Education is a prerequisite for the development of human capital which in turn is an important factor in a country’s overall development. Apart from the increasing income inequality, the education sector has long suffered from problems such as funding shortages and unequal allocation of education resources,[20] adding to the disparity between China’s urban and rural life; this was exacerbated by the two track system of government’s approach to education. The first track is government -supported primary education in urban areas and the second is family -supported primary education in the rural areas.[21]
Rural education has been marginalized by the focus on immediate economic development and the fact that urban education enjoys more attention and investment by the central government.[21] This lack of public funding meant that children of rural families were forced to drop out of school, thus losing the opportunity to further their studies and following the paths of their parents to become low skilled workers with few chances of advancements.[20] This leads to a vicious cycle of poverty. Due to limited educational resources, urban schools were supported by the government while village schools were provided for by the local communities where educational opportunities were possibly constrained depending on local conditions.[21] Thus, there still exist a huge gap in teacher preparation and quality of facilities between rural and urban areas.
The two track system was then abolished in 1986 & 1992, to be replaced by the Compulsory Education Law and the Rule for the Implementation of the Compulsory Education Law respectively.[22] Despite the emphasis of China’s education reform on providing quality and holistic education, the rural schools still lack the capacity to implement such reforms vis-à-vis their urban counterparts.[20] The rural areas lack the educational resources of the urban areas and the rural areas are considered to be falling below the educational benchmark set in the cities.[23] Teachers are more attracted to urban sectors with higher pay and a slew of benefits. In addition, rural villages have a difficult time finding quality teachers because of the relatively poorer standard of living in villages. As a result, some rural teachers are not qualified as they received college degrees from continuing-education programs, which is not the best type of further education one could receive.[24]
As a result, rural students often find themselves neither competitive enough to gain admissions to colleges nor employable for most occupations.[20] Rural residents are increasingly being marginalised in higher education, closing off their best opportunities for advancement. This is especially prominent in Tsinghua and Peking University where the percentage of rural population studying in the two universities have shrunk to 17.6 percent in 2000 and 16.3 percent in 1999, down from 50 to 60 percent in the 1950s. These numbers are the most recent reliable data that has been published and experts agree that the number might be as low as 1 percent in 2010.[25]