Let's Talk About Equality in Education | Class Mobility and How We Understand Cities, Part One

Class rigidity and class mobility reach into a great many things. This piece begins with education.

Guo Yuhua and Yan Fei, both of Tsinghua University, each brought up a long-running observation by Jin Jun, a colleague in the university's sociology department. Every year Jin teaches a course called Introduction to Sociology to first-year students, and every year he surveys their family backgrounds — what their parents do, what the household earns. "He found that most Tsinghua students come from middle-class families, and that the number from truly humble or poor households really has been falling over the past stretch of time," Yan said.

That matches what Xiong Xuan'ang, the top scorer in Beijing's 2017 gaokao, the national college entrance exam, said in an interview: "I think it is getting harder and harder for children in rural areas to test into good schools. I grew up in an ordinary family, but we never lacked for food or clothing, and both my parents are intellectuals. In a big city like Beijing I have had educational advantages that children from elsewhere, or from the countryside, simply cannot get — and that lets me take a few shortcuts in my studies. In recent years you rarely see a top scorer raised in the countryside; most come from comfortable homes and are formidable in their own right."

Our conversation began with the weakening of class mobility, and several academics turned their attention to the same thing: universities have fewer and fewer rural students. Lei Yi named a precise turning point: 1997.

Equality in university education is a product of how resources are distributed and monopolized. Behind that lies the urban-rural divide, and behind that, the question of how we understand urbanization — including, of course, counter-urbanization.

Class rigidity, or blocked mobility, grows out of all of it.

Two things are visible. First, because those in charge think differently about what a city is for, that difference may shape urbanization policy for a long time to come. Second, the talent wars still spreading from city to city show how tangled the problems of urbanization are: outside a handful of super-first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, a shortage of young people has become a drag on the future of most Chinese cities. And it may not stop there. As Chen Yuanyuan, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, argues in another of our articles, cities are all chasing high-end talent now, but within five to ten years they will realize how much they need low-skilled labor. "They will pay a price for it," she said. Once the economic damage shows, the competition between cities may come down to grabbing anybody with a pulse.

Perhaps only then, pressed by an urgently aging society, will the allocation of educational and urban resources really begin to turn around.

Class rigidity and class mobility reach into a great many things. This piece begins with education.

1. Why have universities enrolled fewer rural students since 1997?

Lei Yi, research fellow, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

They go to university, to graduate school; some work three jobs, tutor on the side, and still support a younger brother or someone else at home. Is that not "quality"? Studying hard in poverty and pulling your family out of trouble — does that not count as "quality"? Is a piano certificate the only kind there is?

First, compared with having no exams at all, restoring the exam system did let some people from the lower rungs, from the very bottom, test their way up. Of course gaps of wealth and class exist — between remote areas and cities, even inside a single big city, between key schools and ordinary ones. Say the word today and people compare Dongcheng and Xicheng with Fengtai and Mentougou: the gap is huge. Never mind the city districts against the countryside, or Beijing against everywhere else. This resource problem is very hard to fix.

What matters most, I think? The supply side. Good education is scarce. That is an external constraint. Given that scarcity, how do you get children from poor regions and poor families into such schools? First, open education up as far as possible — let private capital, or any other capital, into the sector. Open it up for long enough and excellent private schools will appear. Plenty of private primary and middle schools have already shown as much. Open the universities fully as well, and in some years you would produce good universities that are neither state-run nor government-run. That is how you take a scarce, high-quality resource and make it bigger and bigger, so there is less competition for it and people from more classes can get in.

And before that opening happens, while the resource is this tight, how do you choose? Exam-oriented education really does have too many flaws, but many people say the answer is "quality education." The moment it was proposed, in 1997, I opposed it flatly. Because when China says "quality education" it means: how is your piano, how is your Olympiad math? Have you passed some level of a foreign-language exam? Painting, piano, all of that. These belong to rich families' children — the richer the family, the more it can train a child in them. Poor families' children can afford none of it. All they can do is study for their lives. And in the gaokao, those other things count for more and more. So the child of a poor family in a remote area, who grinds away on the few textbooks his family can buy because there is no money for anything else, who studies and scores well — what he does counts for less and less.

That is why I still have not written the article I want to write. Why do I say that from 1997 on, the good city universities had fewer and fewer rural children? Because 1997 is when "quality education" was proposed — the rich kids dance, they play the piano. What is quality? I always use the same example. I know several graduate students from very poor places. They cannot do much of anything else; they simply read themselves into a graduate program in Beijing.

Poor children, all through primary and middle school, have to keep working to lighten the load at home. They go to university, to graduate school; some work three jobs, tutor on the side, and still support a younger brother or someone else at home. Is that not "quality"? Studying hard in poverty and pulling your family out of trouble — does that not count as "quality"? Is a piano certificate the only kind there is? And it is exactly those children whom people take to be low-quality. In fact I think they have the most of it.

One thing moved me. I once went to Peking University to give a talk, and as I neared the hall a student was waiting for me. She said she just wanted to meet me. After the talk she walked me out, a long way. She had something to tell me. She said she had graduated from a key high school in Shijiazhuang, Hebei. She had gone to primary and junior middle school in a remote Hebei village, but her grades were good, so she made it to the provincial key high school. The moment she arrived she felt the difference between her own kind — the few who had come up from the countryside together — and the children raised in Shijiazhuang. Those girls sang and danced, their spoken English was good; it stood out. The education reform was in effect then, and principals could nominate students. Every nomination went to a good dancer or a good pianist; the girls from the countryside never got one. In the eyes of the school they became so-called exam machines who could do nothing but take tests. It was reading my article that moved her — it struck her all at once, and she felt that they were the ones with real quality.

To get from a region that poor into a provincial high school is genuinely hard. Is that not quality? Is that not grit? In her old high school, students from the countryside like her were still a minority, so she felt pushed out, on the margins, and without noticing it developed a sense of inferiority. After reading the article, she said, at least that inferiority was gone, and the piece went around her classmates. She later earned a master's and a PhD at Peking University.

So the most important things remain equal distribution of educational resources and more supply. The key question is how you allocate what exists. When "quality education" appeared in 1997 I published an article called Education Must First Prevent Something Worse (《教育首先要防止“更坏”》). To fight for better, first prevent worse. And look how it turned out: how many people are satisfied with the reform? City parents included — they sign their children up for this class and that one, spend all that money, and are still unhappy, thinking, I'm worn out and I've paid a fortune. Because now you move up to the next school without an exam — so how am I, the school, supposed to admit anyone? All I can ask is: whose piano grade is what? Whose Olympiad math level is what? How else would I know? And in Olympiad math, plenty of parents cannot solve the problems themselves. These days the rules say junior middle schools may not test the children moving up from primary school. With no test, the school says: I have ten children and room for six — how do I pick? On what basis? There are a few: power, money, test scores, piano. You went and took away test scores, so all that is left is piano and Olympiad math. And every parent is furious. The adults are worn out, the children more so, shuttled from one class to the next.

2. Educational justice is a question worth arguing about seriously

Wu Fei, professor, College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

Inequality between classes is beyond doubt. Different classes, different social positions — the chance of getting an education is entirely different too.

Inequality between classes is beyond doubt. Different classes, different social positions — the chance of getting an education is entirely different too. The odds of testing into Peking University are very uneven: a Zhejiang candidate and a Beijing candidate are not in the same position at all. It really is a complicated business. Take Wang Jianlin: it is perfectly normal that his child gets more and better education. You cannot say that because you are the richest man in the country your child may not be well educated. That would be its own inequality; you cannot strip the powerful of the right to provide for their own. That is the first thing to keep in mind.

At another level, though, a socialist country puts more weight on fairness and justice, because our wealth is public wealth. From that angle we should build a mechanism that really does give many poor children a chance to move up — the door has to be held open. It is a double bind, and honestly I have no especially good answer. If I have not even solved food and clothing, and you insist this child get into Peking University, how is he to do it? And the good teachers in Hangzhou or Beijing do not want to go to the countryside. Build them fine classrooms, pay them Beijing salaries, and they still will not go. How do you solve that? It is not simple; you do not slap your forehead and produce educational fairness. It is a very complicated process.

Maybe the internet will open a way in the future — a poor child taught by Beijing's best teachers. Is that possible? All we can try to do is create the possibility through institutions. But even if I were the minister of education, I could not solve educational injustice. It is hard.

I think China's ideas about fairness and justice have changed a great deal in recent years. Chinese people used to think, "I could take his place"; they thought about "equalizing rich and poor," about "dividing up the land and bringing down the local despots." There are probably fewer people who think that way now. Many Chinese have changed at this level. But educational justice is still a question worth arguing about seriously. At the very least we have to give the poorest children — the ones who cannot attend school at all — a chance at basic compulsory education. That is the state's job. Whether they end up at Peking University, at Zhejiang University, or at an ordinary vocational high school is another matter.

So the starting line matters most. No one should be denied compulsory education itself. Though from my own fieldwork — I did some work among the Derung, an ethnic minority — I found children there who do not want to keep studying. They find it pointless, so they stop. Part of the reason, of course, is that they do not believe studying will change their circumstances much later on, so they drop out and go home. That is a problem too. But in fact the state has plenty of policies for ethnic minorities: you can score at the bottom, even below what an ordinary city child needs, and still get into a decent school. Those minority policies do exist.

(On educating migrant workers' children) — this is a place where the country's design has serious problems. Many migrant workers have moved into the cities, and their children have to be with their parents; that is only human nature, and education requires it. An education with the parents absent is bound to be incomplete. Getting these children into school is a big problem, and the state will have to put real effort into solving it.

Hangzhou seems to do relatively well here; Beijing seems to find it very hard, probably because so many of its people come from elsewhere. In Hangzhou, even a laborer's child can basically attend the nearest school alongside the city children. There are conditions, and they keep getting stricter — how long you have rented your home, how long you have held a temporary residence permit — but one way or another the child does not lose their schooling. In Beijing, the population question may have been settled with one blunt stroke. I do not understand it. I do not even understand who is able to make that kind of decision. Is there no process of scientific review at all? It is very strange.

That is a serious obstacle in the way our officials govern and administer: a single leader can change things on a whim, with no hearing on the decision. Sometimes, even when only one person's interests are at stake, you have to handle it seriously. This business is absurd. I cannot make sense of it; I cannot imagine it.

3. The problem of left-behind children is more complicated than what we can see

Yan Fei, associate professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

Students at schools for migrant workers' children still have to go back to the place where they hold household registration to sit the gaokao or the zhongkao, the high school entrance exam. Once back, a few really do get out, but the great majority cannot. Those who cannot become the city's second generation of migrant children. At sixteen or eighteen they come into the city and start the working life over again. What this generation thinks, and what it expects from life, is nothing like their parents' version.

There is a teacher at Tsinghua, Jin Jun, who every year teaches first-year students a course called Introduction to Sociology. In that course he surveys the family backgrounds of that year's intake — what jobs your parents hold, what the household earns. He found that most Tsinghua students come from middle-class families, and that the number from truly humble or poor households really has been falling over the past stretch of time.

(On left-behind children,) what I have learned is this: they cannot attend public schools in the cities where they live, so they end up in schools for migrant workers' children. First, they have no money for private schools and could only go to the nearest public school; but without local household registration, they cannot get into a public school either. In the end they find their own way to a school for migrant workers' children. Because of the state of the buildings and the quality of the teaching, those schools sit at the edge of policy. The Beijing and Shanghai governments can say they will shut you down, or they can turn a blind eye and let some of you stay open. But the biggest problem is that these students still have to go back to the place where they hold household registration to sit the gaokao or the zhongkao. Once back, a few really do get out, but the great majority cannot. Those who cannot become the city's second generation of migrant children. At sixteen or eighteen they come into the city and start the working life over again. What this generation thinks, and what it expects from life, is nothing like their parents' version.

(Though we are describing the present,) it seems to be the buried effect of the many growing pains China's society has passed through over the past twenty years.

(Take the gaokao: everyone thinks it is necessary, and everyone thinks it is unfair.) So now there is independent admissions, which brings problems of its own. Independent admissions tilt further toward the middle class: they call for a broad outlook and wide reading, not just skill at taking tests. The Hengshui High School model suits an exam, one paper for the whole country. Independent admissions favor the middle-class children of first-tier cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen.

4. The resources a university gets decide how far it can lift a student, and the differences are enormous

Yan Fei, associate professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

They are all university students, but their larger problem has not been solved. After they graduate they will still slide, slowly, into the lower-middle of society.

(But new problems come with it.) Every year Tsinghua has quotas for supporting students from poor backgrounds. The quotas are fixed, or rise a little each year, and they guarantee that children from rural areas have a chance to study at Tsinghua. Once they arrive, we see a problem like this. Tsinghua's students are all outstanding — many are provincial top scorers, or ranked in their province's top five or top ten — and once they are gathered together they compete with one another. In that competition, enormous gaps open up, especially for those from remote areas or so-called humble families. Because apart from good grades, these students find, when they measure themselves against the others, that a middle-class child from Beijing may have traveled the world before he even enrolled, done exchange programs abroad, owned an Apple laptop, read piles of books outside the syllabus. For this student, it may be his first time in Beijing; he has never touched an Apple product. His outlook and the depth of his reading are not what the middle-class children's are.

That opens a wide psychological gap, and they study still harder, believing study will close it. But in a networked age, closing such a gap quickly is not a matter of taking notes and studying. It takes a steady widening of your horizons, and a lot of student clubs and activities.

So Tsinghua is looking for ways to help, and I am sure other schools are doing much the same. We offer students overseas study, internships, exchanges and visiting programs, and we fund them to go to India, Argentina, Sweden, Belgium and elsewhere to broaden their view. For them it really is a lift.

In the first year especially, you find that students from humble families feel a far larger gap; they grow deeply insecure, and once insecure they stop talking to people, or they go to extremes. But we find that by the second and third year — after two years of clubs and activities, after all those exchange and visiting programs — they slowly close the distance with the other students. That is about the best approach anyone can think of right now.

(But they have already made it into Tsinghua; they are already unlike most people.) In that setting they still feel insecure. But once they leave Tsinghua and compare themselves with others, they think: I'm doing all right, I'm from Tsinghua, aren't I? The gap is still there.

Looking at social mobility as a whole, though, I think the biggest problem is tied closely to what I said earlier about the "Double First-Class" initiative and the disciplinary evaluations. State funding and resources all go to these so-called "Double First-Class" universities. Which means that the many schools outside that list — even the third-tier undergraduate colleges and the vocational colleges further down — get very little money and very few resources. With the expansion of university enrollment, going to university stopped being a luxury long ago. But if you end up at a school outside the 211 and 985 lists, or at a university whose name nobody has ever heard, that produces a structural difference. The students become casualties of the education system, unable to get a good education. Next to the "Double First-Class" schools with state backing and resources, the gap keeps widening. In that setting — you could say they moved up, and yes, there is mobility: going from the countryside to a university in some third- or fourth-tier city is upward movement. But the degree of that movement does very little for them. In that sense, the investment in education does not pay off.

They are all university students, but their larger problem has not been solved. After they graduate they will still slide, slowly, into the lower-middle of society.

5. Why independent admissions deepen inequality when universities have no autonomy

Sheng Hong, economist, director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, a non-governmental Chinese think tank

I have heard things — a student whose father works at the National Development and Reform Commission got 30 bonus points from Peking University and 30 from Renmin University through independent admissions. That is obviously wrong. Where did those 30 points come from? His father is at the NDRC, and the university is still waiting on them to approve its money.

Who decides the gaokao? Who decides who studies where? First, university resources are already distributed unreasonably. Beijing has too many of them. Exams are administered and admission quotas allotted province by province, and although these universities are national, a Beijing candidate's odds of getting into Tsinghua or Peking University are far higher than an outsider's, and a Shanghai student's odds of getting into Fudan or Tongji are also on the high side. A Beijing candidate is 5.2 times as likely as a Sichuan candidate to reach the first-tier admission line. On top of that come policies like independent admissions. Independent admissions are one enormous piece of corruption. I criticized this long ago: when universities have no real autonomy, what is the point of "independent" admissions? Is it not absurd? It is certainly not independent — it just carries a very nice name. Why? Because the administrative bosses above will manipulate it; there is no doubt about that. I have heard things — a student whose father works at the National Development and Reform Commission got 30 bonus points from Peking University and 30 from Renmin University through independent admissions. That is obviously wrong. Where did those 30 points come from? His father is at the NDRC, and the university is still waiting on them to approve its money. It is grossly unfair. It is more unfair still to students from other provinces and from the countryside. Independent admissions favor people who live in Beijing. If you live in Xinjiang, you have to make the trip, and the cost is high; if you are from rural Xinjiang, it is more trouble still. So as a matter of fairness, this policy has enormous problems.

6. Educational unfairness comes from structural inequality. On equality, the wealth gap and the market

Guo Yuhua, professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

Some people say: abolish the gaokao. If you did, I think the children of senior officials would all get into university, and farmers would have no chance at all.

At Tsinghua, Jin Jun in our sociology department has spent several years running this observation with undergraduates. Every year after the new students arrive, they hand out a questionnaire for the freshmen to read and fill in. You can see a trend — probably not only at Tsinghua and Peking University; the key universities all share it — which is that the proportion of students from the countryside is falling.

I remember when we were at university in the 1980s, the share of our class from rural areas was quite high. In recent years it has clearly declined. There really is such a thing as "talent no longer comes from humble homes." Because the whole urban-rural dual structure is unjust, the distribution of educational resources is bound to be unjust too. As for class rigidity — or, today, the wealth gap — those are problems many people worry about a great deal.

But a distinction has to be made here. How do you look at the wealth gap? If you start from Marxist theory, of course the gap is intolerable and must be flattened; that is the class-struggle line all over again. I see several questions in this. One: is a gap between rich and poor normal in a society? There ought to be a normal gap; you certainly cannot make everyone's wealth equal. Every society is like this — there is always class differentiation, always a wealth gap, always differences in how income is distributed. You have to understand correctly what "equality" means. Equality means people are equal in rights, equal before the law, equal in their basic rights; and in opportunity they should be equal. Education today is not equal: in Beijing and Shanghai a slightly lower score gets you into university, while in some other provinces you need a very high gaokao score to get in at all. That is inequality.

But this equality is absolutely not equality of distribution, not equality of outcomes. Outcomes cannot be equal, because people are not the same, so no society can insist on everyone ending up with equal wealth and equal social standing. Impossible. People differ: you may have a talent for painting, I may have one for sport; you cannot demand that everyone be alike. In a freely competitive market economy, inequality is certain, and unequal outcomes are certain.

This needs to be sorted out, rather than waving the banner of equality and calling the matter settled. Because that is exactly what the communist movement did — waved the banner of equality while stripping everyone of their rights. It can invoke great harmony under heaven, wealth equalized for all, and the outcome is always shared poverty. Equal, truly — everyone equally poor. We have already lived through that. We cannot go back.

Second, on today's society: yes, an enormous wealth gap is a problem. People measure it now with the Gini coefficient, and if a society's gap passes a certain value it enters dangerous territory. That does have to be recognized. But what causes a gap that wide? That has to be worked out clearly, and the causes differ from system to system. In some societies the market may be the cause. When the market causes it, there can be other arrangements — relief, welfare, social security. You cannot leave the poor unable to live. You have to give them something, through charity, through social security, through government transfer payments, so that people can survive. But that is not simple leveling.

So what caused China's wealth gap? That is what we have to think through and pursue. Was it the market economy? No, I do not think so. Was it capital, as some on the left say? Absolutely not, I think. It was precisely an incomplete market economy — a market economy dominated by power. Where does today's wealth gap show up most? Between officials and the public, between the special interest groups and the broad mass of people. That is the largest gap of all. Yet people confuse the question, and it is that old class-struggle habit of mind that confuses it. Rob the rich to help the poor? It goes after entrepreneurs, after private companies. Are private companies the people who hold the most resources and the most wealth in China today? Private companies are fragile; plenty of them do not know where tomorrow's meal is coming from. Nationalize further, hand the country's economic lifelines and its biggest firms and their biggest returns further over to these special interest groups, and that is an enormous injustice. That is where China's wealth gap lies. And the cause is exactly this: using power to seize wealth, to disrupt the market economy and control it.

So I think we have to be especially alert to this, rather than treating the market economy, as some on the left do, as the root of all evil. It is not. The wealth gap our country faces and the one Western societies face are different problems.

(Educational unfairness works the same way.) I think it is genuinely hard now to solve any single piece of the problem on its own; these are all structural problems, and they touch everything. There may be some changes today — since the gaokao was restored, with a national exam every year, and in recent years some places have tried methods such as independent admissions. But until the structural problem is solved, independent admissions cannot fully solve it either. A school naturally wants to find the best students, right? And the best students will certainly not come from poor families — a few will, but not many. You cannot fix the root of it with adjustments that small. Admission through examination, through fair competition, is still the most basic method. Some people say: abolish the gaokao. If you did, I think the children of senior officials would all get into university, and farmers would have no chance at all.

Interviewees featured in this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: a still from the film The King's Speech, via Douban