Education in urban and rural China

Wei Ji Ma,

August 2004 -- Access complete travel report here.

"Shall I give you my email address?" I routinely asked the teacher whom I had been talking with. A moment of silence. "We don't have any computers here," he replied. I should not have been surprised. I was in a countryside middle school in Banqiao, a small town near Mengcheng, a city in the countryside of Anhui province. Although it is a city, Mengcheng is provincial (for instance, a foreign visitor is an extreme rarity) and poor, and the towns around it even more so. Earlier, I had taught a lesson in the English class of this teacher, Lu Xiaochao. I had been telling the 13-year olds about Holland and the U.S., about science, about my life, about the countries I had visited. The children were all very interested and very curious; they were especially enthusiastic when I taught them some Dutch words.

Banqiao Middle School was one of the nicest buildings of the town, but these relative good looks hid a lot of problems. Teachers had a salary of 800 RMB a month ($100), while the farmers whose children attended the school, had an income of typically only 250 RMB a month ($30). Having one child attend middle school costed about 1000 RMB a year. Teacher Lu told me that of all teachers at his school, only two had attended Teacher's College (Normal University); all the others were only high school graduates. All poor rural areas of China have great difficulty attracting good teachers. There are more problems, such as class size: more than 50 students is normal, with up to 80. Only 20% of the graduates of Banqiao Middle School will enter senior middle school (high school), a number which is even lower than the average of the Chinese countryside. For these students, going to college is a distant dream.

I travelled for two months through mainland China for a project sponsored by the Avery Foundation. The topic of the project was education in urban and rural China. I visited Shanghai, Hangzhou (Zhejiang province), Hefei (Anhui), the countryside near Yantai (Shandong), and Beijing. I have been to the countryside near Hangzhou, Hefei, and Yantai. My ancestors are from villages near Yantai, and I could stay for a few days with them in the village. I chose not to visit western provinces of China on this trip, although these have a lot of poor countryside, because they are far away, because I first wanted to get a general impression of Chinese education, and because I did not have any contacts there when planning the trip. There were several reasons why education was an obvious topic for my China project. I had always been strongly interested in educational systems, also because of my own, somewhat unusual curriculum; in Europe, I had been involved in projects concerning educational politics. In China, education is central to culture and society. It has therefore also been greatly influenced by the economic and social changes of the last decade. While China's economy is closely watched by the rest of the world, it is often forgotten that education is the long-term engine behind economic development. In the realm of education, rural areas form the bottleneck of development. Not only is the gap between poor rural areas and cities already large, many rural areas also hardly benefit from the country's overall economic growth. A great inspiration for this project has been the movie "Not One Less" (Zhang Yimou), which is a realistic and touching story about students in rural China.

I was mostly interested in middle schools and in the process of admission to university, because it is there that differences between urban and rural areas become most apparent. I visited universities and talked with students with different backgrounds and from different regions. I also visited middle schools, where I talked with students and teachers and sometimes taught a class. In Beijing, I talked with several education experts. In my visits, I noticed that Chinese students are much more disciplinedand hard-working than average western students. They are very well aware of the importance of studying. Teaching methods are sometimes old-fashioned; for instance, it is normal that students just sit in class listening and obeyeing, without actively participating or asking questions. This seems to be improving with the new generation of teachers. However, because of the large numbers of students in one class and because of lack of money for teaching materials, it is often hard for a teacher to introduce a participatory style. The lack of education in working independently and thinking critically, of raising investigative minds, is widely recognized as a problem. Rural areas are generally more backward in their teaching methods than cities.

Quality of education and success of students are directly related to the economic situation of the locality. Elementary and junior middle school are directly funded by local taxes. As an education researcher pointed out to me, China suffers from economic divides at different levels: between western/northern and eastern/southern provinces, within provinces between cities and countryside, and within towns and villages between rich and poor people. Lack of money affects the countryside in many ways: schools cannot afford high-quality teachers, good teaching materials, and maintenance of the buildings. Moreover, if the town or village is poor, parents will more often want their child to go work rather than pursue further education. In rural areas, senior high school students constitute only 20% of their age group, while this is 70% in cities. There is a lot of migration to cities (30% of the labor force), which hampers the development of the rural areas. Migrants have few rights, because of the system of hu kou (birthplace rights). This system is ancient, dysfunctional, and unfair, and it is slowly being abolished. Many migrants end up uneducated and unqualified, which is an increasing problem.

There are more factors which put rural students at a disadvantage. Although students from any province have a chance to be admitted to any university, admittance chances are unfairly distributed. Many poor provinces get low quota, so students have to work harder to enter a good university, and this often with less good of a basic education. Beijing is disproprtionately favored, mainly because officials have their own children living there and because there are so many top universities there (the latter also holds for Shanghai). Shandong, Zhejiang, and Henan have witnessed many cases of very good students who cannot enter a top school while someone with the same score in Beijing would easily get in. These three are special because they have only very few good universities themselves. Students from these provinces often study day and night to get ahead of the competition. It is also said that Beijing students, because they have more spare time, acquire better communicative and social skills and a broader development than students from those provinces, who have to study extremely hard for their entrance examination. In this respect, countryside students are also at a disadvantage compared to city students. In Shanghai, I talked with senior middle school students, who can choose to take classes in music, art, theater, and philosophy, besides their regular curriculum; this was the most progressive situation I have seen.

In Mengcheng, I talked with Ge Ruinan, who had just finished her NCEE. She was a friend of a cousin of a friend of the roommate of a former classmate of friends of mine at Caltech, an indication of how helpful the Chinese people I met were in introducing me to their friends and family members. She accompanied me at my visits to several middle schools in the area. She told me that the NCEE had not been very difficult this year; this was something I also heard from others. In school, she had usually had about 10 hours of classes a day. She had been about 20th of her class of 60 students. She hoped to get into Anhui Agricultural University or Xi'an Foreign Languages University. However, a few days later, she received her score, which was only 478 out of 750, not enough to get into those universities. She was very sad about this. After I had returned from China, I heard she would be studying for the NCEE of next year, to have better chances then.

Everywhere in China, students are under a lot of pressure from parents, society, peers, and sometimes teachers, to get high marks. Marks in school are close to the defining criterion of one's success in life. All students I talked to hated this pressure, but they realized there is no easy solution. Establishing more universities would ease competition, but then the output becomes a problem. It is already getting harder and harder for university graduates, even from famous universities, to get a good job. The creation of high-quality jobs is again a large-scale economic problem. Many students still want to go abroad, but the numbers of those actually going are not high enough to solve this problem. In fact, to some degree it is an additional problem, since many never come back. The desire to go abroad is the main reason for the huge drive of highly-educated people to improve their oral English. Westerners can easily get a good job as an oral English teacher, sometimes even if they are not fluent themselves. At every university I have visited during the school year, I have seen extremely popular English corners. The level of English of the people there is mostly reasonable to good. Chinese people are, however, very uncertain about their speaking skills.

China has a very unequal distribution of income, with a small group of people owning the bulk of the wealth. While the world average ratio of city vs countryside income is about 1.5, in China it is 5.9 (official: 3.5). The central government is trying to levy higher and higher taxes on the high (> 20000 RMB/year) incomes, but this is a sensitive area of policy-making and it goes very slowly. Moreover, the Chinese government spends relatively little on education (3.1%). The country's large economic growth does not benefit areas equally; on the contrary, it is making the income distribution even more unbalanced. These income distribution and employment problems have a very complex social and political nature and cannot be changed overnight.

Efforts by the Chinese government to stimulate education in rural areas, notably the Hope Project (Xi Wang Gong Cheng), suffer from structural drawbacks at several levels, including corruption in local governments. I have also seen and heard of a several ambitious grassroots initiatives. These often involve idealistic young people going to the countryside to teach, for periods ranging from weeks to years. The largest network of this kind is Da Xue Sheng Zhi Nong Zhi Yuan Dui, 'volunteer team of university students to support the countryside'. They go in school holidays to selected villages. Their goals are threefold: education of countryside students and adults, distribution of goods (clothes, books) to countryside children, and surveying the condition of China's rural education. Their educational activities consist of several parts. First they teach middle school students, in particular how to study well and how to think in a modern way. They also teach adults in the village how to cooperate, and about topics like law and agricultural technology. Moreover, cultural and social activities are organized together. The network also supports very poor village students financially, so that they can attend senior middle school. Volunteers go in teams and stay with villagers; they only get part of their travel costs reimbursed. They receive training from education experts and experienced volunteers. Progress can be measured because the same schools will be visited again. Participation in the volunteer teams has a profound impact on the thinking of the volunteers themselves, and in this way, general public awareness about the problems in rural education can be fostered.

As a follow-up project to my Avery project, I would like to support the student volunteer teaching teams from the US and Europe, both by fundraising and recruiting. Many western students, especially those of Chinese descent, will be interested to join the teaching teams and to get a unique life experience in the Chinese countryside. Many western donors, especially those of Chinese descent, will be interested in supporting the Chinese countryside through a grassroots organization. There are already several organizations which have similar objectives, such as the Overseas Chinese Education Foundation, World Vision, Sowers Action, and the Kham Aid Foundation. However, none of these works with volunteer teachers, and some of them do not have a close collaboration with the peasants themselves. An update of our plan will be accessible on http://www.ruralchina.org/

THE CHINESE SCHOOL SYSTEM

From age 6 to 12, children attend elementary school. From age 12 to 15, junior middle school. From age 15 to 18, senior middle school (high school). The National College Entrance Examination determines in a very complicated way whether one can go to university, and thus one's future. Different regions (provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions) not only have different subjects in the NCEE, but also different scoring systems, but scores are normalized and then compared with the required score for a certain major at a certain university. For different regions, there are different required (normalized!) scores. These are set by the Department of Education of the central government. For some regions there are fixed numbers of students to be admitted, for others there are not. A student can indicate four university preferences, and per university six major preferences, and yes/no to the question whether he is willing to be put in an arbitrary major at the university of his choice, if he does not get into one of the majors of his choice (most people answer no). This form has to be submitted before you know your score on the NCEE, and in some places even before you take the NCEE. So this requires good guessing and a clever choice strategy. There are first- and second-tier universities, and there is vocational training. In each category, a student can indicate four university preferences. Universities can do some selection themselves; the ratio of students accepted to students whose score is high enough is about 1 to 1.2.

University studies (Bachelor) are from 18 to 22. After that, two or three more years till a Master's degree, for those who want to pursue that. The government has made a lot of effort to realize nine-year compulsory (and free) education for all (elementary school and junior middle school). Tuition fees vary widely, by location, university, and even major. Computer science and economics have higher tuition fees than other majors. Tuition fee at Shanghai Jiaotong University (typical for Shanghai) is about 10000 RMB a year. A not-too-poor peasant would typically earn 1000 RMB a month, but the average income of a Chinese peasant would be around 250 RMB. This is often not enough to support a child in university. Students have to apply for scholarships or bank loans, but these are not available to all poor students. University restaurant food is cheap (3-5 RMB per meal), but per month this is still about 400 RMB, which is a lot for students from the countryside. There are some private schools these days, with huge tuition fees. Some private middle schools are very good, but private universities generally do not have a good reputation.