Objective/Meaning  Talents are the key to rural revitalization. The new rural sages, developed from the traditional “squire”, still contain great energy in the new period of grass-roots governance modernization and provide talent power for rural governance.

  Methods/Procedures  Through literature review, policy research and field research method, inductive the existing academic research about the new rural sages, combing countries issued many encouraging new rural sages participation in village policy documents, and analyze the new rural sages and village cadres in the process of rural governance, Consistency of objectives and complementarities of functions and utility.

  Results/Conclusions  The study shows that the new rural sages’ participation in rural governance has turned from theory to practice, and the work path of “bringing back sages” designed and implemented in Datian County of Fujian Province has achieved good results in practice. But there are also some problems. Base the problems, this paper put forward to build a long-term absorption mechanism and effective incentive mechanism for the new rural sages to participate in the rural governance with the participation of national administrative force and grass-roots self-governing force.