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Children from poor and rural areas have little hope of keeping up with their rich counterparts

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+.g-fallback+figure{margin-top:0;}Listen to this story

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IN CHINA’S TOP-GROSSING summer film, “Successor”, a rich businessman seeks to motivate his son by raising him in poverty. Young Jiye believes his family is truly poor. He is told to “change his fate” by studying hard and doing well in China’s university-entrance exam, known as the gaokao. But just in case, his father also hires undercover tutors. Fake street peddlers test Jiye’s English. The neighbourhood butcher gives him maths puzzles. A tutor posing as the family’s grandmother tells the boy that her dying wish is for him to study at an elite university. After her (staged) cremation, a grieving Jiye rushes back to his textbooks.

The satire has been a hit because, in some ways, it reflects a painful reality. There are a hundred or so elite universities in China. Acceptance into one of them can change a young person’s life. Experts reckon that graduates of these schools earn roughly a third more from their first job than graduates of second-tier universities. (China has around 3,000 tertiary-education institutions in total, including universities and vocational colleges.) In theory, everyone has an equal shot at getting into an elite university by acing the gaokao. In practice, children from wealthy families, who often go to the best high schools and receive tutoring, have a big advantage.

China is far from being the only country with an unequal education system. But the difference in opportunities for Chinese children based on whether they are rich or poor, urban or rural, is stark. It is also an embarrassment for a government that still calls itself communist. At a meeting last month of the Communist Party’s most senior members (known as the “third plenum” because it is the third in a five-yearly cycle of such meetings), officials promised to make things fairer. The party aims to “promote equality of opportunity” and “better allocate” educational resources. In recent years, though, its policies have failed to improve the system.

China offers nine years of free, compulsory education which usually ends at the age of 15. Students must then pass a test to enter a senior secondary school. These schools charge fees that poor families struggle to afford. After three more years of study students take the gaokao. Kids in rural areas, if they haven’t ended their studies already, rarely make it beyond this point. A paper published in 2015 estimated that students from poor counties were seven times less likely than their urban counterparts to attend university—and 11 times less likely to get into an elite one. Studies since then suggest things may have got even harder for poor students.

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⇒All of our China coverage

In recent decades, as the competition for spots at elite schools and universities has grown fiercer, parents have sought any edge they can get for their children. Many hired private instructors, such that by 2021 the tutoring industry in China was generating $100bn in annual revenue. But that same year, in an effort to level the playing-field, the government banned most for-profit tutoring services for students in the nine years of compulsory education. Police raided cram schools that offer coaching on how to pass exams. Many of the firms that provided these services collapsed.

The moves did not work, say researchers at Peking University. They analysed surveys of household spending before and after the tutoring ban and found that low- and middle-income families were, on average, spending less on after-school education. The richest families, though, were spending more. Tutors were still active. But because they were acting illegally, they charged more, pricing most people out.

Parents continue to feel pressure to help their children keep up, says a well-off mother in the city of Nantong. She describes her 13-year-old son as “not brilliant, but good enough”. He began to fall behind because his classmates were all learning the curriculum ahead of time from tutors. So over the summer holidays she forked out 60,000 yuan ($8,400) for extra lessons, roughly equivalent to the annual earnings of a typical migrant worker in China.

Families that live in or come from the countryside face a bigger challenge. Rural schools tend to be shoddy, sometimes lacking basic facilities such as a library. Their students often end up in secondary schools that focus on vocational training. This rarely leads to university. The children of rural migrants who work in cities have it no better. Many are barred from city schools because of the hukou system, which ties access to public services to the place where one’s household is registered.

To make matters worse, elite universities, which are concentrated in wealthy areas, reserve a disproportionate number of spots for locals. In 2016 the Ministry of Education tried to get such universities to set aside 140,000 places, about 6.5% of the total, for students from poorer areas. To make room, fewer locals would be admitted. But protests erupted in cities. “Why should they eat from our bowls?” one angry mother asked the New York Times. The government walked back the policy.

The result of all this is that many talented children do not reach their full potential. Take Jiang Ping, a 17-year-old who shot to fame in June after she made it to the final round of a prestigious maths competition organised by Alibaba, a tech giant. The public was shocked to discover that Ms Jiang was from a village and attended a vocational high school (most of the other finalists were students at elite universities). In an interview with local media, she recounted how she herself questioned her worthiness to join the competition.

Over a third of Chinese children live in rural areas. The government’s actions betray concern about how they are faring. China scores well on international measures of academic prowess, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a battery of tests taken by 15-year-olds in dozens of countries. Tellingly, though, Chinese officials let only children from good schools in a few wealthy regions take the PISA tests.

Experts say the government should invest more in rural areas, increase the availability of pre-school education and reform the hukou system so that the children of migrants can attend city schools. Such measures would help poor families, but they might not decrease inequality as much as hoped, reckons Li Hongbin, a professor at Stanford University. That is because the rich will continue to find ways to stay ahead. Some of this is a self-perpetuating cycle: students from wealthy families attend elite universities, go on to get jobs with high salaries, then pay whatever it takes to make sure their own children follow the same path.

That is not how “Successor” plays out, though. Jiye does get a stellar gaokao score. But (spoiler alert) he chooses not to attend an elite university. Instead he goes to a sports college. A degree from such institutions is no guarantee of a good job. Still, after some thought, Jiye’s father seems happy enough with the decision. Most Chinese parents would not be. ■

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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Study hard, be rich, get ahead”

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China

August 17th 2024

• →China’s wealthy elite rigs its university arms race
• →A gruesome corpse scandal sparks outrage in China
• →How China thrives in a world of turmoil

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From the August 17th 2024 edition

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Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

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Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)

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They will go to great lengths to try

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China’s alarming sex imbalance

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Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university

It models itself on Stanford, and is in the tech hotspot of Hangzhou

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com