The idea is simple: College students may be exempted from the burden of paying back their student loans if they volunteer to work at the grass-roots level in the nation's western region for a still unspecified period.

The idea is being discussed at the on-going National People's Congress, Dai Guiying, a senior official from the Office of the Leading Group for Western Region Development of the State Council, told China Daily.

Quite a few of NPC deputies from western China have pointed out that the region continues to be stuck within a vicious cycle, where backward education, poverty and the so-called "brain drain" affect the region's potential prosperity.

The slow economic development in the area has driven away skilled people and scared off potential graduates. The results have in turn degraded the local economy, said Li Zhuojuan, an NPC deputy from Yunnan Province.

Li, who is a teacher at the Jingdong No 1 High School in the province, said her school is still short of more than 40 teachers.

"Only four or five graduates apply for our jobs every year, and most of them are unqualified," she said.

At the same time, graduates who leave the area to study are later reluctant to return to work in their poverty-stricken hometowns.

Chen Quan, who came to Beijing to learn business management three years ago from South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, said his hometown is his last choice for a job.

Guangxi, in Chen's eyes, has few powerful enterprises and lags far behind in information exchange. "It can help little with my self-improvement and future," he said.

The junior at the University of International Business and Economics hopes to work in a big city in Guangdong Province -- one of China's fastest developing regions -- after graduating.

Another bottleneck to the region's development is related to the already high and climbing tuitions being charged for higher education and the increasing unemployment levels of college students, as Cheng Su, an NPC deputy from Northwest China's Qinghai Province, has put forward in her proposal.

"The incomes of farmers in our region are less compared with the average level of the country. To send a child for further education, a lot of rural families have to spend their lifelong savings or go into debt," said Cheng, chief secretary of the Qinghai Democratic League Committee.

Farmers in the dozen western provinces and autonomous regions earned an average per capita annual income of 1,817 yuan (US$220) in 2003, much lower than the nation's average for farmers of 2,622 yuan (US$317).

In contrast, almost all universities and colleges in the country raised tuitions by more than 10 per cent yearly on average between 1998 and 2000.

(China Daily March 10, 2005))