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China May 29th 2021 edition

Serve the elite

Education in China is becoming increasingly

unfair to the poor
The hukou system of household registration exacerbates a huge divide

May 27th 2021

HONG KONG

A fterxiong xuan’ang gained the capital’s best score in China’s university-

entrance exam in 2017, he was interviewed by Beijing’s media. The son of
diplomats, Mr Xiong acknowledged that his upbringing had been privileged. “All the
top scorers now come from wealthy families,” he said. “It is becoming very difficult
for students from rural areas to get into good universities.” His honesty drew much
praise online.

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Since 1998, when China began a huge expansion of university enrolment, the
number of students admitted annually has quadrupled to nearly 10m. About one
third of high-school students now proceed to undergraduate courses. Data are
patchy, but experts agree that the share of rural students at China’s best universities
(the top 1%) has shrunk. Only 0.3% of rural students make it into them, compared
with 2.8% of urban ones. Most other tertiary institutions are far inferior.

Around the world, students from poor backgrounds struggle to compete with their
richer counterparts. In China the divide is particularly stark. The main cause is the
hukou system, which makes it very difficult to gain free access to state-provided
services outside the place where one’s household is registered. This means that in
cities, the children of migrants from the countryside are usually shut out of local
state schools. They have to attend shoddy private ones that charge fees, or go to
their parents’ village for an education that is free but also bare-bones.

The situation is made worse by the way that university places are allocated. The best
universities are concentrated in the biggest and richest cities such as Beijing and
Shanghai. They offer a disproportionate number of places to students with local
hukou. China’s two most prestigious universities, Peking University and Tsinghua,
are in Beijing. Their acceptance rate is around 1% for local students but only a tenth
of that for applicants from places outside the capital, according to state television.
More students from Beijing are admitted to Tsinghua every year than the combined
number of successful applicants from Guangdong and Shandong. The population of
those two provinces is ten times bigger than Beijing’s.

In a paper published in 2015, scholars from Tsinghua and Stanford University said
students with hukou in the poorest fifth of counties were seven times less likely
than their urban counterparts to get a university place and 14 times less likely to
attend an elite one. In those counties, the odds were even more stacked against girls
and ethnic minorities. “It is really, really clear that it is now much, much harder for
a poor, rural kid to get into a good university,” says Scott Rozelle of Stanford. He
estimates that around 75% of urban children go to university compared with 15% of
rural ones. Nearly 80% of children under 14 have rural hukou. But writing in 2017,
Wu Xiaogang, now of nyu Shanghai, a Sino-American joint-venture university, said
less than 17% of students in elite universities had rural household-registration
before taking up their places. The pattern has not changed since then, says Mr Wu.
“If anything, it may be even worse now.”

That is because inequalities in society are becoming more pronounced. The

children of wealthy families have accessUpgrade
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school tutoring and extra-curricular activities. Their parents can afford homes in
 g
good catchment areas. China offers nine years of free, compulsory education, but
fees are levied at state-run senior secondary schools. In poor areas, charges can
amount to more than 80% of net income per person, one of the highest such

burdens in the world. Some students prefer to start work: a typical unskilled factory
hand can earn in a month what a poor farmer earns in a year.

The national university-entrance exam was suspended for the final decade of Mao
Zedong’s rule. Since its relaunch in 1977, universities mostly have relied on test
scores for admission. In 2003 China began to allow some universities to recruit
students with special talents such as in sports and arts. Again, the wealthy have
been the main beneficiaries: only they can afford to pay for the training needed.

For decades state-funded feeder schools in poorer areas played a vital role in
offering good students from the countryside a chance to get into university. But
many have closed as a result of migration into cities. Meanwhile, competition has
grown for places in good senior secondary schools. Ma Hang attended primary
school in his home village. But the best junior high school in the county would not
accept village students unless they paid extra fees or had powerful connections. His
parents managed to use such a connection to get him into the school. He says that
set him on a path that led him to a feeder high school and then to university.

Rural children in China face obstacles at every stage of development. Babies are
more likely to be undernourished and lack parental attention. By the time they
enter primary school, many have ailments such as anaemia, poor vision and
worms. Around 60% of students from the poorest counties suffer from at least one
of these afflictions, says Mr Rozelle.

Those who, despite the odds, make it to elite universities often feel socially
isolated. In 2020 a student from the countryside took to social media to describe
being “lost and confused” at university after leaving the “straightforward
environment” of school, where passing tests was the focus. More than 100,000
students, many with rural backgrounds, weighed in, sharing their own experiences
of feeling like misfits and lamenting their job prospects. They coined a new term in
Chinese: xiao zhen zuotijia, meaning “small-town swot”.

Wang Jianyue, a country-born physics whizz, can relate to their complaints. He

chose to study finance at university, thinking it would be easier to find a job with
such a specialism. It was only after he saw several of his classmates get internships
at big financial firms using their parents’ connections that he “truly understood the
gap” between himself and them. Mr Wang changed his focus to computer science.
Unlike some other small-town swots, he has, to his relief, got a job offer. 7

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