78                                                                                                                                                         Global Education Review 2(4)                                                                                                                                                                         

Global Education Review is a publication of The School of Education at Mercy College, New York.  This is an Open Access  article distributed under the terms of the Creative 

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properly cited. Citation: Xu, Shuqin & Law, Wing-Wah  (2015). Rural education and urbanization: Experiences and struggles in China since the late 1070’s. 

Global Education Review, 2(4). 78-100 

 

Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and 

Struggles in China Since the Late 1970s 

 

 

Shuqin Xu 

Sun Yat-sen University 

 

Wing-Wah Law 

The University of Hong-Kong 

 

Abstract 

China has adopted an unbalanced policy for economic development to improve its domestic economy and 

international competiveness for more than three decades. During this process, rural education has 

undergone a series of reforms. With reference to compulsory education, this article argues that rural 

education in China is a pragmatic instrument for the state to expand and improve the quality of 

urbanization. Rural education can be used to serve urbanization, is influenced by the rural-urban 

disparities brought about by urbanization, and receives urban aid and support in exchange for following 

state guidelines. Due to deep-rooted disparities and long-standing inequalities,  effectively financing rural 

education,  rural education still faces challenges and difficulties related to handling urban-based curricula 

and evaluation standards, recruiting, and keeping qualified teachers, and the outflow of original rural 

residents. This article concludes by offering an explanation of Chinese policy implications for the 

functions and constraints of state-directed rural education in serving urbanization. 

 

Keywords 

rural education, urbanization, rural migration, education policy, China 

 

Introduction 

Studies of rural education in developing 

countries, have pointed out that rural education 

is key to promoting educational equality, 

transforming a country’s population into an 

asset for development, improving the local 

economy and enhancing national 

competitiveness (DeYoung, 1987; UNESCO, 

1993). Researchers (Chambers, 1983; Kallaway, 

2001) have become interested in the impact of 

urbanization on rural education, and have 

pointed out that rural education has become 

marginalized, and is dependent on urban 

education and development. The complexity and 

dynamics of rural education in China are no 

exception and have attracted the attention of 

both domestic and international researchers. 

Since reforming its economy in the late 1970s, 

China has adopted a policy of unbalanced 

economic development that allows some areas 

and people to get rich and to reach co-prosperity 

ahead of others; this has rapidly led to 

remarkable economic and social achievements, 

but has also resulted in rural-urban disparity.  

Research on rural education in China involves 

many topics, including gender issues (Hannum, 

______________________________ 

Corresponding Author: 

Shuqin Xu, Sun Yat-sen University,No.  135, Xingang Xi 

Road, Guangshou, 510275, P. R. China 

Email: xushuqin3@mail.sysu.edu.cn 

mailto:xushuqin3@mail.sysu.edu.cn


Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               79                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

2005), the cost and returns of rural education 

(Knight et al., 2010), issues of equality between 

rural and urban education (Hannum et al., 2009; 

Law & Pan, 2009), the influence of social-

political change on rural education (Hannum, 

1999) and the urbanization of rural education 

(Ge, 2003; Yu, 2008). Yet, certain aspects of 

rural education and urbanization remain under-

researched: specifically, the role and function of 

rural education in promoting urbanization; the 

channels through which urbanization affects 

rural education; how rural education is re-

adjusted and reformed to tackle problems 

brought about by urbanization; and the factors 

that constrain the development of rural 

education, especially in the process of 

urbanization. This article seeks to address these 

questions. 

With reference to compulsory education in 

rural China, this article argues that rural 

education, as directed by the state’s central 

government, has dynamically interacted with 

urbanization. On the one hand, in addition to 

confronting long-standing inequities, rural 

education passively promotes and deepens 

urbanization, as state-designed mechanisms 

benefit urban education and development by 

providing financial and human resources that 

are favorable to urban areas. On the other hand, 

urbanization brings rural education challenged 

rural education by bringing it inapplicable 

curriculum, unstable rural teacher resources, 

and great loss of rural students and graduates to 

urban areas. The state tries to exercise macro-

control to develop rural education in ways that 

will alleviate such dilemmas, maintain social 

stability and improve the quality of an 

increasingly expanding urbanization. However, 

the state’s strategies for developing and 

improving rural education are constrained by 

financial considerations, a series of 

unsystematically-made educational policies (e.g., 

rural school financing and planning, programs 

of rural school teachers and migrant children’s 

education), and the local government’s 

modification of policies. 

To present this argument, this article first 

reviews literature on the issues of rural 

education and urbanization to provide a 

framework for understanding the interactions 

between these phenomena and the diverse 

factors influencing them. Then, it describes the 

complex relationship between rural education 

and urbanization, which is influenced by the 

state’s strategy of developing and adjusting rural 

education to serve the needs of urbanization, 

and by other policies. It concludes with a 

discussion of policy implications for rural 

education and urbanization. 

 

Rural Education and Urbanization 

More research on rural education has been 

conducted in developing countries than in 

developed ones, for example, the United States 

(Arnold, 2005; DeYoung, 1987); moreover, 

studies on rural education in developing and 

developed countries generally tend to address 

different topics. Research on rural education in 

developing countries tends to adopt a macro 

perspective to discuss such issues as the 

interactions between rural education and culture, 

social and political change, gender, and economy 

(Graham Brown, 1991; Kallaway, 2001); studies 

on rural education in developed countries, on 

the other hand, often use a micro perspective to 

explore teaching and learning methods, 

classroom conflicts, school leadership in rural 

schools (Arnold, 2005), the relationship between 

rural schools and their communities, new 

technology in education (DeYoung, 1987) and 

issues of education for minority groups (Ayalon, 

2004). Despite these differences, the findings 

from studies in both developing and developed 

countries suggest that rural education is 

relatively inferior, when compared to urban 

education, and faces more staffing, financial and 

instructional problems (DeYoung, 1987).  



80                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

The increasing concern about rural 

education in developing countries results from 

the promotion of universal education, and a 

growing emphasis on the need to transform 

rural populations into human capital. Education, 

as advocated by human capital theorists (e.g., 

Schultz, 1963), helps students to acquire the 

skills and knowledge needed to earn higher 

wages and to improve productivity. Developing 

rural education thus is useful for enhancing 

rural dwellers’ quality of life and for reducing 

rural poverty (Atchoarena & Gasperini, 2003). 

Moreover, it also improves the national economy 

(UNESCO, 1993) and contributes to the 

efficiency of urbanization (Chambers, 1983; 

Kallaway, 2001). Urbanization, at its initial stage, 

is the process of withdrawing massive amounts 

of labor and other inputs from rural agricultural 

activities and concentrating them in urban areas 

for nonagricultural activities; it often 

accompanies industrialization in most countries 

(Champion, 2001). Education can contribute to 

urbanization by facilitating the exodus of literate 

rural people with the skills and knowledge 

necessary for promoting industrialization and 

other aspects of urban development (Atchoarena 

& Gasperini, 2003).  

Studies of urbanization, and of rural 

education in the process of urbanization in 

particular, have addressed the urban-rural 

disparity. Chambers (1983, p.4) described urban 

and rural areas in terms of a core-periphery 

system; urban areas form the core, which is “rich, 

industrialized and high status,” while rural areas 

constitute the “poor, agricultural and low status” 

periphery. Rural and urban development are not 

separate, they are interactive; however, extant 

research has emphasized the unidirectional 

contribution of rural education to urbanization. 

Antrop (2004) has pointed out that urbanization 

in its early period features a pattern of growing 

urban centers exercising different kinds and 

degrees of influence on the peripheries, though 

specific models vary. The prestige and power of 

the core are reinforced by its ability to attract 

and keep resources and professionals (Chambers, 

1983; Strange et al., 2012). Beaulieu and Gibbs 

(2005) claimed that the development of 

urbanization through rural education involves a 

pattern of brain drain: In the initial state of 

urbanization, urban areas draw both talented 

young rural people (who would otherwise have 

served their local rural areas) and local 

resources invested in the education of these 

youth to urban areas. Kallaway (2001), for 

example, criticized that rural education is placed 

in an inferior position in the course of 

urbanization, and that educational policies 

ignore specific problems in rural education.  

China has also witnessed increased rural-

urban disparity and rural dependency on urban 

development in the process of expanding 

urbanization since the late 1970s (Wen & Wen, 

2007). Two approaches to urbanization have 

been debated in China: the transforming rural 

areas into urban places approach (Fei, 1986), 

and the establishing metropolises approach (Rao 

& Cong, 1999). The central government has 

claimed to support the former, but has mainly 

adopted the latter in practice by pursuing a 

policy of unbalanced development (i.e., allowing 

some places and people to become wealthy 

ahead of others). This policy provides urban 

places, especially those in China’s eastern region, 

with more privileges, resources and 

opportunities, thus reinforcing rural-urban 

disparity (Li, 2008). Similar to urbanization 

reviewed in the general literature, urbanization 

in China, at its initial stage, also experienced 

massive rural laborers’ migration to urban areas 

and an expansion of education for providing 

human resources for urbanization.   

Research on rural education in China has 

pointed out that rural education is marginalized 

and has become dependent on urban education 

and urbanization (Ge, 2003; Qu & Wang, 2012; 

Wei, 2004), as reflected in three interconnected 

dimensions. First, compared to urban education, 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               81                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

rural education is confronted by more dilemmas, 

in terms of funding, teachers and infrastructure, 

and is always lower in quality (Ge, 2008; 

Hannum, 1999; Law & Pan, 2009). Second, rural 

schools, are forced to implement urbanized 

curriculum content that was based on urban 

culture and life (Yu, 2005), and to adopt 

pedagogy applied in urban schools (Ma & Tang, 

2004). Both the urban-based curriculum content 

and pedagogy are not applicable in rural schools, 

for the former is distant from rural students’ and 

teachers’ experience and different from rural 

school culture, while the latter needs well-

trained teachers and sufficient facilities that are 

both lacked in rural schools (Yu, 2008). Urban-

based rural education, according to Chen (2007), 

serves China’s urbanization by deviating from 

status quo rural traditions and culture. Third, 

despite receiving a backward and inappropriate 

education, rural students are required take the 

same academic examinations as their urban 

peers, and as a result have less access to top 

universities in China (Yang, 2006). 

The extant research focuses on the gap 

between and the policy-directed inequality of 

rural and urban education, but does not fully 

examine how the state guides the relationships 

between rural education and urbanization; 

specifically, it does not address how the state 

defines the role of rural education in promoting 

urbanization and serving the development of 

urban education, in what ways urbanization 

influences rural education, or how the state uses 

the achievements of urbanization to aid rural 

education in a manner calculated to deepen 

urbanization, cope with the social conflicts 

brought by rural-urban disparities and enhance 

ethnic minorities’ identification with the state. 

This article seeks to fill this gap.  

 

The Context of Urbanization and 

Rural Education in China 

In China, an urban area is an administrative 

concept used to refer to cities where various 

levels of government are located (National 

People’s Congress, 1989). China’s government 

has been led by the Communist Party of China 

since 1949, and can generally be divided into the 

central government (zhongyang zhengfu) and 

local governments (difang zhengfu). The former 

is headed by the State Council and includes 

ministries related to areas of national 

administration, such as the Ministry of 

Education (MoE), while the latter category 

comprises five sub-levels: province, municipality, 

county, district or township, and village (ranked 

from highest to lowest) (National People’s 

Congress, 2004). The first four levels of local 

government are located in urban areas 

(including municipalities directly under central 

government leadership, cities at the provincial, 

prefectural and county levels, and the downtown 

portions of counties and towns), while village 

governments are located in and directly 

administer rural areas (National People’s 

Congress, 1989). 

Although urban areas were initially 

planned and divided for administrative purposes, 

they are usually much wealthier and more 

developed, and have more advanced 

transportation and infrastructure than rural 

areas in the same jurisdiction, as will be 

discussed later. Moreover, in addition to their 

geographic division, the Chinese state further 

divides rural and urban areas through its 

household registration policy (hukou zhidu), 

which was enacted in the 1950s to impede the 

internal migration of rural and urban 

populations (National People’s Congress, 1958). 

The policy divides the population into 

agricultural and nonagricultural categories and 

provides the latter with more privileges than the 

former (hereafter, the term rural residents will 

be used to refer to those with agricultural 

household registration) (Chan & Zhang, 1999; 

Law, 2006). Under this policy, residents who 

hold agricultural household registration, but 

who live in urban areas, do not and cannot enjoy 



82                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

the same social welfares (including medical care 

and education) as non-agricultural residents in 

the same city. 

While China’s rural and urban areas both 

are remarkably developed, the country’s rural-

urban disparity has expanded since Deng 

Xiaoping’s coming to the power in late 1970s 

and his promotion of a series of social and 

economic reforms shortly thereafter. The 

economic reforms that helped promote 

urbanization were the product of three major 

strategies. The first strategy was the 

establishment of a market economy, which 

including inviting multiple investors to become 

involved in China’s economy and introducing the 

concept of domestic economic competition. The 

state, since the late 1970s, has opened that 

market to non-state sectors, including foreign 

and individual investment and private enterprise. 

In so doing, the non-public ownership sector 

(i.e., enterprises that are neither state-owned 

nor -controlled) has grown from 1% of China’s 

gross domestic product (GDP) in 1978, (National 

Bureau of Statistics of China, 2008) to more 

than 40% in 2014 (Li, 2014).  

The second major strategy involved 

gradually adjusting China’s economic structure 

by giving the country’s secondary and tertiary 

sectors (i.e., manufacturing and services) 

priority over the primary sector (agriculture/ 

raw materials). As a result, the contributions of 

the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors to 

China’s GDP changed from 28.2%, 47.9% and 

23.9%, respectively, in 1978 (Zou, 2008), to 10%, 

43.9% and 46.1%, respectively, in 2013 (National 

Bureau of Statistics of China, 2014b). Moreover, 

the growing importance of the secondary and 

tertiary sectors, both of which are labor-

intensive and urban-based, resulted in increased 

demand for labor in those sectors and attracted 

even more rural residents to work in urban areas. 

The third strategy was the forcible 

introduction of a policy of unbalanced economic 

development. The policy prioritized the 

development of urban areas and eastern coastal 

cities (e.g., Shanghai, Guangdong Province, 

Zhejiang Province) by attracting investment to 

and increasing support for those areas. As a 

result of this policy, the income gap of between 

eastern, middle and western residents, as well as 

that between urban and rural residents within 

each region, became quite large. In 2010, for 

example (Zou, 2012), the per capita net income 

of urban residents in eastern China (the highest) 

was about 1.49 times that of urban residents in 

China’s middle and western regions, while the 

per capita net income of eastern area rural 

residents (the highest) was 1.84 times of that 

their counterparts of China’s western region (the 

lowest). The per capita net income of urban 

residents in China’s eastern, middle and western 

regions was, respectively, 3.16, 3.14 and 3.92 

times of that of rural residents in the same 

region.  

The interplay of the state’s economic policy, 

the prosperity of and greater opportunities 

found in urban areas (especially eastern urban 

areas) and the state’s strategy of easing 

restrictions on rural-urban migration flows has 

driven rural residents into urban areas to seek 

employment in labor-intensive factories and 

service industries, high technology industries, or 

transnational corporations. The percentage of 

urban residents (i.e., those who live in urban 

areas for more than six months in the same year, 

even if they have a non-agricultural household 

registration) in the overall Chinese population 

increased from 17.92%, in 1978, to 52.6% (or 

about 712 million of 1.35 billion) in 2012 

(National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2013b). 

In 2012, 263 million urban residents were 

migrant workers, and 88.6% of these worked in 

urban areas at or above the county level 

(National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2013a) 

To confront the social and economic 

challenges brought about by unbalanced 

economic development, the Chinese state, since 

the beginning of the 21st century, has adopted a 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               83                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

number of strategies to develop rural areas, 

especially rural areas in its middle and western 

regions. These strategies include the Developing 

of the West Regions (xibu da kafa) movement, 

and programs urging urban areas and China’s 

eastern region to enter into partnerships with, or 

to provide aid to rural and western areas of the 

country. The central government also increased 

its financial support for rural areas and reduced 

peasants’ financial burden through such 

initiatives as its Tax and Fee Reform (shuifei 

gaige), which cancelled some compulsory taxes 

and fees previously levied against peasants 

(State Council, 2003). However, the disparity 

between rural and urban areas has not yet been 

bridged, leading the state, under Xi Jinping 

(2012-), to propose the further urbanization of 

rural areas by integrating and balancing rural 

and urban development (The Communist Party 

of China Central Committe & State Council, 

2014). 

In addition to social inequality and rural-

urban disparity, China’s urbanization has led to 

an increased disparity between rural and urban 

education. Rural students account for a large 

portion of China’s nine-year compulsory 

education (i.e., primary and junior secondary 

school education), with 46 million students 

enrolled in rural school, in 2012 (Department of 

Development and Planning of Ministry of 

Education, 2013). The influence of urbanization 

has created three types of rural students at the 

nine-year compulsory education level: rural 

students who live with their parent(s) in their 

hometown; rural leftover students (nongcun 

liushou xuesheng) cared for by non-parental 

guardians (e.g., grandparent(s)) in their 

hometown while their parents work as rural 

migrant workers; and rural migrant students 

(nongmingong suiqian zinv) who live with their 

parents in urban areas, away from their 

hometown. In 2012, there were 22 million 

leftover and 13 million migrant students, 

accounting for 17% of primary and 10% of junior 

secondary students, nationwide (Department of 

Development and Planning of Ministry of 

Education, 2013). 

The government adopted four strategies to 

address rural-urban disparity. The first strategy 

was to expand education to reduce rural 

residents’ illiteracy and enhance their 

educational level. To facilitate rural students’ 

access to school, many new rural schools were 

established; each village was required to 

establish a primary school, while those villages 

with considerable territory and sparse 

population were asked to provide teaching 

stations for students up to the fifth grade. In 

addition, in 1986, legislation made universal 

nine-year compulsory education mandatory 

(National People’s Congress, 1986). This law was 

immediately implemented in China’s eastern 

region and in urban areas above the county level, 

and then expanded to counties and towns in 

1995. Rural areas were allowed to institute 

universalizing compulsory education on an ad 

hoc basis. In 2011, the government claimed that 

the goal of universal nine-year compulsory 

education had been achieved (Zhai et al., 2012).  

The second strategy involved reforming the 

financing of education to reduce the central 

government’s fiscal responsibilities; one way of 

doing so was to extend the policy of unbalanced 

economic development to education. First, the 

government invested more heavily in domestic 

economic development than in education 

(including rural education); a goal of investing 4% 

of GDP in education was established in 1993, but 

was not achieved until 2012 (Zhao, 2013). 

Second, more financial resources were directly 

and indirectly allocated to urban education than 

to rural education. Urban education was given 

primary development attention, because it had 

been assigned the mission of supporting China’s 

urban economy and was intended to become a 

model for rural education (Editorial Board of 

Educational Yearbook of China, 1986). In 

addition, financial power was decentralized by 



84                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

the introduction of “level-by-level local 

responsibility and management” in basic 

education, which transferred the central 

government’s responsibility for financing 

education to local government, and required 

local governments to raise and allocate funds for 

education in their jurisdiction through multiple 

channels (Communist Party of China Central 

Committee, 1985).  

The third strategy was to re-establish the 

“key school” program at all educational levels. 

Key schools were primarily based in urban areas 

(county level or above), had fewer students in 

each class and were provided with more funds, 

better facilities and buildings, and more-

qualified teachers  (Editorial Board of 

Educational Yearbook of China, 1984). Teachers 

at key secondary schools, for example, were 

required to have a tertiary degree, received a 

higher salary and had more opportunities for 

promotion; one-third of these teachers were 

experienced teachers with good teaching records, 

who had been reassigned from non-key schools. 

Key schools were criticized for increasing 

inequality among schools, so another term 

(model school – shifan zhongxue) was adopted 

to describe the state’s emphasis on developing 

schools with good teachers and facilities. No 

matter what they were called, key schools 

favored urban students, who were thought most 

likely to further the development of urban 

society. 

The fourth strategy was to re-adopt the 

practice of distributing students who finished 

their compulsory education into one of two 

further education tracks. The first track involved 

vocational and technical education to prepare 

students to enter the labor market, and included 

vocational senior secondary schools (zhiye 

gaozhong), specialized secondary schools 

(zhongdeng zhuanye xuexiao) and skilled 

worker schools (jigong xuexiao). The second 

track offered students a general senior 

secondary education intended to cultivate 

students for higher education. The emphasis on 

these two tracks was unbalanced. From 1980 to 

mid-1996, vocational and technical education 

was emphasized and received the lion’s share of 

state institutional and financial support (He, 

2009). Over that period, the number of first-year 

students in vocational technical schools 

increased almost five-fold, from roughly 714,300 

in 1980, to 3.8 million in 1996, while the number 

of first-year students in general senior secondary 

schools decreased from 3.8 million to 2.82 

million (Department of Development and 

Planning of Ministry of Education, 1997). After 

1996, however, general senior secondary 

education was provided with more development 

opportunities, and the number of first-year 

general senior secondary school students began 

to outpace the number of first-year vocational 

and technical school students. Between 1996 and 

2012, the number of students enrolled in general 

senior secondary schools tripled, while the 

number of students enrolled in vocational and 

technical schools increased by only 40% 

(Department of Development and Planning of 

Ministry of Education, 2013).  

Despite its vigorous promotion of domestic 

economic and social reforms since the 1980s, the 

Communist Party of China (CPC), China’s sole 

political party since the PRC’s 1949 founding, 

has allowed very few political reforms to emerge 

(Law, 2011). On the contrary, it has used its 

program of economic and social reform to 

reestablish the legitimacy of its leadership, and 

to perpetuate its dominant position in China 

(Deng, 1979). The CPC has remained the sole 

decision maker regarding China’s reforms, and 

has consistently stressed the Party’s supreme 

status and the central importance of its 

authoritarian rule, rather than expand 

democracy. The CPC has, for example, continued 

China’s dual leadership system, which has 

enabled the Party to control virtually all areas of 

life in the PRC since 1949. The first aspect of this 

system is the administrative line, theoretically 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               85                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

headed by National People’s Congress (NPC), 

while the second is the political line, 

theoretically led by the National CPC Congress; 

in reality, both are directed and controlled by the 

CPC Central Committee, specifically the 

Politburo of the CPC Central Committee 

(National People’s Congress, 2004; 17th 

National Congress of the CPC, 2007). The CPC 

also enacted the National Security Law, 

ostensibly to ensure China’s political, economic 

and social stability and security, but actually a 

means of using those concerns to legitimize its 

leadership role, maintain its political stability 

and perpetuate its ruling status (Law, in press). 

The CPC’s strategy of developing rural education 

while promoting urbanization in different 

periods also reflects its focus on maintaining 

political stability, as will be shown in next 

section. 

 

The Complex and Dynamic 

Relationships between Rural 

Education and Urbanization in 

China 

The relationships between rural education and 

urbanization in China were reflected in four 

related dimensions: the state’s oscillation 

between decentralizing and centralizing the 

responsibility for financing rural education 

according to the needs of urbanization; 

contradictory rural education planning and 

implementation, which claimed to use rural 

education to serve rural development but 

developed rural education based on urban 

strategies; unstable rural school human 

resources, which fluctuated between the brain 

drain of original rural teachers due to rural-

urban disparity and the unstable brain gain of 

university graduates and temporary urban 

teachers mobilized by the state; and, the flow of 

rural school students and graduates to urban 

society. 

 

Financing Rural Education for 

Urbanization: Centralization versus 

Decentralization 

The first pattern of relationship between rural 

education and urbanization was the state’s 

financial strategy of directly and indirectly using 

rural education to serve urbanization. In the late 

1970s, when the state introduced economic 

reforms that resulted in the expansion of 

urbanization, it invested the main portion of its 

limited financial resources in urban economic 

and social development, leaving rural education 

fraught with problems due to insufficient 

funding. While this urban development focus led 

to remarkable social and economic achievements 

over the next three decades, the resulting 

urbanization also brought about unequal social 

problems; in order to address these problems, 

while still continuing its goal of expanding urban 

areas, the state has recently begun to focus more 

attention on rural development, including rural 

education development, than it had previously. 

The state’s practice of decreasing funding for 

rural education to allow increased investment in 

urban development and education can be seen in 

two state-prescribed approaches to financing 

education. 

The first approach involved decentralizing 

responsibility for financing education to allow 

the central government to focus its limited 

financial resources on economic development, 

which mainly occurred in urban areas. To 

increase its capacity for economic investment, 

the central government, in 1994, introduced its 

new System of Tax Sharing (fenshuizhi), which 

transferred the fiscal income of local 

government at various levels to the central 

government, leaving them a small portion of tax 

income to finance local concerns, including 

education. This effectively increased the funds 

available for urban education, which cultivated 

talented people to serve the needs of 

urbanization, and decreased funding for rural 

education, as the financial capabilities of the 



86                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

various levels of local government did not match 

with their responsibilities (Law & Pan, 2009). 

Higher-level governments located in urban areas 

had more fiscal income, but their responsibility 

for financing education was usually limited to 

the schools in the city in which the government 

was located; the government could thus provide 

more funds to urban education and allocate 

educational allowances to the residents under its 

direct jurisdiction. By contrast, township and 

village governments, at the bottom of the 

administrative hierarchy, had the least tax 

income, but bore the most responsibility for 

raising and allocating funds for rural schools 

(State Education Commission, 1992). Rather 

than providing more financial support, the 

central government directed rural governments 

to explore new ways of developing their local 

economy that would enable them to support 

education through self-reliance (Editorial Board 

of Educational Yearbook of China, 1994). Local 

governments, following the example of the 

central government, began to divert funding 

earmarked for education, using it instead for 

local economic development and related areas of 

responsibility that could quickly yield results 

(Editorial Board of Educational Yearbook of 

China, 1995), leaving the poor peasants to pay 

for rural education (renmin jiaoyu renmin ban) 

to (re) construct school building, buy teaching 

facilities and provide teachers’ allowance. The 

peasants who shouldered a heavy financial 

burden paid for education through three ways 

(Ma, 2000). The first way was paying for their 

children’s tuition and miscellaneous fee (xue za 

fei). The second way was paying 1.5% to 2% of 

their per capita net annual income as 

educational surcharge (jiaoyufei fujia) that was 

calculated and charged by village government. 

The third way was donating money for 

constructing or renovating school building and 

buying school facilities, which will be presented 

more in next paragraph. These ways not only 

increased peasants’ financial burden, but also 

failed to provide sufficient funds for rural 

education. 

The state’s second approach involved 

introducing multiple investment mechanisms 

(charging additional fees, running school 

businesses and encouraging social donations) to 

fund education. As discussed above, urban 

residents’ per capita net income was significantly 

higher than that of rural residents; therefore, the 

additional fees urban schools charged urban 

residents were higher than those charged by 

rural schools. In addition, urban schools, being 

located in urban societies that featured high 

levels of commerce and industry, could also 

generate additional income by running school 

businesses; rural schools could not, as they had 

no market in which to sell such goods or services. 

Urban schools also received a higher level of 

financial support from diverse stakeholders for 

such reasons as charity, appreciating the school, 

helping their offspring get educational in the 

school or building up relationship with local 

government. These stakeholders included 

individuals, companies and other donators, and 

all of them had more disposable income than 

their rural counterparts. For example, in 2000, 

individuals and social groups donated almost 

RMB 114 billion in educational funding, but only 

RMB 26 billion of that amount went to rural 

education and most of which was contributed by 

peasants (Editorial Board of Educational 

Yearbook of China, 1995).   

Owing to a lack of funding, rural schools, 

especially those in remote poor areas, suffered 

strains. They did not have sufficient funds to 

provide sound physical facilities for education, 

either by constructing adequate new buildings or 

by renovating old or dilapidated existing school 

buildings. Rural schools also found it difficult to 

pay the salaries of and to provide adequate 

allowance to teachers, which resulted in their 

constantly losing existing teachers and having to 

recruit replacements. Qizhou County in Hubei 

province in middle region of China, for example, 



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could pay its formal teachers only 65% of their 

salary, while community-sponsored teachers 

were paid RMB 250 per month, and substitute 

teachers were not paid at all (Zhou et al., 2003). 

To cope with these problems, the central 

government, at the beginning of 21st century, 

introduced three major strategies for increasing 

funding to develop rural education. The first 

strategy reshuffled the financial responsibilities 

of various levels of government (Law & Pan, 

2009), shifting primary responsibility for raising 

and allocating funds for rural education from 

village and township governments to county and, 

ultimately, provincial governments (State 

Council, 2005), meaning peasants were no 

longer called upon to donate money to support 

local education. The resulting shortfall was 

compensated for through the Fiscal Transferring 

Payment (caizheng zhuanyi zhifu) program, a 

special fund for improving rural education that 

was allocated by the central and provincial 

governments on a proportional burden-sharing 

basis (National People’s Congress, 2006). 

County governments were assigned the 

responsibility of establishing special funds for 

paying teachers’ salaries. 

The second strategy reformed fee-charging 

by the 2001 introduction of a “one-fee system” 

for the poorest rural areas, which was later 

extended, in 2004, to rural schools in China’s 

middle and eastern regions (Ministry of 

Education et al., 2004). This system limited 

schools to charging student fees only once a 

semester, and stipulated that the fee charged 

must be based on the per-student budget 

established by the provincial government. The 

system was intended to ensure that funds were 

fully allocated to rural schools and to reduce 

peasants’ financial load regarding their 

children’s education. 

The third strategy was to increase financial 

investment in rural education. It first surfaced in 

the central government’s “two exemptions and 

one subsidy” policy, which exempted students 

from paying textbook fees and miscellaneous 

expenses and subsidized school boarding fees. 

Then, in 2006, the central government began to 

provide free nine-year compulsory education in 

schools in western regions, allowing those 

students to get school boarding subsidies and 

free textbooks and exempting them from 

miscellaneous fees (National People’s Congress, 

2006). Moreover, the central government also 

mobilized urban schools and schools in the 

eastern region to provide funds and free 

teaching materials to schools in the western 

region, especially rural schools. By 2003, schools 

in 12 eastern cities had donated RMB 280 

million to western schools (Editorial Board of 

Educational Yearbook of China, 2004).  

Although rural schools had access to more 

funds due to the new financial system and 

increased investment, they were still confronted 

by challenges during the reform process. First, in 

the process of increasing its investment in rural 

education, the central government tried to 

reduce costs by combining the teaching stations, 

schools, students and teachers scattered among 

several villages into larger schools (chedian 

bingxiao) (State Council, 2001). By 2010, 

65,000 rural junior secondary schools and 

302,000 rural primary schools (including 

teaching stations) had disappeared (Editorial 

Board of Educational Yearbook of China, 2005). 

This movement resulted in larger classes at the 

merged schools, more resource shortages, and 

eroded rural culture. It also increased the 

financial burden on families sending their 

children to distant schools, and made it more 

difficult and increased travel time for students to 

go to school. Students who previously would 

otherwise have gone to local teaching stations or 

schools now had to attend primary schools an 

average 5.4 kilometers from home or secondary 

schools an average of 17.4 kilometers from home 

(Yang, 2011). After more than a decade, this 

movement was finally stopped in 2012 (State 

Council, 2012). Second, though total funding for 



88                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

rural education increased, per capita funding for 

rural students remained lower than that of their 

urban counterparts. Third, though new and 

modern facilities (e.g., computers, music room, 

and function room) were provided to rural 

schools, they were seldom used in teaching 

because the schools did not have enough 

teachers to organize activities and the teachers 

they did have did not know how to operate 

modern technology or use it for teaching 

purposes (Wu, 2006). More problems related to 

rural teachers will be presented in the next 

section.  

 

Rural Education Reform: Self-

contradictory and Urban-based 

The second pattern of relationship between rural 

education and urbanization concerned the 

contradictions of rural education, in terms of 

goals, curriculum and evaluation. Rural 

education was designed to serve the needs of 

rural and agricultural development, but was 

either provided with insufficient resources to do 

so, or was based on urban experience.  

The first contradiction was that, while the 

entire state was in the midst of an urbanization 

trend, rural education had long been tasked with 

serving rural and agricultural development 

needs and improving peasants’ standard of 

living (Ministry of Education, 2010; Ministry of 

Education & Ministry of Agriculture, 2001); 

rural students were expected to work in their 

rural hometown after graduating. Two 

approaches were adopted to promote rural 

development through rural education. The first 

required rural junior secondary school students 

to learn agricultural knowledge and skills. In the 

1980s, rural junior secondary schools were 

required to provide agriculture-related subjects 

or to place some final year students into classes 

that specifically taught agriculture (Communist 

Party of China Central Committee & State 

Council, 1983). In the new curriculum reform, 

begun in 2001, rural junior secondary schools 

were required to allocate 300 teaching hours to 

two or three agriculture-related subjects, and to 

award students who passed these subjects Green 

Certificates (lvse zhengshu) which was proof 

that the awarded students had learned the 

government prescribed agricultural knowledge 

and skills (Ministry of Education & Ministry of 

Agriculture, 2001). 

The second approach to serving rural 

development through rural education was 

implemented mainly through vocational and 

technical schools (Deng, 1978; Pang, 2006), 

despite the fact that these institutions were 

generally designed to benefit urbanization, 

rather than rural development. First, students 

who enrolled in majors relating to agriculture 

and rural development were not well trained in 

urban development, and did not promote rural 

modernization (Editorial Board of Educational 

Yearbook of China, 2000). Second, to encourage 

students to study in vocational and technical 

schools, the state offered to change their 

agricultural household registration to a non-

agricultural one, which meant providing them 

more social welfares (He, 2009). Third, the state 

shifted its emphasis from vocational and 

technical secondary schools to general 

educational schools to cultivate more talented 

people capable of supporting modernization and 

urbanization. Fourth, to attract students and 

help them to get jobs, vocational and technical 

schools provided only majors that were popular 

in urban markets (He, 2009). Fifth, rural 

students were not interested in a rural 

vocational and technical secondary education 

that could not help them earn more than rural 

migrant workers earned in urban areas, or that 

made them less competitive in urban job 

markets than higher education graduates (Pang, 

2006).  

The second contradiction was that the 

curriculum provided to rural students was based 

on urban experiences and transmitted an urban 

culture that marginalized the rural culture with 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               89                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

which rural students were familiar. By analyzing 

the drawings and themes in Chinese language 

textbooks provided to rural primary school 

students in 1994, Yu (2005) found that content 

concerning rural life and culture focused mainly 

on landscapes, animals and plants, while urban-

related content addressed a richer range of 

information, including architecture, 

interpersonal relationships and modern 

technology; moreover, the number of textbook 

drawings and themes that focused on urban life 

increased with the grade level.  

The Chinese state tried to solve the 

problem of urbanizing the rural curriculum by 

prescribing a three-level curriculum—national, 

local and school—during the curriculum reform 

initiative it began in 2001 (State Council, 2001). 

However, this reform merely aggregated the 

inferiority of the curriculum provided for rural 

students and promoted its further urbanization 

(Wei, 2004). On the one hand, rural schools, 

lacking funds and teachers as shown in the 

previous two sections, and were not capable of 

implementing local curricula or developing 

school-based curricula, which were also 

challenges for urban schools. On the other hand, 

the national curriculum, which was based on 

urban experiences, became more challenging 

from a rural education perspective. A 

remarkable amount of national curriculum 

content referred to concepts familiar to urban 

students (e.g., computer and multimedia, 

McDonalds, supermarkets), but strange to rural 

students and teachers (Wei, 2004). Moreover, 

many suggested student activities (e.g., visiting 

the zoo and collecting information from internet) 

and teaching materials (e.g., videos and video 

players) could not be organized or accessed in 

rural schools (Wang, 2007).  

The third contradiction was that rural 

students, despite having been provided inferior 

educational resources and unsuitable curriculum 

content, were evaluated using urban criteria; 

they took the same examination their urban 

peers did to determine whether they could 

pursue further study after finishing their 

compulsory education. Due to increasing rural-

urban disparity, rural students became less 

competitive in entry examinations for senior 

secondary schools and universities (Yu, 2008). A 

sample investigation of 16 universities showed 

that the percentage of freshmen coming from 

rural areas decreased from 72% in 1982, to 48.3% 

in 2010 (Wang, 2013). The percentage of rural 

students in top universities had also decreased, 

to even lower levels; in Tsinghua University, for 

example, rural students fell from 21.7% of total 

enrollment in 1990, to 17.6% in 2000 (Yang, 

2006).  

To maintain social stability and harmony, 

the Chinese state tried to increase the proportion 

of rural students, using three strategies (Dong, 

2013). The first strategy was to request that 

universities lower their university entrance exam 

score requirement for students from the 

country’s middle and western regions. The 

second strategy involved designating some 

eastern universities to recruit rural students; 

Fudan University, a top Chinese university 

located in the eastern coastal city of Shanghai, 

introduced a policy of recruiting outstanding 

rural students, and admitted 200 such rural 

students in 2014 (Dong, 2014). The third 

strategy was to provide programs for recruiting 

rural students into key-point universities, such 

as the free normal university program discussed 

in the previous section. Despite these strategies, 

rural university graduates continued to be at a 

disadvantage in the labor market, leading to a 

perception that higher education yielded low 

returns; this, together with the multiple 

unfavorable situations in rural education, 

discouraged many rural students from pursing 

further study (Liu, 2015).  

 



90                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

The Quality and Mobility of Teachers in 

Rural Education: Brain Drain versus 

Brain Gain 

The third pattern of relationship between rural 

education and urbanization concerned the brain 

drain of rural teachers to work in urban areas 

and the state’s subsequent brain gain strategies 

for mobilizing urban human resources to work 

in rural schools. In addition to lacking funds, 

rural schools were short of teachers. This 

shortage was intensified by the outflow of 

(potential) rural teachers to urban areas that 

were more developed and that offered job 

opportunities that could provide a higher salary 

and a richer life experience. The state, beginning 

in 2000, established programs to encourage 

graduates with tertiary education experience to 

teach in rural schools and to mobilize teachers in 

eastern and urban areas to aid western and rural 

schools.  

The brain drain of rural teachers occurred 

in two ways. First, in-service rural teachers were 

attracted to urban areas where there were more 

opportunities to earn more money. The first 

large wave of rural teachers leaving for urban 

areas took place in the late 1980s, when the 

market economy in urban areas began to show 

its advantages (Li, 1999). This trend continued 

due to the fact that rural teachers’ salaries, 

already low and often defaulted upon, were 

increasingly lower than those of teachers 

working in urban areas. In 2004, when county 

governments were first commanded to pay 

teachers on time, experienced rural teachers 

received a basic salary of only about RMB 2000 

per month; by contrast, migrant peasant 

workers who worked in big cities could earn 

around RMB 6000 per month (Ouyang, 2014). 

In Qichun County of Hubei Province, more than 

800 teachers quit their jobs within a single six-

month period, and most went to work in urban 

areas (Zhou et al., 2003). Rural teachers flowed 

to urban area in three ways: by abandoning their 

teaching positions and working as factory 

workers, construction workers or entrepreneurs 

in more urban areas; by securing teaching or 

administrative positions at schools in more 

urban areas (in 2014, for example, nine 

outstanding teachers from a rural junior 

secondary school in Wugang County of Hunan 

Province left to take up teaching positions in 

urban schools (Yang et al., 2015); or by 

continuing to work in rural schools, while 

commuting as manual laborers at weekends or 

during holidays (Ouyang, 2014). 

The second way in which the rural-urban 

brain drain manifested occurred when graduates 

who had been expected to teach in rural schools 

instead found jobs in urban areas. Until the 

1980s, students from normal school and colleges 

(universities) could be coerced by the 

government to teach in rural areas; once the 

government began to afford them greater 

autonomy in their job choices, however, they 

increasingly chose to work in urban areas. In 

addition, normal schools, which recruited junior 

secondary school graduates and were the major 

provider of rural primary teachers, were 

marginalized or upgraded to be normal college 

when the state shifted its emphasis from 

vocational education to higher education, in the 

1990s. This policy resulted in the supply of 

teachers to rural schools falling dramatically, as 

graduates of normal colleges generally were able 

to use their academic degrees to find jobs in 

urban areas. 

In response to the shortage of teachers, 

rural schools, especially those that were isolated 

or poor, were provided with large numbers of 

community-sponsored teachers (minban jiaoshi) 

and substitute teachers (daike jiaoshi) who 

could be untrained and unpaid teenagers; 

however, these still could not satisfy the rural 

demand for quality teachers. Community-

sponsored teachers were not authorized 

personnel (bianzhi renyuan) who enjoyed state-

prescribed allowances and salaries; rather, they 

were graduates recruited from public schools 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               91                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

and paid by a combination of government 

allowances and funds raised from local 

communities; if they wished, they could upgrade 

themselves to become teachers and authorized 

personnel (State Education Commission, 1995). 

In 1980, there were 3.4 million community-

sponsored teachers in primary schools (61.4% of 

all primary school teachers) and 3 million in 

junior secondary schools (30.1% of all junior 

secondary school teachers) (Liu, 1993); a large 

portion of these taught in rural schools. Unlike 

community-sponsored teachers, who had stable 

positions, substitute teachers were temporarily 

recruited by specific institutions, were paid a 

significantly lower salary, and did not receive 

state allowances. In 2002, there were 580,000 

substitute teachers in rural schools, accounting 

for 9.6% of all rural teachers. Community-

sponsored and substitute teachers, despite 

making contributions to rural education, were 

criticized for lowering the quality thereof.  

The state adopted two major brain-gain 

approaches to improve the quality and number 

of rural teachers. The first approach consisted of 

reducing the number of teachers who were not 

authorized personnel. The MoE (later the 

National Education Commission, 1985-1998) 

used four methods to clean up and improve 

community-sponsored teachers in the 1980s and 

1990s (State Education Commission et al., 1992). 

First, in 1986, they stopped recruiting 

community-sponsored teachers; then, they 

transformed qualified teachers who passed 

examinations into authorized personnel, 

transferred less qualified teachers to non-

teaching positions, and dismissed unqualified 

teachers. By 2000, there were almost no 

remaining community-sponsored teachers. As 

for substitute teachers, most of whom had been 

recruited when community-sponsored teachers 

left or when rural teachers fled to urban areas, 

the MoE decided to eliminate them altogether, 

beginning in 2001 (State Council, 2001). This 

initiative was criticized for seriously reducing 

the number of available teachers in poor rural 

schools, for disregarding the important 

contributions substitute teachers had made to 

rural education, and for showing a lack of 

consideration for their welfare (Chen, 2010). 

The second approach centered on 

preparing and recruiting university (college) 

graduates to work in rural schools, and involved 

three main programs. The first urged university 

(college) graduates to volunteer to be rural 

educators, under such state initiatives as Calling 

University Students to Serve for Western Areas 

(daxuesheng fuwu xibu jihua), enacted in 2003, 

and Three Supports (supporting education, 

agriculture and hygiene) and One Alleviation 

(alleviating poverty) (sanzhi yifu), which began 

in 2006. To entice graduates to join this 

program, universities, endorsed by the MoE, 

offered to exempt graduates who volunteered for 

a two or three-year term of service in western 

and rural areas from having to write their 

Master’s program entrance examination. The 

second program, begun in 2006, recruited 

university (college) students to be Special Post 

Teachers for Rural Primary and Junior 

Secondary Schools in western and middle 

regions (tegang jiaoshi). Special post teachers 

were contracted to work in designated schools 

on a three-year basis (Ministry of Education et 

al., 2006); 59,500 university (college) graduates 

were recruited in the first three years of this 

program (Wang, 2007; Wu & Bian, 2010). The 

third program, begun in 2007, offered a free 

normal college education to students from 

western and middle regions, in exchange for 

their agreeing to work in their home province for 

10 years (including at least two years in rural 

schools) after graduation. 

These three programs had three 

similarities. First, they were all funded by the 

central government, which afforded rural 

education volunteers a small allowance, paid 

special post teachers a salary equivalent to that 

of teachers who were authorized personnel, and 



92                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

gave students who accepted free normal 

education an annual allowance of RMB 6,000, 

and exempted them from paying tuition or 

boarding fees. The second similarity was that, 

despite the levels of financial support they 

provided, these programs were not attractive to 

students and graduates. In 2011, only 4.1% of 

first-year graduates of the free normal education 

program worked in rural schools (Tian et al., 

2011). Special post teachers treated their 

position as a temporary job and tried to find 

other positions (e.g., civil service or urban 

teaching positions) during or after their term of 

service (Jiang, 2008); in Chongqing 

municipality, for example, 76.9% of special post 

teachers polled planned to quit their jobs (Wang 

et al., 2013). Rural education volunteers only 

needed to stay in rural schools for two or three 

years, and seldom went to the most distant rural 

schools. The third similarity was that schools 

and county governments frequently defaulted on 

the salaries of both the free normal education 

program graduates working in rural schools and 

special post teachers, and failed to endorse them 

as authorized personnel who could enjoy more 

social benefits (Wu & Bian, 2010).  

The third approach concerned requesting 

urban schools to provide intra- and inter-

provincial partnership aid to rural schools. One 

method involved sending urban teachers to rural 

schools to provide inter-provincial partnership 

aid (duikou zhiyuan). From 2006 to 2008, four 

provinces mobilized a total of 15,000 teachers 

from town- and county-level schools to aid rural 

schools within those provinces, while another 22 

provinces sent 5,000 teachers from town- and 

county-level schools to aid their rural schools 

(Editorial Board of Educational Yearbook of 

China, 2009). The second method urged schools 

in China’s eastern region to prove intra-

provincial partnerships to schools in the 

country’s middle and western regions. Three 

thousand teachers from eastern schools were 

sent to western areas in 2003 (Editorial Board of 

Educational Yearbook of China, 2004). To 

ensure urban teachers’ participation, some local 

educational authorities informed newly-

recruited and existing urban teachers that they 

must first provide aid to rural schools in order to 

become senior-level teachers (Department of 

Education of Henan Province, 2015). The third 

method centered on providing in-service 

training for aided school teachers and 

administrators through schools visits and 

training courses. Almost 4,000 teachers and 

school administrators were invited to visit 

eastern schools between 2000 and 2003 

(Editorial Board of Educational Yearbook of 

China, 2004). The National In-service Training 

for Teachers in Primary and Secondary Schools 

program was enacted, in 2008, to provide free 

training to rural teachers and school leaders 

through on-site or distance training programs 

provided by normal universities and other 

authorized training centers in urban areas; 

around 4.7 million rural teachers had attended 

this program by 2013 (Chai, 2014). 

 

Inevitable Loss of Rural Students and 

Graduates to Urban Areas 

The fourth pattern of relationship between rural 

education and urbanization involved the flow of 

rural students and graduates to urban areas. 

Rural students who dropped out of school, 

finished compulsory education or had more 

education experiences tended to work in urban 

areas. Rural students who studied in urban areas 

and had degrees tended to find jobs in urban 

areas where they could realize improved social 

mobility and, especially, transform their 

household registration from agricultural to non-

agricultural. Rural education, though inferior, 

still sent rural elites to serve urban development 

through the mechanism of education (Yu, 2008). 

In the early 1990s, 24% of formal migrants who 

obtained household registration in Beijing did so 

through higher education institutions (Liu, 

1992). The graduates of vocational and technical 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               93                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

schools who worked in urban society before 1996 

also received non-agricultural household 

registrations and became urban residents (He, 

2009). Most tertiary institution graduates from 

rural areas tended to work in urban areas; an 

investigation of 15 universities in four provinces 

indicated that 93% of tertiary students from 

rural areas preferred to work in urban areas 

above the county level (Teng & Miu, 2010). In 

addition, rural students who did not study in 

urban areas or did not have tertiary degrees 

were also attracted to urban areas, due to the 

cancellation of migration barriers between 

agricultural and non-agricultural household 

registration (Liu & Yu, 2012), mainly becoming 

migrant workers who performed poorly-paid, 

menial jobs. There were 269 million such 

migrant workers in 2013 (National Bureau of 

Statistics of China, 2014a), and their efforts 

contributed to China’s urbanization by speeding 

the construction of basic urban facilities, 

improving the quality of life for urban residents, 

and increasing their own family income, which 

in turn furthered the urbanization of rural areas 

(Liu & Yu, 2012). 

Despite migrant workers’ contributions to 

urbanization, children who lived with their 

migrant worker parents in urban areas did not 

enjoy equal access to education with their urban 

peers, due to the interplay of household 

registration laws and the slow implementation of 

government policy. First, although more and 

more migrant workers’ children lived in urban 

areas since the 1980s, ensuring their education 

was not a significant government priority until 

1996. Second, although migrant workers’ 

children stayed in urban areas, their education 

was still deemed the responsibility of their 

original local government, due to the limitations 

of household registration, from 1996 to 2001. 

During that period, migrant children could not 

take advantage of the nine-year compulsory 

education in the public schools of their host city 

unless their parents paid a large Temporally 

Schooling Fee (jiedu fei) (Communist Party of 

China Central Committee & State Education 

Commission, 1991). Third, although 

responsibility for providing education to migrant 

workers’ children shifted to the host government 

and public schools in the host city in 2001 (State 

Council, 2001), the children were still not 

welcomed by urban public schools. This was 

because the State Council neither changed the 

decentralized education financing system, nor 

did it provide enforceable measures and 

sufficient resources for accepting migrant 

students in public schools, effectively giving 

local educational authorities license to reject 

them or charge them high fees. Expensive fees at 

public schools meant that migrant workers 

instead sent their children to cheaper, 

unlicensed schools, where teachers were 

insufficient and unqualified, and where facilities 

often did not meet basic government standards. 

The government tried to eliminate such 

unlicensed schools, as they were illegal.  

The State Council finally increased 

financial support for urban public schools to 

enable them to accept migrant workers’ children, 

and required urban schools to treat them equally, 

charge no additional fees and provide subsidies 

for those with financial difficulties (Ministry of 

Education et al., 2003).  

The entry of migrant workers’ children into 

urban public schools, however, challenged both 

the children and the schools. Urban public 

schools complained that enrolling migrant 

students strained schools’ human and material 

resources, increased teachers’ student 

administration burden and lowered schools’ 

academic level. As for the migrant workers’ 

children, their first dilemma was that they were 

not allowed to enter public schools where they 

lived unless they first met those schools’ 

admission requirements. For example, the 

admission requirements established by the 

municipal government of Nanjing, an eastern 

city in Jiangsu province, stated that migrant 



94                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

workers’ children must have resided in Nanjing 

for more than one year and that their guardian(s) 

must provide proof of stable employment 

(Education Bureau of Nanjing, 2013). The 

second dilemma confronting migrant workers’ 

children was the discrimination they suffered in 

urban public schools. Migrant workers’ children 

in one Shanghai school were restricted to 

specific areas of the school building and 

playground to segregate them from urban 

students, studied in different classes and played 

different games on the playground (Wu, 2010). 

The third dilemma was the issue of the 

university entrance examination. Despite that 

cross-provincial migrant workers’ children could 

have opportunity of studying in urban schools 

away from their home province, they were not 

allowed to take the university entrance 

examination in a province where they did not 

have household registration without first 

satisfying several oppressive requirements of the 

family (Ministry of Education et al., 2012). The 

requirements included that the migrant 

student’s family must have legal and stable job 

and residence in the host city, and bought the 

host city’s social insurance for years, which were 

too demanding for migrant workers who usually 

had great mobility (Ministry of Education et al., 

2012). In other words, students were educated in 

one place, but required to take another 

province’s examination, despite the fact that that 

examination was different than what they had 

prepared for and would not test what they had 

been taught. Because the university enrollment 

scores for students in different provinces 

differed, students from some places (e.g., Beijing 

and Shanghai) could successfully enter 

university with lower scores (Zhang, 2010).  

 

Policy Implications for the 

Development of Rural Education 

during Urbanization 

Rural education can be a means to improve rural 

residents’ quality of life, promote rural 

development, and enhance national 

competitiveness. However, during the process of 

urbanization, rural education, especially in 

developing countries, has increasingly been 

shown to be inferior to urban education in the 

same country. With reference to compulsory 

education in rural China, this study has 

examined the historical development of the role 

of rural education in the urbanization process 

promoted by China’s efforts to develop its 

economy and maintain social stability. It has 

identified patterns in the state’s strategy of 

defining rural education to serve urban 

development and expanding urbanization. 

Unlike some studies (e.g.,Antrop, 2004; Ge, 

2003; Qu & Wang, 2012; Wei, 2004), which 

claimed that rural education was dependent on 

and passively influenced by urban education, 

this article has demonstrated that the 

marginalization of rural education was designed 

by the state to allow it to concentrate its fiscal 

resources on developing the country’s urban 

economy and to provide human resources for 

urbanization. Unlike Beaulieu and Gibbs’s (2005) 

view that urbanization drained the local elites 

trained by rural education, this study argues that 

urbanization attracted both rural elites and 

unskilled rural workers. Rural education’s 

contribution to urbanization was directed by 

state development policies in different periods 

and constrained by practical considerations. 

Moreover, the experiences and struggles in 

China’s rural education development provide a 

useful means of understanding the complex, 

dynamic intertwined relationship among the 

state, rural education and urbanization. This has 

three main policy implications for rural 

education in developing countries during the 

process of urbanization. First, the state was the 

key actor in dedicating rural education to serve 

the needs and goals of urbanization. Urban 

development and the expansion of urbanization 

in China were planned by the state and enacted 

through specific, targeted economic and social 



Rural Education and Urbanization: Experiences and Struggles in China                                                               95                                                                                                                                                                             
 

 

reforms. The state first limited the resources 

available to rural education to further the 

development of urban areas and urban 

education by enacting a policy of unbalanced 

economic development. This policy helped China 

make remarkable progress in terms of its 

domestic economic development and greatly 

expanded its urbanization, but resulted in 

increased rural-urban disparity, both in terms of 

economic development and education. Next, the 

state left rural education to fend for itself, and 

provided it with an inappropriate curriculum; at 

the same time, it allowed urban areas to use 

their economic superiority to attract rural 

education elites, outstanding teachers and it 

failed rural students in order to serve the needs 

of urban development. Finally, when the state of 

rural education became a barrier to further 

urbanization, the state transferred financial 

resources and mobilized human resources to aid 

rural education, and confronted long-standing 

dilemmas in an effort to resolve the inferiority of 

rural education. 

Second, in the process of urbanization, the 

state’s emphasis on the importance of rural 

education was neither in accordance with trends 

in population mobility and social development 

nor favorable to rural education. The case of 

China shows the conflicts inherent in positioning 

rural education during urbanization. The first 

conflict was that, despite shifting its emphasis 

from the primary economic sector 

(agriculture/raw materials) to the secondary and 

tertiary sectors (manufacturing and services), 

which are necessary for urbanization and require 

skilled workers and professionals, the state 

continued to encourage rural education to 

cultivate rural students (who constitute a large 

portion of Chinese students) capable of 

modernizing Chinese agriculture. The second 

conflict was that, despite emphasizing the role of 

rural education in the modernization of 

agriculture, the state did not provide sufficient 

financial or human resources to allow rural 

students to acquire knowledge and skills relating 

to agriculture; instead, it provided an urban-

based curriculum and evaluated rural students 

using criteria that favored urban students. Being 

influenced by these conflicts, rural education 

failed to cultivate students who were capable of 

modernizing agriculture and enhancing its 

competitiveness. On the other hand, it did help 

those who succeeded at the urban-based 

evaluation to become more socially mobile and 

to live in urban areas, and it also cultivated 

unskilled and less-educated workers and service 

staff to further the process of urbanization. 

Third, the planning of rural education must 

systematically consider the interplay of rural 

education policy and other policies. The 

struggles and difficulties resulting from the 

Chinese state’s efforts to plan rural education 

show that policy-makers should consider the 

following three policy issues: The first issue is 

that rural education is constrained by other 

social policies supported by the state. China’s 

rural education was influenced by the state’s 

policy of unbalanced economic development, 

and by China’s household registration system, 

which provided non-agricultural residents with 

more privileges, effectively blocked rural-urban 

migration, and inhibited the provision of equal 

education to migrant workers’ children. Despite 

having explored ways of educating migrant 

workers’ children for almost two decades, the 

Chinese state has continued to divide students 

based on household registration. Another social 

policy affecting rural education is the authorized 

personnel system, which provided rural teachers 

in the system with a stable job and higher salary. 

The system helped the state eliminate substitute 

teachers, who were important to rural teaching, 

and discouraged teachers recruited through the 

state’s schemes for supporting rural education.  

The second issue concerns the consistency 

and appropriateness of rural education policies. 

First, to facilitate the implementation of new 

rural education policies, the state should 



96                                                                                                                                                      Global Education Review 2(4) 

 

 

simultaneously review, and update as needed, its 

other education policies, so as to avoid conflicts. 

The case of China’s rural education has shown 

that the state’s policy on rural education did not 

match its general education policies. For 

example, the state asked host cities to provide 

education for migrant workers’ children in 2001, 

but continued its decades-old decentralized 

financial responsibility system, which did not 

provide adequate financial support to the host 

cities; the host city governments were thus 

neither willing nor able to accept migrant 

workers’ children in their public schools. Next, 

rural education policy should be made by 

carefully examining the unique demography and 

geography of the targeted rural areas. To reduce 

the cost of rural education, the Chinese state 

arbitrarily enacted policies abolishing teaching 

stations and merging schools with few students, 

while neglecting to consider the impact of such 

issues as sparse populations and the lack of 

convenient transportation in remote rural areas. 

Similarly, its policy of eliminating substitute 

teachers neglected to consider the lack of 

teachers in rural schools.  

 

 

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About the Author(s) 

Shuqin Xu is a lecturer in the School of Education at Sun 

Yat-Sen University. Her main research areas include school 

leadership and citizenship education, curriculum of 

citizenship education, education and social change in China 

 

Wing-Wah Law is professor in the Faculty of Education at 

The University of Hong Kong. His main research areas 

include education and development, globalization and 

citizenship education, education policy and legislation, 

education reform and Chinese societies, music education and 

social change, and culture and school leadership.