Having faced persistent poverty over a long period of time a number of countries in the Asia-Pacific region have recently started changing their development strategy to cater to the need of the 21st century. One of the programmatic options that came about in rural development planning of some of these countries is to engage universities in rural/agricultural development research and project-implementation activities. The Agricultural University of Hebei in China, which has been providing direct services to rural communities for some years, is being seen as a pioneer of such initiative in the region. This paper was originally presented by the author in the UNESCO Regional Meeting on the "Role of Universities for Rural Development" in Beijing last September, which was participated by academics and practitioners to exchange ideas, experiences and new methodologies in rural development. In the context of rural poverty and an exploitative social structure, the author pushes forward the idea of "partnership" between formal governance (government and NGOs) and new actors (universities,