According to a recent online survey by Extrawhite, a maker of chewing gum, a quarter of the people in China never smile or smile less than five times a day. The survey found that only 2 per cent of Chinese people are willing to smile at strangers.

To reverse this situation, a group of 40 students from the Humanities and Communications College of Shanghai Normal University launched a team of "smiling volunteers" last month. Their technique is simple enough: they smile at people.

They carried out their first "smiling task" on Saturday at the Shanghai Film Art Centre, where they smiled at all the visitors and asked if anyone needed any help.

"We started to prepare for this special team back in October," said Dai Ningning, a teacher at the college who is in charge of the team.

But the team's work is not all fun and games. Dai suggested that the team's work also had a professional component. "Most of our students will be teachers after they graduate. Smiling is necessary for good teachers. We hope they will learn how to smile at each other properly before they become teachers," she said.

Dai added that she had high hopes for the "smiling volunteers" team.

"The team will recruit more members in the future. We have no special requirements for the students who want to be members of the team. The only requirement is that they have sincere smiles and helping hearts, and are always ready to assist other people," she said.

Xu Xiaohong, a first-grade post-graduate student at the university, leads the team. She said that not all students found it easy to smile all the time.

"When volunteers help other people, smiling is the best way to make other people understand that the volunteers are ready and sincere," she said. "Smiles can also erase a sense of strangeness among people who do not know each other."