China Strives for Free Compulsory Education for All
By Rong Jiaojiao

The new semester in March 2006 was different from others for Shang Zhibo in Manhai Elementary School of Manhai Village in Yunnan Province. For the first time in his six-year teaching career, he announced to his fifth-grade class of 16 students that they no longer needed to pay their 80 yuan (US$10) school fees. “I was told by the education bureau of Tongxin Township that the miscellaneous fees are exempted forever and the township government will always foot the bill from now on,” said the 26-year-old Shang. “This is really good news for me, for my students, and most importantly, for their parents.”
The average annual income of Manhai villagers in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province is 800 yuan (US$100), mainly derived from vegetables and pigs. At the end of 2005, the Chinese government announced it would invest 125.4 billion yuan (US$15.6 billion) over the next five years to foot the bill for compulsory education in rural areas, making sure every rural child has the opportunity for a free nine-year education. Beijing invested 3.69 billion yuan (US$461.3 million) on schools in 12 western provinces including Yunnan and Sichuan to cover the school fees before the start of 2006 spring semester.
The plan is to extend the scheme to China’s central and eastern areas, with 148 million primary and junior school students receiving a free education in 2007. By 2008, all the fees for rural China’s 400, 000 elementary and junior schools will be shouldered by central and local governments. Local governments have been ordered to pay a minimum 92.8 billion yuan (US$11.6 billion) over the next five years, bringing the total spending to a potential 212.8 billion yuan (US$26.6 billion). In addition, students from poor farming families in key counties included in the national poverty alleviation plan will be provided with free textbooks and exempted from paying miscellaneous fees. Boarding students will receive a living allowance.
“This policy is a milestone for China’s century-old compulsory education, moving from an era where farmers support compulsory education into one where the government shoulders all the responsibility,” said Zhou Ji, China’s education minister. Free and compulsory education is identified as a fundamental human right by the United Nations. The U.N. Millennium Development Goals stipulate that every school-age boy and girl complete a full course of primary education. A report released by the Asian Development Bank states that of the world’s 190 nations, more than 170 provide their children with free compulsory education. Included in the list are poor Asian countries like Laos, Cambodia and Nepal, whose per capita GDP amounts to just one third of China’s.
However in China, children in poor rural areas often miss out on compulsory education due to the inability of local governments to fund public schooling and the massive income gap between eastern urban and western rural areas. China’s literacy has reached 98.9 percent in 2004, with a rate of 99.2 percent for men and 98.5 percent for women, an increase by 1.2 percent and 5.4 percent for men and women respectively compared with 1990, according to the UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2005.
Yet 87 million people in China remain illiterate, 23 million of whom are youths and middle-aged individuals, according to the Ministry of Education’s National Report on Education for All released in November 2005. About eight percent of the nation has not yet adopted the nine-year compulsory education system, and all of these areas are in the poorer and more remote western regions. China’s compulsory education consists of six years of primary school and three years of junior high school. The dream of free compulsory education is far from being realized. Free education was first mandated in the 1986 Law on Compulsory Education for China’s 289,000 primary schools and 4,266 junior high schools.
By 1998, it still was not free and the number of primary schools had doubled to handle 140 million students.

—China Features