It is a winter afternoon in the Great Northwest. Villagers are sitting in a line in the warm sun below a wall when Wang Xiaoping comes and sits among them. He starts to chit-chat with them about their everyday life. Wang was a student of Guizhou College of Finance and Economics. It is in many of these exchanges that he interacts with the villagers and does his work. Even though many villagers do not know what Wang is doing, they like this simple young man immensely. Wang has been organizing women in the village with a colleague and has helped them to set up the Culture and Art Group and the Economic Cooperative. “In what way can we help the rural village to have a better development?” This is a question this young person who has just left school keeps thinking about.

PCD and the Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Centre are co-organizing a program to train young people for rural development and to support university students to take part in rural development work on a long term basis. Like Wang Xiaoping, the students of LSMC live in the village in order to understand every aspect of rural life and to help organize the villagers. Unlike many youth training programs organized by other NGOs, this program places young people in the vast open space of the rural area so that they can work with the villagers and learn from them. In this way, a direct relationship between the young people and the rural villages is built. In other words, it is a kind of practice-based training that the young people are having. The purpose is to enhance their practical capacity, to promote voluntarism among young people, to strengthen their sense of responsibility, and to improve their capability in terms of putting theories and concepts into practice. In this way, the program trains a group of young people who take part in rural development and becomes a main force in the New Rural reconstruction Movement that aims at attaining harmonious and sustainable development of the rural sector.