Sitting half in her seat with hands cloaked in ripped sleeves, Wang Caiyue breathed lightly as she waited for her turn to speak. The scene clearly wasn’t what the former English teacher had in mind when she gave up her job in hope of something better in the countryside.

It has been three years since she was installed as Qiuzhuang village’s first college-educated cadre in Pingdingshan city of the central Henan province. Wang learned the names and faces of all 936 local residents, and won their hearts and minds by a rare, sweeping victory in the rural election.

In the words of Qiuzhuang’s Party boss Huang Fawa, on whom Wang’s nervous eyes were fixed, “the girl has become a true local.”

Wang is among the first pioneers of Pingdingshan’s ambitious strategy in 2003 to install a college-educated cadre in each of its 2,637 villages. The city hoped that the move – which many compare to the “zhiqing movement” of the Mao years that sent millions of urban youths to the countryside – would both curb rising unemployment and find fresh blood to stimulate the staggering rural economy.

Pingdingshan became the first city in all of China to realize that goal in 2006, as other cities across the country began to replicate its experience. The central government, too, made it a five-year state project that aims to hire 100,000 to 200,000 college graduates to work in villages nationwide shortly before the financial crisis fell in 2008, leaving millions jobless.

According to official figures, about 1.5 million college graduates were without work at the end of 2008. They are to be accompanied by 6.1 million peers who will enter the job market this year.

Governments at all levels are laying high hopes on the project, which some have come to call the “cunguan (village cadre) movement”. But every hope is accompanied by frustration, even here in Qiuzhuang village, the little-known root of the widely influential zhiqing campaign.

It is plainly impossible for Wang to backtalk Huang, a determined, albeit temperate, 73-year-old who has led the village since 1970. The firm-voiced Party veteran still holds unquestionable authority in Qiuzhuang, and prefers to contextualize her work in – perhaps also unconsciously restrain it to – conventional revolutionary discourse.

“These college graduates who are working as rural cadres are, just like us then, receiving reeducation by the poor and lower-middle peasants in response to Chairman Mao’s call,” Huang told China Daily. “Their work is to unite the masses and develop the economy.”

As one of the last living founders of the zhiqing (literally meaning “educated youths”) identity, Huang, indeed, has every inclination to still think that way.

Huang became one of Dalizhuang township’s first 32 “educated youths” – those who finished at least primary education – during the rural cooperative movement in early 1955. Like most other rural areas at the time, Dalizhuang’s cooperatives severely lacked management and accounting personnel. That was when Huang and the other local “educated youths” were convinced to return to their native villages instead of trying for a shot in the cities.

Dalizhuang’s effort led to almost immediate economic success and, not much later, unprecedented political fame. In July, the township’s experience, summarized by its superior Jiaxian county, reached Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao annotated: “All such intellectuals who could go work in the villages should do so happily. The countryside is a vast land; great accomplishments can be made there.”

Hence began the first tide of the zhiqing movement, one that saw 2.88 million elementary and middle school graduates across the country returning to their native rural lands.

The second tide came in 1968, when Dalizhuang changed its name to “Vast Land and Great Accomplishment” (Guangkuotiandi Dayouzuowei) People’s Commune. A much more organized movement was launched that December, after Mao’s call “It is imperative that educated youth go to the rural areas and be reeducated by the poor and low-middle peasants” spread – and was echoed – all over China.

Around 18 million educated urban youths flooded the villages between 1966 and 1980, when the movement was halted. Huang’s village received 82 zhiqings, while Dalizhuang hosted a total of 830. Vice Premier Li Keqiang’s wife Chen Hong, too, stayed in the commune as a zhiqing for three years.

According to a 1974 documentary on Dalizhuang, the zhiqings “brought knowledge to the villages and sparked rural lives”. Huang, meanwhile, said the movement “has had an apparent impact and (still) has a bright future”.

While linking the current state project with the zhiqing movement, though, Huang does acknowledge that significant differences remain. “Unlike past decades, rural areas today are in dire need of people with college education. Things just don’t click when people don’t have that much education,” he said.

“Economic development is borne out of talents, who are borne out of schools,” Huang stressed.

But development means so much more in today’s rural China, enmeshed between contradicting paths to free its residents from both ill-paid farm work and overtime, under-waged, temporary urban labor.

Wang, now village chief, is keenly aware of it all. She understands the villagers’ urge for wealth and devotes herself to making it happen. But in a market economy, it is no longer possible for today’s rural “educated youths” to return to the villages. Qiuzhuang has 36 university graduates, including four with PhDs or Master’s degrees, but not a single one has returned.

Many local residents are employed by the six village factories, all set up by businessmen from outside the region. Wang has tried to help villagers start their own businesses, but that mission has been much easier said than done.

“We’re sent here to lead the masses to wealth, not receiving reeducation from them,” Wang resisted Huang’s frame of mind in a low tone. “The cunguan movement seeks to strengthen social stability and boost rural economy.”

“After they are promoted, the cadres, with experience at the village level, may be more inclined to draft farmer-friendly policies,” she said.

But there have long been well-founded doubts as to what role these college-educated youths, trapped in trying to balance between the cunguan campaign’s three central missions – resolving urban unemployment, finding capable reserve cadres for the Party, and changing the static, backward face of rural China – can really play during their three-year terms in the village.

Wang’s barriers point to not only inherent rural issues entirely beyond her, but also an implicit local consensus that unless she helps villagers accomplish their common mission – to get rich fast – her role would be constrained as a zhiqing – an assistant, an urbanite, an outsider.

But still, she has had very few complaints. With an annual per capita income of 5,360 yuan (US$ 784), Qiuzhuang’s economy is already profoundly more solid than most of its counterparts in Pingdingshan. Unlike Wang, these other cunguans have run into much deeper problems, ranging from taking sides in local clan clashes and ways to leave – and advance their personal careers.

Li Gang, deputy Party boss of Gaozhuang village in the city’s Zhanhe district, told China Daily “the blessing of local powers” has been his biggest experience after five years of working here.

“No work can really be done here if you can’t develop good guanxi with the Party boss and village chief,” Li, 33, stressed.

Here, as in much of China’s countryside, clans are the de facto ruling force in local affairs. Gaozhuang is dominated by the Gao and Jia families, each trying to oust the other during rural elections through every means possible. The result was a paralyzed system of governance, and a village in piling debt.

Li, an officer with the district’s culture bureau who volunteered to become a cunguan with hopes of fast-tracking his way up the career ladder, has regressed to what he called his “old, laidback self” over the years.

“Any cunguan must first and foremost help keep the local leaders together, do their best to coordinate the relations between the local Party and village committees. They must also be patient at all times, and constantly report to their superiors,” he said.

After spending more than a term in Gaozhuang, Li’s biggest hope has changed from advancing his personal career to merely leaving the village.

“It’s actually okay to work here… but it’s just that in general, all government staff who work as cunguans should be succeeded by non-government workers in the cunguan pool. That hasn’t been the case with me,” he complained.

Li’s worries are shared by many cunguans, who already have stable government posts (or are teachers and doctors), receive a decent pay and are seeking personal gains out of their village experience.

The policies have been “quite unfair” for the non-government workers who volunteered and passed all tests to become cunguans, admitted Chen Xunzhang, head of Pingdingshan’s cunguan office.

Among the cunguans, government officials have a monthly subsidy of more than 2,000 yuan (US$ 292), while those formerly employed by companies earn not even half as much.

Either way, cunguans who finish their service will receive bonus points when they pass the highly competitive national civil servant recruitment exam as well as the national graduate school entrance exams.

But for those who do not intend to become career politicians, preferential policies are still scarce.

“Most of these people aren’t enrolled in the government, were born and raised in the countryside and hold strong social convictions in rural development,” Chen told China Daily.

“I wish we could’ve done more for them, because generally speaking, urban cunguans tend to be spoiled,” he said.

Chen’s office sent an inspection team earlier this year to a village in Pingdingshan’s Ruzhou county. Officials asked five random villagers about the cunguan, a young government staff who had been stationed there since 2007.

As it turned out, none of the villagers knew who he was. The officials turned to the owner of a local market who claimed to know everybody in town. But he, too, had no idea who the cunguan was.

“We’ll have to improve our current mechanisms to ensure a fair environment for all cunguans,” Chen stressed.

But it’s been easier said than done. As a result, the existing administrative framework of cunguans has made selfless devotion from the non-government workers, who have little means of official support, a prerequisite.

A great many villages still lack basic facilities in their rural committee buildings, where the cunguans are required to reside. Most cunguans made office renovation their first and foremost task – Li, for instance, spent more than 40,000 yuan on a new twin bed, a pair of sofas and other gadgets for his small living room.

Only a dedicated few, mostly from the villages, have held on with the most basic living standards. Zhao Xinping, a tall, shy, spectacled man of 31, is most representative of them all.

A rural child, Zhao studied accounting in college and worked in downtown Pingdingshan for 500 yuan a month until Oct 2003, when he heard news of the city’s call for more cunguans.

Zhao turned down his boss, who promised to triple his salary, and wasted no time to volunteer. After passing through several exams, he was sent to Caozhen township in Feb 2004 and settled down in its Yinwang village five months later.

“I grew up in the village, so it was only natural that I come back to one,” he told China Daily.

In five years, the quiet man turned the village upside down. He single-handedly managed to build roughly 5.1 km of cement roads for Yinwang, helped various villagers start their own businesses or find jobs, and always stayed out of trouble.

He sleeps besides a handful of spiders on a half-broken wooden bed with intensely odorous quilts in a shabby, cold office, where the cracking walls are covered with complimentary banners from local residents, an exceptional scene in any village. He grows vegetables outside his office, cooks his own meal, and never asks anything from anyone.

With greasy hair, a pair of dark, muddy, typical 1980s sweaters, pants and shoes, Zhao’s pro-poor attitude and Puritan work ethic has made him the villagers’ man.

Wang Ying, a 63-year-old farmer who rarely picked up his pen after graduating from junior middle school in 1965, was so intrigued that he wrote a report of more than 100,000 words on Zhao’s contributions in the village.

“I intend to write a trilogy,” said Wang, who has spent all his spare time from farming – mostly at night – in the past year and a half on the report.

“He’s too good a cunguan, a comrade, a leader for us,” said Wang, still clearly influenced by his education in the revolutionary years. “Zhao is a 21^st Century lighthouse for the world, leading us to the road ahead,” he so proclaimed, exaggeratingly, in typical Cultural Revolution language.

Zhao, for his part, said the cunguan experience has helped him realize his value and truly be with the masses.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “As a rural man, I feel especially fulfilled being able to do something for the countryside. I want to do more.”

“My parents hosted zhiqings back in the day, but I think we’re different. Our main task today is development, because development is the cardinal principle,” Zhao said.

But even cunguans like him have not been able to stay oblivious from some of the deeper rural problems.

Zhao received the highest number of votes in the local election last year. But he has not yet sworn in as village chief because, in Wang’s words, “some issues have not been resolved yet.”

Can't be done without Zhang Haizhou's selfless assistance...

GUJIAO, Shanxi: At least 74 miners died and an uncertain number of others still trapped underground - and feared dead - after a gas blast early yesterday at one of China’s safest collieries in Shanxi province.

The blast occurred at 2:17 am while 436 employees of the Tunlan Coal Mine were at work underground in Gujiao city, 60 km west of Taiyuan, capital of the coal-rich province.

Aside from the dead, 114 miners were hospitalized, of which 26 were in critical condition as of last night.

Rescue work officially ended as of 6 pm yesterday. Rescue headquarters confirmed that the death toll stood at 74, without announcing the number of miners still trapped - or whether anyone is still trapped at all.

In any event, the actual number of casualties may still rise. Earlier reports in the afternoon by Xinhua, which put the number of deaths at 44, said at least 65 miners remained trapped underground.

No official explanation on the confusion has been offered.

Three days before the blast, Wang Jun, governor of Shanxi, just warned the province “had run out of tears to shed” when reviewing local work safety situations during a conference in Taiyuan.

By the pit where life and death parted here deep in the mountains, an anonymous recorder on duty at the mine recalled that the first batch of rescuers reached the site at around 3:20 am.

A total of 57 rescuers, some from other places including Taiyuan, worked in the pit during the half-day rescue phase, according to a local police officer.

But Gujiao residents said the number was far from enough.

“The rescue team here with the mine has been severely understaffed, as its mother company is based in Taiyuan,” nearby villager and former Tunlan miner Kang Changqing told China Daily.

Though his Liangzhuang village sits 3.5 km away, Kang, 46, said people there were the first to find out about the blast and call police.

“Two intakes of the pit were built by the road just outside my home in Liangzhuang," he said, noting that most villagers were woke up by “two tremendous explosions” at around 2:18 am.

As the explosions took place more than 400 meters deep underground, mine watchers were not the first to find out about the accident, according to other villagers.

“The part of the intakes above ground was totally destroyed. Luckily for us, the explosions happened at night when no one was around,” Kang said.

The current death toll suffices to make this the most lethal accident reported in China's disaster-prone mining industry since 276 people died in the collapse of an unlicensed iron ore reservoir last September, also in Shanxi.

President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao issued instructions to do everything possible to save those still trapped inside the mine, state television reported.

Earlier reports said that more than 300 miners escaped alive.

Most of the miners who rushed to hospital after the accident had suffered carbon monoxide poisoning, Xinhua said, citing doctors at the Xishan Hospital of Coal and Electricity.

A photo posted online showed one of the survivors, apparently unconscious and with a blackened face, being rushed to medical treatment.

After climbing out of the deadly pit, the rescuers, some with a cellphone on each hand, wasted no time to call their homes.

“If I don’t call them immediately, they would start worrying about my safety and mental health," a rescuer surnamed Zhao told China Daily. "My family may think I've gone crazy after being through all this every time," he said.

Zhao, part of the provincial mine rescue team, began work immediately after reaching the pit in the morning and did not came out from underground till 5:30 pm.

“Seeing horrific things – that’s just about what my daily life is like. Higher officials may never see things I see,” he added, pointing at the temporary rescue command centre.

The Tunlan mine, which has an annual capacity of five million tons, is operated by the Shanxi Jiaomei Group. With no accidents reported over the past decade, it is considered one of the safest and most advanced mines in the province.

A total of 3,786 coal miners died in gas blasts, floods and other accidents in 2007 as companies, often flouting safety regulations, rushed to feed demand from a booming economy.

The number of coal-related deaths fell to roughly 3,200 last year, after thousands of small, mostly unlicensed mines across the country were closed.

PINGDINGSHAN, Henan: Wang Meilian’s wheat field had been without water for more than 110 days, but she managed to keep looking on the bright side. “I thought the rain would eventually come,” the 45-year-old said. “There’s always some rain.”

Although Henan, her home province, is suffering the worst drought in half a century with a 90 percent drop in average rainfall since last November, Wang said she was never too afraid.

Her native Pingdingshan city boasts itself rich in black (coal), white (salt) and blue (water) resources. As the dry spell spread over town, so did relief efforts by local cadres and residents. And with widespread fog since early Saturday, meteorological reports of a rainfall that evening and local preparation of artificial precipitation, it was only natural for the villager to assume all was going to be well.

But when Wang woke up with no sight of rain on Sunday outside her house, she realized the time to irrigate the fields was now or never.

“We started at six am,” she said in the winter chill, watching her 15-year-old son taking a turn to irrigate their field with a water pipe. “The rain would’ve saved us a lot of effort. But it hasn’t been of much help, and forecasts are now saying it’s going to be sunny again from tomorrow on.”

“It’s not that we just wanted to wait for the rain,” she said. “It was too cold in the past few months. And since drought relief work started, it’s been difficult to borrow water pumps.”

While slight showers and artificial precipitation brought on average 0.5 mm of rainfall to 17 counties and cities in Henan yesterday, Pingdingshan received virtually no rain at all.

“About half of our wheat will be lost this year no matter what we do,” local water resources chief Dong Fagen told China Daily. “And to be very frank, we can only manage to irrigate at best 2 million mu (133,333 hectares) of Pingdingshan’s total 3.06 million mu (204,000 hectares) of farmland.”

“The rest is up to Mother Nature,” he said.

Residents like Wang, who live on plain fields where water has never been a real problem, perhaps do need the ubiquitous government banners that read “Meteorological sources say there won’t be rain in nearly a month” and “Irrigation is the only way to ensure summer harvest” to be reminded that Mother Nature isn’t always on the gentle side.

But all those who live in the deep terrains a dozen km down southwest are born to know right from wrong. Here, in Liwuzhuang and a handful of other villages in Bao’an township, water has been a headache for more than 30 years.

“All seven small local reservoirs were built in the late 1950s, when we could still grow rice here. But one broke after another after the Reform and Opening Up, and nobody took care of them,” said village Party chief Gao Hai.

“The nearest reservoir’s strobe has been broken for 30 years. With it fixed, we could’ve irrigated all of our 3,250 mu of crops for three times,” he said.

“But now, five of the seven reservoirs are dried up, and so are all five of our main riverways.”

Local residents have neither tap water nor water from wells as deep as 70 to 80 meters. Drinking water has to be bought from a nearby village for 50 yuan (US$7.3) per three tons.

“We have to ensure drinking water first,” said villager Gao Guobin. “Plus, it’s no use irrigating the fields now anyway… rain can’t be a cure anymore here.”

“A stretch of normal wheat has about 20 rootstalks. But even the good ones here now have only two to three left,” he said.

Like many in Liwuzhuang, the 60-year-old’s 13 mu of crops are all dried. People have given up on saving the fields and returned to work – mostly as migrant labor across the country. Those who lost their jobs in the deepening financial crisis, too, have left for the cities again.

All across the countryside, trees are being planted atop dry wheat and rape plants as villagers seek for desperate alternatives.

About 2.8 million hectares of wheat fields in Henan have been hit by the drought, including 470,000 that are severely damaged, according to Xinhua.

The foul weather had brought water shortages for 420,000 people and 90,000 heads of livestock across the province.

Henan grows a tenth of China’s crops.