Recently, during the 5th National University Students Rural Revitalization Competition—Yanbian, Panzhihua “Shared-Prosperity Pioneer” special session—two student teams from the School of Digital Economy (majoring in Convention & Exhibition Economics and Management and in Marketing) secured the first and second prizes in the Creative Track, bringing distinct honor to the university.

The competition was co-organized by the China Youth Career Development Foundation (affiliated with the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League), Zhejiang University’s Rural Development Institute, and the Yanbian County Government. Operating under the principle that “villages propose questions, universities provide solutions, real problems are addressed, and deliverables are implemented,” the event attracted 519 teams and over 5,000 teachers and students from 104 universities nationwide. As the only special-session contest held in Sichuan this year, it was particularly competitive; after rigorous selection, only 80 teams advanced to the final round.

Grounding their work in Yanbian’s rich intangible cultural heritage, the university teams embedded themselves in mountain villages for several months, apprenticing with torch-makers, folk vocalists, and embroiderers until the narratives behind every flame and footfall became their own. Their entries—“Torch Festival Action Plan” and “Red Yi Step-Dance: Event, Product & Promotion”—integrate heritage into experiential formats: nocturnal torch processions, midday dyeing workshops, and silver pendants modeled after dance ankle-bells. The projects demonstrate that traditional skills can still generate contemporary tourism revenue.

At the final “Youth for Shared-Prosperity Bazaar,” students wore hand-stitched Yi jackets, erected a scaled-down torch gate on the plaza, and invited attendees to experience the festival atmosphere. They instructed visitors in the triple-beat stamp of the step-dance, circulated butter-lamp lapel pins, and sold festival-scented sachets while explaining the cultural rule that ceremonial flames must circle leftward, never right. Officials, tourists, and local children paused to participate and applaud. The sustained footfall attracted Xiong Jian, Deputy Party Secretary and Secretary-General of the China Youth Career Development Foundation, and Wei Xia, Secretary-General of the competition, who remained at the university booth to confer with faculty and students long after the performances concluded.

The achievement constitutes tangible evidence of the university’s enduring commitment to “moral cultivation and social service.” For years the institution has relocated classrooms to the field, requiring students to read the landscape as carefully as they read textbooks and to regard every village as a living laboratory. Faculty and undergraduates jointly excavate local memory—songs, dyes, torch rituals—then design projects that respond to verifiable township needs. The iterative cycle of “field course → live project → national competition” converts intellectual curiosity into operational competence and subsequently into measurable community benefit: the village obtains a festival plan or a product line, while the student graduates equipped with judgment, empathy, and a curriculum vitae inscribed in sweat and soot.

Looking forward, the university will continue to expand the portal between campus and countryside through additional county-government partnerships, credit-bearing field stations, and dedicated budgets for heritage-to-market initiatives. The objective is straightforward: to dispatch successive cohorts of Sichuan Arts & Science students into the national rural-revitalization effort, allowing their ideas to pollinate the highlands and their energy to ignite the next torch for both traditional culture and local economic growth.