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The purpose of this paper is to describe the policy and trends in rural education in China over the past 40 years; and also discuss a number of challenges that are faced by China’s rural school system.

The authors use secondary data on policies and trends over the past 40 years for preschool, primary/junior high school, and high school.

The trends over the past 40 years in all areas of rural schooling have been continually upward and strong. While only a low share of rural children attended preschool in the 1980s, by 2014 more than 90 percent of rural children were attending. The biggest achievement in compulsory education is that the rise in the number of primary students that finish grade 6 and matriculate to junior high school. There also was a steep rise of those going to and completing high school. While the successes in upscaling rural education are absolutely unprecedented, there are still challenges.

This is descriptive analysis and there is not causal link established between policies and rural schooling outcomes.

The authors illustrate one of the most rapid rises of rural education in history and match the achievements up with the policy efforts of the government. The authors also explore policy priorities that will be needed in the coming years to raise the quality of schooling.

This is the first paper that documents both the policies and the empirical trends of the success that China has created in building rural education from preschool to high school during the first 40 years of reform (1978-2018). The paper also documents – drawing on the literature and the own research – the achievements and challenges that China still face in the coming years, including issues of gender, urbanization, early childhood education and health and nutrition of students.

Low levels of human capital in rural China are rooted in the poor schooling outcomes of elementary school students. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the distribution of academic performance in rural China and identify vulnerable groups.

The authors draw on a data set of 25,892 observations constructed from 11 school-level surveys spanning nine provinces and one municipality in China conducted from 2013 to 2015.

The authors find that the distribution of academic performance is uneven across provinces and subgroups. In general, male students, Han, living in richer counties, living with their parents and studying in rural public schools do better academically than female students, non-Han, living in poorer counties, left behind and studying in private migrant schools in cities.

Using the results of this study, policymakers should be able to better target investments into rural education focusing on at risk subpopulations.

With limited data sources, the research on the academic performance of students in rural China is largely absent. The findings of this study help to fill the gaps in the literature base.

Literature has shown that the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities is stronger for children raised in more advantaged environments. However, there has never been an empirical investigation of this pattern in China. This study examines differences in the intergenerational transmission of cognitive capabilities among mothers and young children in urban and rural subpopulations in China and investigates whether these differences are driven by differences in parental investment in the home environment.

Data collected from randomly selected 6- to 36-month-old babies and their mothers in a Northwestern province in China was used. Child capabilities were assessed by the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (3rd edition). Maternal intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were assessed with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. The non-parametric regression methods were used to construct the factor scores of child capabilities. The ordinary least squares (OLS) models were employed to investigate the relations between child cognition, maternal IQ and parental investment.

In urban households, where most children are raised in a positive home environment, child cognitive scores are strongly correlated with maternal IQ. In rural households, where parental investments are lower and more variable, child cognitive scores are not significantly correlated with maternal IQ but are predicted by differences in parental investments in a cognitively stimulating home environment.

This study provides a unique contribution by utilizing rural–urban disparities in China as a unique natural experiment to investigate differences in the transmission of cognitive capabilities across socioeconomic status (SES). It also provides the first empirical evidence of SES differences in the intergenerational transmission of cognitive capabilities in a developing country. This study reveals that intergenerational mother–child cognition associations are disrupted by poor parental investment in rural households but not in urban households.

To combat poverty in China's rural areas, Chinese government has established an unconditional cash transfer program known as the Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Rural Dibao) Program. Interestingly, despite the importance of education in breaking cycles of poverty, little is known about Rural Dibao's impact on rural children's education. This study investigates Rural Dibao's impact on rural children's learning outcomes by first examining targeting issues within the program, exploring a causal relationship between Rural Dibao and learning outcomes, and then exploring potential mechanisms and heterogeneous effects.

Fixed effects model and propensity score weighting method and data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from the years 2010 and 2014 were used.

The results suggest that the Rural Dibao program suffers from high levels of targeting error, yet is still effective (i.e., program transfers generally still go to people in need). The fixed effects and propensity score weighting models find that program participation raises rural children's standardized test scores in CFPS Chinese-language and math tests. In investigating mechanisms, increased education expenditure seems to connect Rural Dibao participation to increased learning results. The heterogeneity analysis shows that poorer, non-eastern, not left behind, younger or male children benefit from the program (while others have no effect).

These findings suggest that Rural Dibao participation boosts rural children's learning, which could indicate a long-term anti-poverty effect, and that if the program can resolve targeting problems, this effect could be even greater.

Although access to safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world, drinking water remains a large problem in China today, especially in rural areas. Despite increased government investment in water resource protection and management, there is still an absence of academic studies that are able to document what path the investment has taken and whether it has had any tangible impact. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of drinking water investment on drinking water in China.

The authors make use of nationally representative data from 2005 and 2012 to measure the impact of drinking water investment among 2,028 rural households in 101 villages across five provinces. Both ordinary least squares regression and probit regression are used to analyze the correlates and the impact of drinking water investment.

The authors demonstrate that water quality was likely a significant problem in 2004 but that China’s investment into drinking water appears to have resulted in initial improvements during the study period. The authors show that the most significant change came about in terms of hardware: villages that received more drinking water investment now have more piped tap water and more access to water treatment infrastructure (disinfecting and filtering facilities). High rates of rural resident satisfaction with drinking water suggest the effects of drinking water investment are being felt at the village level.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study on drinking water investment over time in rural China using nationally representative data.

This study aims to bridge the gaps in the existing literature by studying the links between children's development and the subjective well-being of the caregivers using first-hand data collected in rural China.

Although the broad array of literature has examined the effects of child development on the subjective well-being of caregivers, the relationship between early childhood development and caregiver subjective well-being has not been well-studied using sample families with potential developmental delay in rural China. Also, existing research has relied on maternal reports to evaluate the developmental status of children. The study used data collected from 32 townships in seven nationally designated poverty counties in the Qinling mountainous area in 2016. The authors measure child development using the social-emotional module of the Ages & Stages Questionnaire and Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development–Third Edition.

The authors find that child development indicators are correlated with caregiver subjective well-being. In particular, social-emotional skills are positively associated with life evaluations and positive emotion. However, we do not find any significant correlation between child development and negative emotion or depression, anxiety and stress scores.

The value of this study is to report the indicators of child development in rural China and examines the correlation between child development and caregivers' subjective well-being.

Although China has instituted compulsory education through Grade 9, it is still unclear whether students are, in fact, staying in school. In this paper, the authors use a multi-year (2003–2011) longitudinal survey data set on rural households in 102–130 villages across 30 provinces in China to examine the extent to which students still drop out of school prior to finishing compulsory education.

To examine the correlates of dropping out, the study uses ordinary least squares and multivariate probit models.

Dropout rate from junior high school was still high (14%) in 2011, even though it fell across the study period. There was heterogeneity in the measured dropout rate. There was great variation among different regions, and especially among different villages. In all, 10% of the sample villages showed extremely high rates during the study period and actually rose over time. Household characteristics associated with poverty and the opportunity cost of staying in school were significantly and negatively correlated with the completion of nine years of schooling.

The findings of this study suggest that China needs to take additional steps to overcome the barriers keeping children from completing nine years of schooling if they hope to either achieve their goal of having all children complete nine years of school or extend compulsory schooling to the end of twelfth grade.

The authors seek to measure the prevalence of both compulsory education rates of dropouts and rates of completion in China. The study examines the correlates of dropping out at the lower secondary schooling level as a way of understanding what types of students (from what types of villages) are not complying with national schooling regulations. To overcome the methodological shortcomings of previous research on dropout in China, the study uses a nationally representative, longitudinal data set based on household surveys collected between 2003 and 2011.

China’s rapid pace of urbanization has resulted in millions of rural residents migrating from rural areas to urban areas for better job opportunities. Due to economic pressures and the nature of China’s demographic policies, many of these migrants have been forced to leave their children with relatives – typically paternal grandparents – at home in the countryside. Thus, while income for most migrant families has risen, a major unintended consequence of this labor movement has been the emergence of a potentially vulnerable sub-population of left-behind children (LBCs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of parental migration on both the academic performance and mental health of LBCs.

Longitudinal data were drawn from three waves of a panel survey that followed the same students and their families – including their migration behavior (i.e. whether both parents, one parent, no parent migrated) – between 2015 and 2016. The survey covers more than 33,000 students in one province of central China. The authors apply a student fixed-effects model that controls for both observable and unobservable confounding variables to explicate the causal effects of parental migration on the academic and mental health outcomes for LBC. The authors also employ these methods to test whether these effects differ by the type of migration or by gender of the child.

The authors found no overall impact of parental migration on either academic performance or mental health of LBCs, regardless of the type of migration behavior. The authors did find, however, that when the authors examined heterogeneous effects by gender (which was possible due to the large sample size), parental migration resulted in significantly higher anxiety levels for left-behind girls. The results suggest that parental migration affects left-behind boys and girls differently and that policymakers should take a more tailored approach to addressing the problems faced by LBCs.

The main contributions of this paper come from the large and representative sample, as well as the causal effects analysis of being left-behind on both academic performance and mental health. First, the paper uses comprehensive panel data from a representative and populous province in China, and the sample size is the largest one among LBC-related papers to the authors’ knowledge. Second, the paper separately examines the causal effects on the student outcomes of different migration strategies. Third, the paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of different migration strategies on LBC gender. The authors believe that the paper makes a key contribution to the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the trends in residential solid waste collection (RSWC) services in rural China over the past decade and analyze the determinants of these services using nationally representative data.

The authors draw on panel data from three rounds of village-level surveys of 101 villages. The three surveys were conducted in 2005, 2008, and 2012 in five provinces. The authors used fixed-effected regression approach to analyze the determinants of these services.

The results show that in the aftermath of increased investment and policy attention at the national level, the proportion of villages providing RSWC services in rural China increased significantly from 1998 to 2011. However, half of all villages in rural China still did not provide RSWC services as of 2011. Based on econometrics analysis, the authors show that villages that are richer, more populous, and villages with more small hamlets are more likely to provide RSWC services.

The analyses are based on primary survey data and the first to quantify trends in waste management services in the beginning of the twentieth century. The authors believe that the results will have significant policy implications for China in its continuing quest for better waste management policy.