XJTLU rural revitalisation team wins third prize in national competition

Recently, an interdisciplinary student team from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University won the third prize of the Creative Track of the Second “Two Mountains Cup” National University Student Rural Revitalisation Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship Competition 2024 for their educational excursion project “She Yun Exploration, Cultural Journey”.

The activity was held on 9-10 November in Langcun Village, Zhangcun Town, Anji County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province. Previously, they successfully held the “Red Education-led Rural Revitalisation Work Practice” in Suzhou and Shaanxi from 15 to 28 July this year.

Since 2018, XJTLU has been actively responding to the national call for rural revitalisation by organising joint workshops with universities across the east and west of China to serve the countryside and help promote the comprehensive revitalisation of the countryside. XJTLU has received support from Suzhou Traffic Radio and Suzhou Wisdom Lake Lixin Education Development Foundation.

Student team, from left to right: Ziyiyang Zhou, Zemin Zhao, Wenxi Sha, Hanyu Li, Dingjian Zhang, Rengeng Zheng

This year’s “Two Mountains Cup” National College Student Rural Revitalisation Innovation and Creativity Entrepreneurship Competition was hosted by Xinhua News Agency, and organised by Anji County of Huzhou City, Xinhua News Agency Branding Office, and Xinhua News Agency Zhejiang Branch. 1,051 teams from 237 colleges and universities at home and abroad including Peking University, Tsinghua University, and University College London (UCL) enrolled to participate.

The XJTLU team consisted of six students from the Design School and International Business School Suzhou from different levels of study including undergraduate, masters, and PhD, and was supervised by Dr Jun Xia and Dr Bing Chen from the Design School. The multidisciplinary composition of the team made this creative planning not only an exploratory journey of rural revitalisation, but also an in-depth learning process based on interdisciplinary cooperation.

The team members from different academic backgrounds combined their professional strengths to conduct a multi-dimensional and holistic research on the problems faced by Langcun Village in Anji County, and came up with a revitalisation plan that is both innovative and practical, in order to promote the sustainable development of the village’s society, economy, culture and ecology.

Student team at Langcun Village

Inspired by the “Fei Xiaotong Spirit” learnt in the previous “Red Education Guided Rural Revitalisation Work Practice”, the student team started from the local area. Taking into account the current situation of Langcun Village, they set the restoration of the local ecosystem and the inheritance and development of the She ethnic minority culture as the project goal.

The team aimed to restore the local ecosystem and to inherit and promote the culture of the She ethnic minority. Based on this goal, they designed a two-day study programme based on the development model of “ecology + culture and tourism”.

By organically combining ecological study and cultural experience, the programme provides a dual impetus for the revitalisation and development of Langcun village, namely, the “green economy + local culture” twin engines.

The creative plan not only showed the unique cultural charm of the She ethnic group, but also opened up a new model for rural tourism, which was highly recognised by the villagers of Langcun village and praised by the expert judges, and also loved by the young students in practice.

The instructors, Dr Jun Xia and Dr Bing Chen, said: “Good education should, through ‘learning by doing’ or interactive, action-oriented ‘transformative learning’, train students to become teachers, so that they can turn what they have learnt into what they do, and thus achieve the goal of enlightened wisdom.”

In this project, the team members not only studied rural revitalisation in depth through design and planning, but also organised study activities to transform what they had learnt into practice. They put into practice the call from Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chinese president, to “write thesis on the motherland”, and further promoted the innovation of the learner-centred teaching mode of rural revitalisation.

Story provided by Ziyiyang Zhou

Edited and translated by Yi Qian