The “艺美青年” social practice team, established in 2024 to support rural revitalization, has evolved through three years of iterative development into a structured, multi-disciplinary empowerment initiative, according to authors 姚思彤, 蔡朴杰, and 王思敏. Operating across more than ten Chinese provinces and municipalities, the student group has earned honors including being named a school-level top ten practice team and a key social practice team, focusing on industrial enhancement, cultural revitalization, and youth education.
Industrial Enhancement and Brand Upgrading in Rural Communities
To tackle agricultural challenges such as low product added value, weak brand recognition, and insufficient online traffic, the team built a full-chain assistance model covering preliminary research, creative branding, traffic direction, and sales conversion. According to the team’s documented fieldwork across five provinces and ten locations—which included interviews with over 30 rural cadres and 100 villagers alongside more than thousands of online questionnaires—shortened industrial chains and a lack of promotion were identified as core bottlenecks for local tea, fruit, and Chinese herbal medicine industries.
The team delivered customized solutions for three specific agricultural sectors, producing over 40 original design assets including cartoon IP figures, luxury gift packaging, promotional boards, and travel merchandise. In Ya’an’s Gaoganging village, the team supported the local tea industry, created a full visual suite for Qiangjiang village’s peaches—tailored for picking experiences, markets, and holiday gifting—and helped uncover intangible heritage techniques for ancient peony cultivation in Zhongjiang’s Quawan village to develop peony balms and gift items.
Digital outreach efforts over the three-year period included producing 10 rural documentary Vlog segments, dozens of promotional materials, three industry reports, and 12 press releases published on platforms like China.com, generating more than 100,000 total views. These digital efforts aimed to build a closed-loop framework connecting online traffic with offline agricultural tourism and sales.
Cultural Revitalization and Intangible Heritage Preservation
Addressing the preservation gaps in rural farming culture and intangible heritage, the team utilized arts education to run cultural revitalization projects across multiple provinces, referencing survey data from over 500 questionnaires that indicated over 60% of surveyed regions face a shortage of successors to farming traditions. Furthermore, specialized findings revealed that local cultural items like the Tibetan-Qiang Tea Horse Road and Garze Tibetan traditional clothing suffered from very low public awareness, with only 12.56% of respondents expressing familiarity with the Tea Horse Road.
To counter this, the team completed over 300 square meters of rural theme wall paintings over three years, including a tea culture wall in Gaogang village and a 250-meter Tea Horse Road mural in Qiangjiang village, which attracted more than 2,000 visitors. Additional community efforts during the Spring Festival included writing over 300 couplets, producing 2,000 folklore gift boxes for 400 community residents, recording local folklore, and completing 30 design drafts for community public facility decoration.
Cultivating Rural Youth Through Cultivated Aesthetics Education
To bridge educational gaps in rural areas, the team established a two-module “indoor science popularization plus field practice” educational system that moved away from traditional didactic teaching. Over the span of three years, the team delivered more than 50 farming aesthetic classes, developed 10 featured farming curriculum systems, and organized two fun farming sports meetings, accumulating over 5,400 hours of volunteer service and reaching more than 2,700 rural students and residents.
The curriculum covered crop growth, agricultural tools, folklore, and hands-on activities like grain crafting and farming painting, paired with outdoor fieldwork. To ensure lasting impact, the standardized curriculum packages, original design materials, digital media assets, and research reports were permanently transferred to local villages and communities to support ongoing public welfare teaching.
Did You Know? The practice team’s field investigations covered five provinces and ten locations, involving interviews with over 30 rural cadres, more than 100 villagers, and over thousands of online survey respondents.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the core practice paths of the team?
According to the source text, the team focuses on three core paths: art-empowered industrial upgrading, aesthetic revitalization of local culture, and cultivating new generations through farming and aesthetic education.
Which specific local industries received customized design support?
The team provided customized branding and visual design services for the tea industry in Gaogang village, the peach industry in Qiangjiang village, and the ancient peony cultivation industry in Quawan village.
How many volunteer service hours and participants were recorded in the education programs?
The team logged over 5,400 hours of volunteer service across more than 50 farming aesthetic classes, serving over 2,700 rural students and grassroots community members.
What steps might the team take next based on their reported trajectory?
According to the text detailing their future outlook, the team is likely to continue iterating and optimizing its practice framework, deepening its engagement across its three core paths, and applying creative youth initiatives to activate local rural resources.
How do you view the role of university student volunteers in driving sustainable rural economic and cultural development?
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