BEIJING, April 21 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government will repay the school fees or bank loans for college graduates willing to work in remote and poverty-stricken areas of the country's central and western regions, according to a notice released jointly by Finance Ministry and Education Ministry Tuesday.

    The notice has clarified the range of the country's western area, which includes 12 provinces, cities and autonomous regions: Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang.

    The central area refers to 10 provinces: Hebei, Shanxi, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Hainan.

    According to the notice, the graduates should work for at least three years in grassroots areas at the county-level of the central and western regions, such as government administrations in town or county level, primary or middle schools, farms, veterinarian stations, electricity construction site and coal mines.

    The sum of repayment money should be less than 6,000 yuan (about 878 U.S. dollars) each year, the notice added.

    Student applicants will sign a service contract with the school and government before their graduation. If they want to terminate the contract, they should apply to the school for permission.

    If they break the agreement or there is any fraud activity, they will be punished and they should return all the repayment. Their bad credit will also be recorded in the national databank of citizen's credit.

    Finding jobs for college graduates has been a long-time headache in China. It became an even harder task for the 6.1 million June graduates after the country began to feel the affects of the global financial crisis in late 2008.

    Compounding the problem is around 1.5 million graduates who failed to find jobs last year, a half-million increase from 2007, according to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.