Southwest China’s Chongqing attracts talents to revitalize villages

The aerial photo shows terraces, new houses as well as new road network of a village in Wusheng county, Guang’an, southwest China’s Sichuan province, March 16, 2019. (Photo: People’s Daily Online)

Southwestern China’s Chongqing municipality, putting great efforts on attracting talents in rural areas, witnessed huge improvement in its rural revitalization work in recent years.

Xiong Xiong, a young designer of Chongqing Planning and Design Institute, was one of the many that are attracted to work in the rural part of the municipality.

He is among the first batch of Chongqing’s “village designers”, and started working at Huashi village, Jindai township of Chongqing’s Liangping district since last June.

Xiong, born in the urban area, gave all of him to the village in the past 9 months, from village planning, to the renovation of local water supply and lavatories. Though he has caught the sun when working in the village, he is happy about what he has done. “It’s worthy to do what I can for the villagers,” Xiong said.

Talent is the key to revitalizing China’s rural areas. By thoroughly implements the guidance of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, Chongqing takes talent construction as a priority for the work of rural revitalization. It not only attracts professionals from other regions of the country, but also nurtures talents of its own.

Guiding talents to the rural areas, Chongqing has created a powerful force to revitalize the countryside.

Making full use of related policies such as poverty alleviation, Chongqing attracted over 8,900 rural talents back to their hometown to lead the locals for entrepreneur projects.

Meanwhile, Chongqing carried out a series of trainings for the villagers, hoping to turn them into professional farmers, young ranch owners, and e-commerce talents. A batch of rural entrepreneurs are playing their due roles in the countryside.

Zhang Youhua is one of the returnees. He rented a 200-hectare farming land and established an ecological agriculture in his hometown Yongchuan district of Chongqing.

His business did not go well at the very beginning, as the sales dropped after a peak in August. It even became a headache for him when he settled account at the year end.

Fortunately, the agriculture committee of Yongchuan district recommended him to a training course, during which he received expert lectures and attended field investigations.

It largely broadened Zhang’s horizon. He built a workshop for processing lotus leaves, upgraded his ecological park, and made the park a base for tour study and research.

“Now I’m always kept busy by the business, and I have to recruit more villagers,” he said, adding that his gross income hit 20 million yuan last year.

The aerial photo shows a wide street and neat houses of the beautiful Duiqiao township, Jinxi county in Fuzhou, east China’s Jiangxi province, March 17, 2019. (Photo: People’s Daily Online)

In addition to talents attraction, Chongqing also rolled out a package of plans to provide intellectual support for rural revitalization, allocating professionals, projects and resources to villages.

In 2018, more than 2,700 technological experts were commissioned to aid the impoverished villages of Chongqing, including Dong Peng, a section chief who is in charge of vegetable planting at the Chongqing agricultural technology promotion center.

Dong was sent to a vegetable base in Guanba, Tongnan district. Being quite popular among local villagers, he often provided them effective measures to control and prevent diseases and pests.

“Thanks to Dong who helped me optimize fertilizer structure, my cabbage hit the market in advance. The yield of my plant was up by 500 kilograms every 0.07 hectare, and I can gain an extra 700 yuan from each 500 kilograms added,” said Peng Yingping, a local villager.

Besides, Chongqing also upgraded its system for talent training and development in rural areas, offered favorable policies in employment, professional title reviewing and treatment. It established an evaluation mechanism that matches the characteristics of personnel at the grass-roots level. These measures have effectively motivated the rural talents to start businesses.

Chongqing kept enhancing its efforts on the multi-channel training of professionals at grass-root level. Every year, a batch of young and middle-aged researchers from the Three Gorges Dam are sent to universities and research institutes for a half-year study and training. By far, a total of over 1,900 personnel from the city have joined in the training program.

27-year-old Zou Jian now works as the head of villagers’ committee of Linkou village, Mawu town in Fuling district. He quitted his decent job in another city, and decided to come back after a long talk with the former Party chief in the village.

Zou is quite busy with the village affairs, such as road construction, commercial crops planting, and landscape lifting projects.

“We’re highly encouraged by the favorable government policies and will make more efforts to revitalize rural areas,” Zou said.