International Journal of Educational Development 29 (2009) 447–453

Editorial

Education and development in China – Institutions, curriculum and society

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International Journal of Educational Development

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The articles in this special issue engage with three themespertinent to the relationship between education and developmentin China. First, alongside changes in approach to development, theinstitutional arrangements that underpin different dimensions ofeducational provisioning, including education financing, educationmanagement and teacher evaluation have also changed. Whatkinds of reforms to the different elements of an education systembest support educational equity and quality? How do changes inone aspect of a system such as fiscal reform affect other aspectssuch as teacher evaluation procedures, or educational quality andaccess? Second, the development process influences the accessthat people with different attributes have to education. How doeducational inequalities interact with common agents of stratifi-cation such as geography, residency status (rural or urban), gender,ethnicity, occupation and class – and how do people affected bythese different agents of stratification perceive and pursueeducation in a rapidly changing environment? Third, even thoughChinese planners have always been concerned about how to builda strong, unified and prosperous nation, there have beenfluctuations in visions of how such a society should be organisedand in the attributes that individuals would need in order tocontribute to this project. These changes in vision have affectedwhat students are taught. What does the curriculum reveal aboutchanges and continuities in China’s development trajectory? Howsuccessful is the curriculum in socialising Chinese individuals tobecome citizens who have the skills, and the productive and moralorientations compatible with building a particular vision of astronger and wealthier society? By analysing original texts,ethnographic data, interview transcripts and survey data, thecontributions in this special issue engage with such questions.Before looking at the articles however, it is useful to sketch themain shifts in approaches to both education and development thathave occurred since the founding of the People’s Republic of Chinain 1949.

1. Education and development in China

On the founding of the People’s Republic of China an educationsystem was set up which followed the Soviet model. This modelused scientifically devised and hierarchically executed plans toachieve rapid industrialisation and capital accumulation. Undersuch a development model, the education system was highlycentralised, students were channelled into academic and voca-tional streams, and those students with academic and scientificaptitude received a disproportionate share of educational invest-ment (Pepper, 1992).

By the 1960s, however, the hyper-egalitarianism of the Mao eraand the Cultural Revolution gained ground and ‘redness’ and

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correct ideology were deemed to be more important for achievingsocialism than ‘expertness’. Rather than invest considerableresources in training a technocratic elite who may not be inclinedto serve the poor toiling masses, the education system wasrestructured to place basic knowledge, science and technology inthe hands of the peasants and workers (Pepper, 1992). Students inurban areas were on the whole adversely affected by these radicalpolicies: curriculum became ideologically intensive, years ofschool tenure were reduced, exams were abolished, politicalrecommendations and class background determined progression,education standards fell and teachers were frequently toointimidated to teach. Further, after the height of the CulturalRevolution large numbers of urban students were sent down to thecountryside for several years to learn from the peasantry (Pepper,1992).

In rural areas however the political climate in schools was lessradical and despite the post-Mao verdict that the CulturalRevolution was a disaster for education, many people in factbenefited from the commitment to egalitarianism: there was amassive increase in the number of schools and the curriculum gavefarmers the basic literacy and numeracy that they needed formanaging production as well as for receiving political education(Gao, 1999; Han, 2001). Indeed owing to the strong statecommitment to use education to promote egalitarianism the linkbetween family origins and educational attainment that char-acterises most societies was notably diluted (Deng and Treiman,1997). The link between gender and educational inequality wasalso diluted though not eradicated during this period (Hannum,2005).

In the 1970s the radicalism of the Mao era abated and thenational development trajectory again leaned towards expertnessover redness and radicalism. Indeed the need to improve teachingquality in order to facilitate economic growth became the urgentpreoccupation of policy makers and educators (Lewin, Xu, Little, &Zheng, 1994; An, Hannum and Sargent, 2006). Calling for attentionto teaching quality was also a way for educated individuals todisavow the radical policies of the previous decade that had beenso inimical to their interests. With the change in politicalenvironment, academic streams and exams for school progressionand university entrance were restored, and a system of key pointschools was revived (Pepper, 1992). The key point junior and seniorhigh schools aimed to prepare students for the specialised tertiarystudies that would enable them to contribute to national economicdevelopment, in particular to the building of the Four Modernisa-tions in agriculture, industry, science and technology and defencewhich were proclaimed in 1978 (Pepper, 1992).

The new competitive and meritocratic ideologies benefited theurban areas more than the rural areas. The revived key-point

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schools were based in urban settlements and these childrenenjoyed not only a better learning environment but also homeenvironments more conducive to academic attainment (Hannumand Adams, 2007; Hannum, Behrman, Wang, & Liu, 2007). Bycontrast, rural children faced a situation in which educationprovisioning was rudimentary and designed to prepare them fortheir future lives in agriculture. The inferior quality of rural schoolsand their non-academic orientation closed off education as apathway to socio-economic mobility for most of these students(Hannum and Adams, 2007).

In rural areas, major transformations in the economy presentedfurther challenges to households and therefore to children’s accessto education. During the early 1980s the communes weredismantled and the farmers tilled plots under the householdcontract system: once quotas of grain had been sold to the state,they were free to sell their surplus on the newly emergingcommodity markets. Alongside the implementation of the house-hold contract system, the communal structures for managingresources and administering public goods such as education andhealth were dismantled. At this time, in 1985, a Decision on theReform of Education Structure was passed which aimed to laydown guidelines for providing education in the transition to amarket economy (Cheng, 1994 cited in Hannum, Behrman, Wang,& Liu, 2007). In tandem with broader shifts towards fiscaldecentralisation, the Decision made local governments responsiblefor raising and allocating funds for nine years of education. Inlocalities with weak and predominantly agricultural tax bases thisfiscal arrangement meant that local officials charged fees to ruralhouseholds for education and other public goods (Hannum andWang, 2006; Knight and Li, 1996; Li, Park, & Wang, 2007). Thereforms therefore increased not only the incomes of ruralhouseholds but also their burdens. Under these circumstances,many parents were initially more influenced by the costs ofeducation than by a perception of the longer term returns toeducation (Hannum, 2005). As a result they opted to invest theirlimited resources in the education of sons rather than daughters:sons would look after their parents in old age whereas daughterswould marry out (Hannum, 2005). Also, in some households,parents opted to withdraw their children after only a few years ofschooling (Brown and Park, 2002; Knight and Li, 1996).

Chinese policy makers became concerned that a lack ofeducation in rural areas would exacerbate social inequalitiesand hinder national development, and in 1986 the Decision wasfollowed by the promulgation of the Compulsory Education Law.This Law affirmed that all children in China were entitled to receivenine years compulsory education (Hannum and Adams, 2007;Murphy, 2004; Pepper, 1992). Yet, in recognition of rural-urbanand regional inequalities, the state council allowed localities torealise this policy objective at a pace permitted by their owncircumstances. In coastal urban areas the goal was to be realised by1990, and in moderately well-off counties and rural areas it was tobe realised by 1995, but in poorer rural areas, local governmentswere given the more modest task of supporting the expansion ofbasic education to the best of their abilities –in 1993, however, amore concrete target of achieving compulsory education by theend of the twentieth century was set (Wang, 2003). Further, in1995 a new Education Law specified that the state should supporteducational development in poverty stricken regions, and borderand minority regions (Hannum and Adams, 2007; Postiglione,2006).

During the 1990s with the deepening of the market reforms,returns to education in China steadily increased. Across the urbaneconomy, state-owned enterprises were privatised, cradle-to-grave security disappeared and a system of job allocation wasreplaced by increasingly meritocratic recruitment methods(Solinger, 2006). The numbers of foreign ventures and private

businesses expanded dramatically. Recruitment into civil serviceposts also became exam based. Further, the rise of meritocracy wasoccurring in an environment in which, owing to the birth patternsof previous decades, ever more young people were reaching theage for entering urban labour markets (Fong, 2004). For ruralpeople too, returns to education were increasing (Li, 2003; WorldBank, 2009). The dismantling of the communes, the rise of privatemarkets and the easing of mobility restrictions from rural to urbanareas created conditions under which rural people could earnmoney off the farm. Whilst it was true that a development strategybased on the hyper-exploitation of a surplus labour pool dependedon large numbers of rural people performing poorly paid menialtasks, it was also true that with increased economic diversification,better paying off-farm jobs disproportionately went to thoseindividuals with more training, education and information (Li,2003; Zhao, 1997). Indeed a recent World Bank report found that inboth urban and rural areas, the educational attainment of ahousehold’s adult workers was the clearest predictor of poverty inChina – while the poor differed from each other in other ways, lowlevels of educational attainment was common to nearly all thepoor, and a high school level of education virtually guaranteed anescape from poverty (World Bank, 2009). According to bothinternational observers and Chinese planners, these links betweeneducation and economic wellbeing are likely to strengthen becausesuccessful economic development in the longer term depends onChinese manufacturing moving up the global production chain andon diversification into services, processes that would necessitate amore stable, skilled and experienced work force (Dollar, 2009).

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s mountingcompetition in all aspects of education and labour markets wasaccompanied by the rise of an official development discourse thatcentred on the concept of suzhi or ‘quality’. In Chinese languagesuzhi is an all-embracing concept that refers to an individual’sinnate and cultivated attributes (Bakken, 2000; Kipnis, 2006;Murphy, 2004). The improvement of suzhi may in some senses beunderstood as the individuated process of development – eachperson had to work to improve him or herself and the role of thestate was to create conditions which facilitated such improvement(Kipnis, 2006; Yan, 2003). Planners and educators, increasinglyexposed to overseas models of education, became ever moreconcerned that China’s education system was failing to promotethe kind of human development (suzhi improvement) that wasneeded for weaker social groups to catch up with the stronger onesand for China overall to catch up in the global economy (Kipnis,2006; Murphy, 2004).

China’s education system with its focus on rote memorisationfor examinations was deemed to be deficient in at least threerespects. First, a rigid approach to learning was thought to hinderstudent engagement, and the ensuing boredom led many students,particularly those in rural areas, to either repeat a year and/or dropout (An, Hannum, & Sargent, 2007; Sargent, forthcoming). Second,the prevailing approach to education was said to be inadequate forfostering the skills of problem-solving, innovation, and creativity,thereby undermining national competitiveness in the globaleconomy (Murphy, 2004; Sargent, 2006). Third, the educationsystem was said to impede the all-round physical, emotional andacademic development of students, a serious matter given thereputed character flaws of the spoilt Only Child generation (Fong,2004; Fong, 2007a; Fong, 2007b). Reform was therefore deemednecessary to prepare students for entry into healthy adulthood andfor a healthy and stable society overall.

During the late 1990s and again in 2001 planners andeducationalists announced various education reforms under thebanner of suzhi improvement, the commitment to which wasrenewed in the 2006 revised Compulsory Education Law. The NewCurriculum Reforms of the 2000s incorporated several elements.

2 An institutional approach also recognises that schools are embedded in a wider

societal environment that includes demographic change, market forces and cultural

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Schools were to provide an enriched curriculum by includingsubjects such as music, sport and art. Teachers were encouraged toadopt more lively activity-based teaching styles and to helpstudents learn teamwork skills, civic responsibility, and emotionalcoping skills. In practice however these reforms were difficult toimplement. First, exams continued to be the main way that thesuzhi of students and teachers was evaluated (Kipnis, 2001;Murphy, 2004). Second, schools in rural areas and in deprivedcommunities (e.g. rural migrant communities in the cities)generally lacked the specialised teachers (e.g. English languageor music teachers) and facilities (computer rooms, gyms andinstruments) needed for enriched curriculum activities (Kipnis,2001; Kipnis, 2006; Murphy, 2004; Sargent, 2006; Woronov,2004). It could also be that more subjective evaluation measuresbased on course work and extra-curricular activities implied by theNew Curriculum reforms would disproportionately benefit thosestudents from wealthier families (Sargent, forthcoming). Further-more, even though the concept of suzhi became the focus forhuman development in China, it did at the same time become away to explain why some individuals performed poorly in exams,in labour markets and in life in general (Murphy, 2004; Woronov,2004; Yi, 2006). Such focus on the innate traits of individuals andsocial groups obscured the structural foundations of the ethnic,class, residential, and regional inequalities that were expressedthrough educational stratification.

More positively however, even in quite poor areas, moderatechanges to teaching style have appeared to exert positive effects.For instance, a study in rural Gansu found that in classes whereteachers allowed students to ask questions and express them-selves, the students tended to have higher aspirations, whilestudents in classes where teachers assigned heavy homeworkloads had lower aspirations, and students with higher aspirations –affected by factors both inside and outside the classroom - tendedto perform better in tests (An, Hannum, & Sargent, 2007).1

After the start of the Hu-Wen administration’s New Deal (2002/3) the competitiveness that had previously dominated China’sapproach to development and education for two decades wasincreasingly balanced by social equity and ‘harmony’ considera-tions (Hannum and Adams, 2007). This could be seen in a series ofmeasures aimed at reducing inequalities in educational access andquality across regions and social groups. Examples of suchmeasures have included:

– The requirement in 2001 that county governments guarantee thepayment of teachers’ salaries;

– The State Council meeting in 2003 to devise plans for improvingeducation access and quality in rural areas (the first held since1949);

– The 2003-2007 Action Plan for revitalising education includingimplementing compulsory education in rural areas (Postiglione,2006);

– The launching of the 2005 policy of ‘two frees and one subsidy’.This waived school fees and paid a supplement to studentsboarding at school. In rural areas, it has become common forstudents at the junior high level and even during the final twoyears of primary school to board. The subsidy took the form of anannual contribution of approximately three hundred yuan perstudent to cover the costs of school fees and textbooks.

– The 2006 amendment to the compulsory education law whichstated that both rural and urban children were entitled to nineyears compulsory education and that migrant children werepermitted to attend school in urban areas. There was though the

1 Notably, the benefits of creative and flexible approaches to pedagogic practice

are not unique to China but have formed part of the ongoing initiatives in

educational reform in many countries, including UK (Baker, 2009).

proviso that the fees for ‘non-residents’ were to be waivedgradually and that local governments were to have the time toprepare the necessary budgetary resources for extendingeducation to migrant children.

– The 2007 abolition of all fees for nine years of compulsoryeducation (Hannum, Behrman, Wang and Liu, 2007).

Yet despite the evident commitment of Chinese policy-makers’ toquality education for all, as the papers in this volume show, the roadto achieving this has not been straightforward. In particular, thepapers explore how institutional and managerial change, socialstratification, and the curriculum have influenced who has receivedwhat kind and quality of education in China.

2. Institutional and Managerial Change

An orthodox view in the wider literatures in both developmentstudies (Goetz, 1997) and education studies (Crowson, Boyd andMawhinny, 1996) is that policy implementation and outcomesdepend on institutional arrangements. This approach recognisesthat institutions such as schools are embedded in a proximateinstitutional environment.2 In education, this environment com-prises authoritative relationships between (1) school officials whohave a mandate to manage education to achieve set objectives and(2) stakeholders such as government and regulatory agencies, tax-payers, and students who have a vested interest in educationaloutcomes. The adaptation of schools and managerial organisationsto the proximate institutional environment shapes their internalstructures and also the rules and practices that govern individuals’behaviours. Importantly some aspects of the resulting changesare intentional while others are accidental (Crowson, Boyd andMawhinny, 1996).

In the case of China, tensions over how much latitude the centreshould cede to education managers at lower levels have affectedthe environment in which recent policies to reform both educationfinancing and curriculum and pedagogy have been implemented(Lewin, Xu, Little and Zheng, 1994; Bray, 1999; Hawkins, 2000).With regard to education funding, decentralised management hasoffered possibilities for harnessing local resources and initiative.But in the absence of adequate supervisory mechanisms – providedin liberal democracies through community involvement, electionsand independent regulatory institutions - decentralisation alsocreates possibilities for the diversion of resources (Dabla-Norris,2006). Owing in part to its reluctance to adopt the fundamentalinstitutional changes necessary for decentralisation to work moreefficiently, in 2001 the central government announced thateducation financing and supervision of fund usage would becentralised.

With regard to curriculum and pedagogy, there has similarlybeen tension between central control and local initiative. Asmentioned, during the 2000s, there were renewed proposals toimprove curriculum and teaching quality. But education managersand teachers had to try to implement these reforms – whichrequired local innovation and flexibility – within a system that hada relatively centralised approach to curriculum, examinations andteacher monitoring.

This brings us to the questions posed at the start of this editorialintroduction: How can the innovation necessary for the effectiveuse of funds and the implementation of curriculum reforms occurin a hierarchical and authoritarian political system? How might

values, and that there are interactions between the societal and the proximate

institutional environments that ultimately affect the organisation of schools and

the behaviours of education managers and teachers. For the purposes of simplicity

and conciseness here we highlight only the proximate institutional environment

(Crowson, Boyd, & Mawhinny, 1996).

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reforms in one aspect of a system impact on other aspects ofeducation management? Two papers in this volume address thesequestions by drawing on data from Gansu, which in 2004 wassecond from the bottom out of China’s thirty-one provinces for percapita rural income (Li, Park, & Wang 2007).

The essay by Andy Brock examines a project which intentionally

used interconnections among different dimensions of an educationsystem to support holistic reform so that more children fromminority and Han Chinese backgrounds would both want to and beable to stay in school. Reforms in head teacher training, teachertraining, teaching quality and curriculum were used by the projectdesigners to increase student engagement in the classroom.Meanwhile reforms in finance were used to fund teacher training,curriculum innovations and school inspection schemes, as well asto provide scholarships for large numbers of disadvantagedstudents. Stakeholders at different levels and from differentsectors (international NGOs, Provincial Ministry of Education,academics, local officials, school teachers, parents and students)were encouraged to buy into and contribute to the new way ofoperating. Ideas of equity were also revised so that rather thanallocate equal funds to boys and girls and minorities and Han,resources were allocated to weight for each child’s historical legacyof disadvantage. Brock contends that the lessons from the projecthold special significance in light of the recent nationwideinitiatives to dramatically increase funding for rural educationand to renew the New Curriculum Reforms.

Mingxing Liu, Rachel Murphy, Ran Tao and Xiehui An similarlyexamine the interconnections among different dimensions of theeducation system, though in relation to the unintended institu-tional changes that followed the fiscal recentralisation measuresimplemented in 2002. Drawing on detailed data from fiftytownship-level school districts located in Gansu province, theessay shows that on account of fiscal recentralisation, managerialdecision-making power – for instance, the power to appoint,evaluate and transfer teachers –shifted upwards from the town-ship to the county government. Yet there were also some townshipschool districts in which limited managerial power transferredfrom the township government to township-school districtgovernors who were educational professionals; these individualsdepended on good educational outcomes for their career rewardsand advancement. The authors posit that broadly education qualitywould appear to benefit when the school districts are managed byindividuals who possess in-depth knowledge of local circum-stances. However educational quality appears to be adverselyaffected when managerial power is concentrated in the hands ofcounty-level officials who have priorities other than education andwho are distanced from the coalface of rural education.

Together these essays provide evidence to support severalestablished views in the education and development literature:that different elements of an education system are inter-related;that local leadership is important for education quality; that adegree of local (school and/or district level) autonomy is beneficialfor educational quality, and that managerial arrangements whichcreate clear, positive and appropriate incentives for teachersmay help to promote good educational outcomes (Bray, 1999;Chapman, 2000; Fuller, 1987; Hanushek, 2007; Umansky, 2005;Winkler and Gershberg, 2000).

3. Social stratification

A second theme addressed by this volume relates to howeducational stratification has changed over the course of devel-opment. Not surprisingly many sources of educational inequalitylie beyond the direct remit of education policy in China: these haveincluded discriminatory policies and practices towards ethnicminorities (Yi, 2006), household registration policies which

disadvantage rural people who do not have urban residencepermits (Wang, 2006; Woronov, 2004), the restructuring of state-owned enterprises that have left many urban families withoutsecure income (Solinger, 2006), and the continuing inter and intra-regional inequalities that have characterised the developmentprocess (Hannum and Wang, 2006). There are also aspects ofinequality which are not directly addressed by state policiesthough may be indirectly affected by them, for instance, aspects ofreligious beliefs and gender relations may influence communityideas about the kinds of education that people with differentattributes should receive. Further, educational stratification maybe attributable to different intersecting agents of stratification, theeffects of which are not always initially obvious. For instance, it isnot clear the extent to which ethnic minority status in and of itselfis an agent of educational stratification: ethnic groups residing inthe more developed North and Northeast regions of China typicallyhave educational outcomes comparable to those exhibited amongthe ethnic Chinese population, while the majority of ethnicminority groups in the Western interior have much poorereducational outcomes (Hannum, 2002; West, 2004). The followingfive essays draw on rich empirical data to probe the barriers andopportunities that shape the educational access, attainment andexperiences of the members of diverse populations in China. Theseare: parents and children in rural Gansu province, Muslim womenin interior and Western provinces, rural migrant children in thecities, children in lower and higher income urban households, andthe children of the urban elite who strive to study overseas.

The children in rural Gansu studied by Hannum, Kong andZhang faced a complex set of factors that affected their educationalcareers. These included not only economic deprivation but alsogendered aspects of parental behaviours and aspirations, theexpression and effects of which were often more contradictorythan has generally been assumed to be the case. Hannum, Kong andZhang found no significant difference in the extent to whichparents invested money and time in supporting the education ofsons and daughters. But mothers did place greater demands ondaughters to help with household chores – a circumstance that didnot seem to affect their academic attainment. Most parents alsoheld strong aspirations for the future studies of both sons anddaughters. But a significant portion of parents expressed strongson preference, an attitude that corresponded with poorerperformance at school among both boys and girls, and suggestedthat traditional family environments disadvantaged children ofboth sexes. The authors concluded that even though genderdisadvantage had increased across many dimensions of Chinesesociety, for instance in sex ratio distortions at birth, once girls werefull members of the family, they on the whole received a similarlevel of parental support for their education as boys.

Ideas about gender also affected attitudes about education forfemales living in the Muslim communities studied by MariaJaschok and Vicky Chan. Here too, the expression and effects ofgendered attitudes were not straightforward. Muslim women inrural communities in Henan, Xinjiang and Gansu provinces haddiffering degrees of access to education provided by religiousinstitutions and by secular state schools, and this degree of accesswas strongly influenced by how gender norms interacted withlocal configurations of state policy and ethno-religious socialarrangements. In Henan, women were able to set up their ownmosques and have female religious teachers. This educationafforded them the authority to interpret religious texts which wasimportant for their sense of wellbeing. Education in mosques alsoenabled the women to obtain vocational knowledge that couldhelp them find jobs compatible with the models of goodwomanhood accepted by their families. In Xinjiang and Gansuprovinces however, owing to a tense relationship between thestate and Muslim communities, women faced difficulties in

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obtaining education in either local religious institutions or insecular state schools. In these provinces the state clamp-down onreligious activities removed the possibility for them to attendreligious schools. At the same time, Muslim parents’ distrust of asecular curriculum and a co-educational environment caused themto restrict their daughters’ attendance at state schools.

The migrant children and parents from rural areas whoCharlotte Goodburn met in Beijing similarly had to deal withstate schools that did not cater to their needs and state repressionof their own community-run schools. The urban state schools thatGoodburn visited were distinctly unwelcoming to migrant parentsand their children. They required migrants to produce numerouscertificates and to pay outsider supplement fees in order to enroltheir children. But at the same time, the migrant-run schools werevulnerable to official harassment and the arbitrary imposition ofplanning regulations. Indeed fear of closure prevented themanagers of migrant schools from investing in more pristineand spacious buildings while failure to provide adequately sizedclassrooms and facilities was often the pretext that local officialsused for shutting them down. Migrant children continued to facethese barriers to education despite a series of central governmentpolicy exhortations calling on the receiving localities to provideeducation for migrant children. These included the 1998 ‘Tem-porary Plan for the Education of Migrant Children’ issued by theMinistry of Education and the Public Security Bureau (Kwong,2004); the 2002, 2003 and 2005 State Council documents onmigrants’ rights (Huang and Zhan, 2005; World Bank, 2009); andthe new edicts in the 2006 revised Compulsory Education Law,mentioned previously. The ongoing exclusion of migrant childrenmay be explained by intersecting factors including the continuingreluctance of local officials to incur the fiscal burden of extendingeducation to outsiders, and both urban residents’ and officials’association of rural migrants with crime, social instability anddirtiness.

The rural people discussed so far have clearly faced consider-able obstacles in their quest for education. Yet, as Postiglione(2006) reminds scholars of Chinese education, urban people alsoface growing educational exclusion and/or fear of such exclusion.In their contribution to this volume, Ka Ho Mok, Yu Chueng Wongand Xiulan Zhang begin their exploration of urban residents’experience of educational exclusion by describing how educationalgoods and services have become ever more marketized. Specifi-cally, public high schools and universities have demanded higherfees; a second tier of tertiary institutions affiliated with publicuniversities have diversified higher educational opportunities butthey also charge fees; and individuals and institutions have startedoffering private tuition and extra-curricular education activities.Mok et al’s analysis of survey data for eight cities indicate that in2004 parents allocated between approximately 14 and 50 per centof their total household income to education. However theircapacity to purchase educational resources for their children wasinevitably affected by the income level of their households andcities: the proportion of educational expenditure was highest inthe poorest households and cities. A similar finding was reported ina World Bank study: in the late reform era incomes mattered morethan they used to for access and outcomes in education and health,and so the burden of these expenditures for poor householdsincreased substantially (World Bank, 2009).

Yet it is not just ordinary urban families that have felt pressureto secure educational advantage for their children. The urbanpolitical-entrepreneurial elite examined by Xiang and Shen alsofelt such pressure. They responded to the changing dynamics ofstratification in the reform era by sending their children to studyoverseas. Xiang and Shen argue that the convertibility of differentforms of capital is central to understanding the elite pursuit ofinternational education. During the early 1980s much overseas

education was state funded and at this time members of the urbanelite most valued political capital because it could be convertedinto symbolic and financial capital. Following the rapid market-ization and the dismantling of state enterprises in the 1990s,however, bureaucrats and factory managers as well as entrepre-neurial individuals from low status backgrounds could earn largeamounts of money quickly; an international education for theirchildren became a way for them to consolidate and legitimate theirstatus gains in symbolic and social forms. By the 2000s culturalcapital in a competitive economy became increasingly valued byemployers. At the same time, the widespread availability of foreigndegrees devalued these qualifications and meant that financialcapital alone was inadequate for obtaining the symbolic capital ofan international qualification. Under these circumstances, mem-bers of the urban-based political-entrepreneurial elite pursuededucation in higher status countries and higher status institutions.

In summary, exploration of the educational barriers, opportu-nities and experiences encountered by members of different socialgroups in China sheds light on the complex ways that educationpolicies and market reforms have interacted to dilute the effects ofsome agents of educational stratification while intensifying orreshaping others. As an example of dilution, girls have clearlybenefited both from parental responses to the rise of meritocraticmarkets and from state interventions to expand educationalaccess. Yet despite policies that proclaimed education for all, policyimplementation gaps have persisted, interacting with other social,political and economic factors to sustain educational disadvan-tage: for instance, children in poor rural communities and in poorfamilies have continued to face relative educational deprivation(Hannum and Adams, 2007), migrant children have experiencedongoing educational barriers and the members of ethno-religiousminorities in state schools have been presented with culturallychauvinistic curriculum that has undermined their engagement inthe classroom. At the same time, children from wealthier families,particularly urban middle and elite class families, have not onlyretained but have also strengthened their educational advantage.Educational equality across regions and across social classes inChina’s development process is therefore not likely to be achievedin the near future. For this reason, ongoing interventions to addresseducational stratification and social stratification more generallyare likely to be important for minimising the inter-generationaltransmission of disadvantage.

4. Curriculum

The final broad theme addressed by essays in this special issueis curriculum. Like the concept of development, the curriculumitself is tied to visions of the future. Alongside shifts in approachesto development, ideas about what kinds of knowledge, skills andvalues students need in order to live moral, productive and goodquality lives have also changed. For this reason the curriculum inChina is deemed to be too important to be out of Party-statecontrol. But even so, prevailing approaches to both education anddevelopment in China are not produced by a homogenousdominant group: the interests of competing groups from a rangeof sectors – education, politics, administration, social work, NGOs -do not coincide and there are often internal divisions. On the wholehowever the curriculum represents consensual currents in thetheories and values of educators and academics, modified to suitperceived economic needs and political imperatives (Kwong,1985). Two essays in this volume look specifically at the schoolcurriculum while other essays offer additional valuable insightsabout the curriculum through their consideration of the educa-tional experiences of particular communities.

To begin with the curriculum-focused essays, Edward Vickersuses the lens of political education and Alessandra Aresu uses the

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lens of sex education to explore how the curriculum is a mediumthrough which the state nationalises and moralises development.Both authors show that the curriculum does this by emphasisingcharacter development and by encouraging students to subordi-nate the self to a collective interest. Vickers examines a corepolitics textbook for senior high students called Thought and

Politics to consider how the classroom materials convey the ideathat human capital development, moral rectitude and nationalcohesiveness are the means by which China will become strong. Hemaintains that such a theme draws heavily on longstanding SocialDarwinian ideas about the survival of peoples and nations. Hesuggests that while the content of political education has changedover historical periods, the pastoral relationship between the stateand the people that such education establishes has changedrelatively little – the government has always claimed for itself apivotal role in ensuring that national strength is maximised.

Alessandra Aresu probes continuities and ruptures in how sexeducation serves as a discursive mechanism that links concepts ofnational strength, modernisation, healthy bodies and people’ssexual knowledge. She shows that that across all historicalperiods, the state has dominated in propagating a conservativediscourse of sex education centred on self-discipline and restraint.However, she also discusses how in the contemporary era aminority of middle school teachers, academics and social workershave tried to advocate a more holistic approach to sex educationthat considers not only the science of human anatomy andmorality but also the emotional wellbeing of individuals and theirneed to know about safe sex. Aresu closes her discussion by notingthat reformers’ efforts to pioneer new approaches to teachingyoung people about sex have been thwarted by officials in localbureaus of education, generally in response to protests fromparents concerned about the moral wellbeing of their often onlychild.

In their examination of the educational experiences of differentcommunities, other essays in this volume offer yet otherperspectives on the curriculum. Specifically, they provide insightinto what has been at stake for individual, community as well asnational futures when decisions have been made about thecurriculum. For instance, Brock discusses how an NGO sponsoredproject involved rural teachers and parents as well as academics indesigning supplementary textbooks which provided culturallyrelevant and sensitive content. Jaschok and Chan note that Chineseofficials, Muslim parents and even religious teachers from SaudiArabia and Pakistan all contributed ideas about appropriatecurriculum, ideas that often underpinned tensions betweenindividuals and communities, and between communities andthe state. Goodburn reflects on how migrant children wereexcluded from the enriched curriculum enjoyed by urban children.Mok et al and Biao et al show that both low and high income urbanparents were willing to invest to ensure that their childrenobtained the knowledge and skills taught in advanced institutionsboth in China and abroad.

Clearly, even though the curriculum is an important dimensionof how education serves development, there is no inevitability tothe kinds of knowledge that are made available to children. Rather,contingent power relations that underpin ideas about a good life,development and nation-building influence what students aretaught, and patterns of social stratification influence whichchildren can obtain the most prestigious forms of knowledge.

5. Conclusion

This collection of essays offers manifold insights into howchanging approaches to development in China have affected howeducation is managed, funded, distributed, delivered and designed.The essays in this volume also concur with a much wider body of

literature for both China and other countries which demonstratethat policies to provide quality education for all are central toachieving a wide range of individual and community leveldevelopment goals including poverty alleviation, gender equality,economic competitiveness and social cohesion and also nation-building (Sen, 2002; Watkins, 2000; World Bank, 2009). Yet whilstthe state commitment to education and to amplifying theeconomic and social returns to education are impressive, obstaclesto realising quality education for all remain. Specifically, people’saccess to education continues to be affected by combinations ofstate policy biases, inequalities in political economy, inefficientinstitutional arrangements, and local community norms that affectdifferent people’s perceptions of the relevance of education forboth themselves and others.

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Rachel MurphyDavid Johnson

University of Oxford, UK