The ‘Go West’ Program
China’s Version of the America’s Peace Corps
Every year, the Communist Party Youth League, which for each of the past five years, selects 10,000 freshly graduated teachers, engineers, agronomists, administrators and doctors to pledge one or two years to help people in China’s least developed, and often strained regions. This maneuver fits smoothly into a government campaign to develop China’s remote western reaches more swiftly and integrate their ethnic minorities into an economic and political system run by the majority Han Chinese.
Party officials announced recently that 60,000 graduates applied this year for the 10,000 posts being staffed. Volunteers were motivated by a desire to help the less fortunate. In other words, a desire to avoid facing the increasingly difficult search for a job after graduation. The volunteers are sent to Tibet and to Yunnan and other provinces, where the experience can be something of a jolt. In any case, most of the locals speak their own language and have their own Muslim customs. They have little in common with the Han Chinese visitors from the prosperous northeast that is two time zones and several eras away. For volunteers from China’s large cities, the shock sometimes is not so easy to overcome. One volunteer who left the comforts of Shanghai was so put off by life with the peasants that he opted out.
