BEIJING - College graduates were reluctant to work in the vast countryside to improve the lot of farmers despite the Chinese government's push based on the idealism of youth, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

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China, which struggles to find jobs for millions of new graduates leaving universities annually, is encouraging them to spend time working in the economically underdeveloped countryside as teachers, nurses and in other skilled jobs.

But efforts appear to be floundering, the official news agency said in an opinion piece, even as hundreds of students vie for desirable urban jobs such as civil servants.

It said Beijing should offer policy support and improve work conditions for the graduates, but made no concrete suggestions.

It is all a far cry from the days of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when millions of Chinese students "went down" to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Many went willingly, though, out of revolutionary zeal.

Xinhua highlighted what it said were the "surprising" results of a survey of 2,560 graduates in the central province of Hubei in which not one respondent showed any desire to do grassroots work in the countryside, home to around 800 million people.

"Some students struggled to pass exams to get them out of the country and into colleges, so they think going back there after graduating is a loss of face," Xinhua said.

"A more direct difficulty is that conditions are poor, life is hard and income levels don't match up to the investment required for higher education," it added.

"The gap in human resources has widened urban-rural disparities, while the large number of graduates who failed to find jobs in a timely way have added pressure to social disharmony," Xinhua said.

State media this year have carried extensive coverage of the estimated 150,000 graduates who have left wealthy eastern cities to head to poorer rural regions, including Tibet in the west and Yunnan in the far south.

The number of young people going to the countryside is believed to be the highest since the Cultural Revolution, although nobody is compelled to go any more.

"It is not enough to simply rely on morality to inspire university students to work at the grassroots," Xinhua said.

"Related departments still have a lot of work to do," Xinhua said.