Growing with the grassroots

Shi Lei (wearing glasses) tells villagers how to use the computer to study agricultural technology. Photos Provided to China Daily

Shi Lei fixes a machine in a village factory.

Rather than head to a Fortune 500 firm after graduating from a top university, Shi Lei has staked his fate with poor farmers in a village. Cang Wei and Song Wenwei meet him in Nanjing.

While most graduates of the prestigious Tsinghua University go to work for big companies, Shi Lei has instead chosen to live with poor farmers in the countryside.

The then-20-year-old instrumentation major defied his parents and became a village official in Qixia district of Jiangsu's provincial capital Nanjing in 2008.

"I didn't think too much about salary or working conditions before I applied," says Shi.

"I just wanted to do something meaningful."

But he found it to be more challenging than he'd imagined, especially at first.

He didn't know how to communicate with the villagers, who hadn't received higher education. And he was clueless as to how he could change the habits of the young men, who loafed about the village all day.

However, the greatest difficulty was gaining villagers' trust.

Shi says he faced suspicion, and often felt upset and frustrated.

He encountered skepticism and even contempt when he was elected the Party chief of Xihua village in June 2010.

"There was no reason for the villagers to trust a stranger, especially a young man who'd just graduated from university," he says.

"I understood I had to earn their trust. It's like the Chinese saying: 'The village is the university of the social'. I needed to work to graduate from this university."

Shi took great care in his service. He digitalized one village's economic, historical and cultural documents.

Then, he printed his first batch of business cards and distributed them, telling the farmers to feel free to call him.

The first friend Shi made was Wu Xueyin, an elderly paralyzed man. Shi promised Wu he'd visit whenever he could.