Urban employment agencies are helping people in China's less-developed countryside adapt to the fast-developing market economy.

Hou Zhenyu, a 34-year-old former farmer in Hongze County in East China's Jiangsu Province, is the founder of a Shanghai-based employment agency that has found jobs for over 20,000 mainly rural workers in some 130 foreign-funded enterprises in the booming Shanghai Pudong New District since 1995.

He said rural youth who have gotten jobs in urban areas through his agency have reported annual incomes of 10,000 yuan (US$1,204), five times more than what their whole family used to earn.

There are over 850,000 "rural youth agents" like Hou in China, helping develop the rural economy and channel surplus rural labour to meet the demands of the country's urban economy.

The Communist Youth League of China, the country's largest youth organization, plans to establish a national association of rural youth agents. It has filed an application to this effect with the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

There are 320 million young people in rural China, and the surplus workforce there amounts to 150 million.

The first group of rural agents appeared in the late 1980s in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. They sold local farm produce to the cities.

Although these agents did not gain immediate government recognition, the first 21 rural agents were officially approved in Heilongjiang's Binxian County in 1995, helping sell beans to other parts of the country.

The youth league started to provide professional training to rural youth agents in the 1990s and helped them pass professional agency examinations, according to league official Tao Hong.

League statistics show that one-third of the 850,000 rural youth agents have passed professional certification tests and there are more than 300 associations of rural youth agents across the country.