He grew exhausted and gave up on the project. Other young new officials had similar problems and halted their ideas midway.

"Their ideas are more idealistic than realistic," said Shi Jingming, the Party secretary of Wali. "They have many ideas, but few are based on the actual situation. The situation in the village is quite different from that in their imaginations. What's more, we don't know what we should ask them to do, nor do we know what they can do."

To be involved in the villages

The young workers, though, regard their inability to communicate with villagers as one of the important reasons for the failure of the projects.

The graduates are mostly from other provinces in China, another friction point that makes it difficult to get involved in the villages.

"As a totally new person in the village, it is natural not to be accepted at first," village official Gao Futu said. "As long as you know what the villagers need and help them to deal with their problems, it is not difficult to build good relationships with them."

Gao, a 2006 Beijing Union University graduate, works in the village of Liyang, also in Mafang Town. He tried to find long-term and stable distribution channels for the peaches harvested in the village during his first year but also failed.

Together with Chen Juan, another young official in the village, Gao started visiting the villagers and got to know their problems. When the village's drainpipe was blocked due to highway construction and the overflow water destroyed the property of some villagers, they negotiated with the construction team and received compensation.

The villagers gradually began to trust the two young officials. The village head promised to give any help they needed. Chen then started her plan to plant sweet corn, a new variety. In the first year, they received 0.3 hectare of farmland to run an experiment. After it proved to work well, they expanded the project to 23 hectares. In 2008, the households who opted to join in the project received twice their average income.

Unlike Lu and Gao, 25-year-old Ouyang Hui, a postgraduate from East China Normal University, chose to go back to a village near her hometown as an official. Born in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, Ouyang had never experienced rural life. "It is a great challenge for me," she told Xinhua News Agency. She went to Jiangqiao, a village in Xinjian County, as the assistant to the village Party secretary.

She taught villagers how to use the Internet and helped them search for and share information. A villager who operated a delivery business was suffering losses because he did not know how to draw up contracts. Ouyang downloaded samples of contracts and helped him draft his own to avoid losses. Since then, many villagers have come to Ouyang for Internet help.

Ouyang also began going to the farmland, chatting with the villagers and helping with the farm work. "In the first two months, I got phone calls from my schoolmates who also chose to be village officials, complaining they didn't know what to do or where to begin," said Ouyang. "I don't think we should always hold the idea that we are supposed to be the officials. Make some achievements. Just be patient."

The choice and the future

After graduating from Hebei Province's Shijiazhuang Vocational Technology Institute in 2008, Liu Ronghua took a job as an official in a village 25 km outside of her hometown.

Liu helped the village drill six motor-assisted water wells and solved irrigation problems just three months after she arrived. But her mother was not satisfied with Liu's choice to be a village official since she wanted her daughter to find a job in the city instead of coming back to the rural area.

"It is not my first choice either," Liu told Central China Television. "I made this choice partly because the employment situation last year was quite harsh."

According to a survey conducted by Renmin University of China, more than 57 percent of students consider being village officials as a viable choice in the recently tough employment environment.