Our colleague Brian Speegegal is a reporter based in Beijing, but recently he spent a lot of time in the Chinese countryside.

You go out to these rural places and they're just still really basic struggles.

So roads that don't work, plumbing that hardly works, jobs that don't exist. Rural China is a very poor place still.

Brian was there to report on an initiative that's being pushed by Chinese leader

Shejin Ping. Get young unemployed people from the cities send them to the countryside.

Send them to rural China to work and live.

The goal is to give young people a sense of purpose, to help rural areas, and to revitalize the Chinese economy.

So, yeah, we started showing up in villages there that to the best that we could tell had been where we thought

the volunteers were living and the struggle was you might only have one or two

volunteers in each in each village. So are you just like knocking on doors being

like hello does a volunteer live here?

Correct. Have you seen the college volunteers?

And so if you couldn't find them or they didn't want to talk to you, you kind of

had to travel quite a large distance to get to the next village.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

This push to get young city people to move back to the country

is a shift for China.

For the last four decades, people from the country side have been looking to get out of the countryside because of a lack of economic opportunities.

And so now we see the government saying to young unemployed people,

actually we'd prefer it if you would consider going back to rural areas.

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