BEIJING — China has started its annual recruitment of volunteers to provide legal aid in the country's central and western regions to help solve their shortage of legal service personnel, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Altogether 300 lawyers, as well as 130 law school graduates and grass-roots legal service workers, will be recruited this year to serve people in areas including Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Qinghai, and Gansu, said the ministry in a statement, adding that another 80 lawyers will be selected to serve in Tibet autonomous region.

The service period of these volunteers ranges from six months to one year, it added.

Initiated in 2009, the project has dispatched more than 1,100 legal aid volunteers to around 400 county-level regions and dealt with over 62,000 cases, offering legal services for more than one million people.