If personal incomes, working conditions and future development opportunities can be improved in underdeveloped regions, more and more talents will be attracted to work there, says a signed article in People's Daily. The following is an excerpt.

In the application process for the national civil servant test of 2008, many positions attracted over 1,000 applicants - one of these positions attracted 3,592 test-takers; but no applicants showed interest in 59 positions in underdeveloped regions.

In another instance, almost 200 undergraduate students recently competed for 45 places at the "rural education graduate" job fair held at Henan Normal University. If enrolled, they can study free of any test and charge for a master's degree in education, although they must work in an assigned middle school of a poor county for four years. It has such a great attraction that the number of applicants increases year by year. According to statistics, the number of university graduates choosing to work in the central and western part of the nation increased by 550,000 this year. A key reason is that the government has adopted a series of preferential policies to encourage them to work in these regions and this has achieved some positive results.

For example, those graduates who are willing to work in the western rural regions can get loans for education and the government will pay these loans for them.

But working in a rural area, rather than in cities, not only means different living and working conditions, salaries and social status, but different chances for future development. That is why some people would rather drift in a city than work as a civil servant in underdeveloped areas.

At present, some urban primary and middle schools have hundreds of millions of yuan spent on them while rural schools are short of money. Teachers in rural areas only earn several hundred yuan a month, 10 times less than the salaries earned by their urban counterparts, even though they teach the same subjects.

The allocation of public resources should become more balanced and tilted more toward those regions that need the resources most.

(China Daily December 29, 2007)