Although universal access to primary schooling is, according to the government, now close to being “basically achieved,” the future fate of China’s education system is by no means certain. Reflecting here on the present and future challenges are three education experts, Wang Xiaohui (王晓辉) , Hu Wenbin (胡文斌) and Gerard Postiglione (See end of article for contributor bios.)
CDB: China’s new Five-Year Plan anticipates a rise in government spending on education from 2.79 per cent of GDP in 2004 to 4 per cent of GDP in five years time. But previous targets of this kind have been missed, in large part because the burden of expenditure falls on local governments that, in poorer areas, do not have the necessary resources. Are the same problems likely to arise this time?
Hu: The same problems are certainly likely to arise unless the central government doubles its contribution to education. Oddly, the national finance system always feels that its investment in education is by no means small, whereas the education system feels it is far from enough. If the central government were to cover the cost of text books, miscellaneous expenses and subsidies for student boarders to cover basic living needs—for there are still millions of people in China who have not yet resolved their basic food and shelter (温饱)—expenditure would indeed reach 4% [of GDP]. China does now have the financial capacity to achieve this goal, but the key issue is converting political will into concrete, financial action. It seems that much better communication is needed between the finance and education systems. Otherwise, 4% will probably still just be the happy dream of the education system.
Postiglione: It is astonishing that financial expenditures for education have declined for three years in succession (2002: 3.32 per cent; 2003: 3.28 per cent; 2004: 2.79%) Of course, GDP rose by 2.3 trillion yuan in 2004, and therefore the amount of money going to education is actually rising. Moreover, even with a low proportion of GDP allocated to education, China managed to push enrolment rates for primary and junior high schooling to levels above that of most other lower-income countries. But, hold on. Eleven provincial-level entities could not increase the rate of budgeted disbursements for education to match the growth rate of financial revenues. Nineteen had budgeted educational expenditures that constituted a smaller portion of financial expenditures than the previous year, some down as much as two-thirds. What is happening? Unlike expenditures for education, administrative expenditures increase dramatically without restraint, while education expenditures have grown more slowly. Local governments still play a leading role in the economy, but their function in issues as education, healthcare, employment, living quarters and social security is very questionable. Resolving this means setting up a new system to finance public education. This has not happened.
Yes, [the same problems] could arise again, especially because there have only been minor changes in the way that education funding is allocated and ensured in rural areas. In the past it was difficult for county governments to identify enough funding sources to provide all children with a quality education without adding a heavy burden to village households. Rural counties continue to struggle over how to fund schools. Many villages have gone into debt trying to universalise basic education. Even after tax reforms, the debt in some areas cannot be repaid. Creditors even block off government buildings, seal off school gates, and put school principals and teachers in precarious situations. Insufficient funds have left some village schools without the most basic school supplies and caused many teachers to leave villages and townships for county seats and cities.
When resources are available, is there any way to make county governments think twice about allocating them to secondary schools in the county seat instead of improving teaching, learning and curriculum development in poor village schools? It seems that ordinary county high schools do not find it easy to resist the tendency to pursue luxury. Lately, there is more emphasis being placed on dissipating discontent over unequal development in schools within the same area.
Everyone recognises that the poorest families have great difficulty in paying miscellaneous school fees, and the central government is responding to this with programs to subsidise text books, boarding fees etc, in poor, Western areas. But rising education costs are a major household expenditure for nearly all of China’s citizens. ‘Key’ schools, and those with good reputations, are now charging high fees, and the system is becoming increasingly stratified. Do you think that competition between schools is healthy? Or is state education becoming too commercialised?
Wang: The central government is implementing a ‘two frees, one subsidy’ (两免一补) policy, this is really putting into effect the Law on Compulsory Education, and it should be praised. But whether there will be real balance—both within cities and between urban and rural areas—is still a grave challenge for the future development of education in China. We can’t say compulsory education has really been achieved without a basic quality guarantee and a basic equilibrium guarantee. But isn’t it an absurd contradiction if schools in the compulsory education system keep charging high fees?
Hu: I think the problem is one of equity, not commercialisation. It’s absolutely necessary to have some competition between schools, but the present kind of competition is unhealthy. The main point is that schools are not all starting from the same base. During the reform and opening period, long term policy for primary and middle schools has been to give a few “key” (重点) schools “superior rice” (吃偏饭). As a result, these schools have grown bigger and stronger, but many more have been “step-mothered” (后妈养的): for a long time they haven’t had enough to eat, and they are malnourished. As a result, inequity in education has become increasingly serious, manifest between schools, between regions, between urban and rural areas, between ethnic groups. In the foreseeable future this inequitable situation may continue to deteriorate. The government of China fully understands the seriousness of the situation, but to turn things around it needs not only to increase expenditures but also to work on mechanisms and systems. For example, the central government has recently devoted a lot of funding to compulsory education in rural areas. The Ministry of Education wants the funds to go mainly to poor areas, especially to increase expenditure on village primary schools and teaching posts (教学点) in very remote areas. But from the provincial plans published recently in the China Education News (中国教育报) it is clear that more than average will be invested in city and small town (镇) schools, rather than village schools. This shows that awareness of educational inequity is still very weak.
Postiglione: To improve rural education in poor areas, CNY 218 billion (USD 27 billion) will be allocated over the next five years, but 80% of it will come from the central government. Can the local governments guarantee the other 20% while ensuring that the 80% gets properly allocated? There has been little fundamental change with respect to the finance of basic education in poor rural areas. Local officials still have tendencies that can offset central initiatives. Laws have no bite when local officials don’t do it right.
After so many years of inadequate expenditure on education, and with the onus on the grassroots level to resuscitate education and create revenues, it was inevitable that such pressure would give impetus to a rise in profit seeking and intensifying money-for-education and money-for-power transactions in many areas. It takes time to correct these tendencies, especially when elections are confined to village levels. The key school phenomenon further complicates the situation. In May, 2005, the Ministry of Education published a document regarding “the further promotion of balanced development in compulsory education.” It noted that students must be allowed to enter public schools during the compulsory education period without entrance examinations, and it will not be permitted to operate “key” schools [with selective admission] or try to manipulate the rules to establish such schools.
A market economy cannot view competition as unhealthy. However, the right of a child to a good education is a higher priority than commercialisation of education. Educational institutions can be run like businesses, but they are not businesses. Key schools, competition and commercialisation have to be considered within the context of national development. Contemporary education not only transmits China’s heritage to the next generation but also differentiates and stratifies, setting social trajectories early in life. The irony is that while the socialist market economy has increased the educational choices available, it has made these choices more a function of poverty, gender, and ethnicity than in the planned economy of the pre-reform period.
Education as a mechanism of social stratification is not new in China, a nation with a cultural heritage that includes the keju (科举), a system of social selection based on examinations that test knowledge of the classic texts. It is the experience with market forces within an expanding global economy that continues to confound efforts to reduce the educational gap between rich and poor. China has learned to transform itself and its education system. However, in the process, sometimes it seems that markets matter more than Marxist principles in educational provision.
China is approaching a key historical juncture in education—the first time that children from nearly every family, region, and nationality in China will attend school. As schooling reaches into virtually all regions and households, it comes to play a larger role in determining China’s social stratification. The market economy has already transformed the equation of educational access and equity in rural China. Families can no longer rely with certainty on state-sponsored educational provision. As schooling has come to cost more, so also have basic food stuffs and health care. Family incomes have become less stable, affecting the rural household environment and compelling some members to migrate to urban areas for work. As the profit motive of local enterprises have come to play a larger role in their decision about who to hire, schools are becoming pressured to offer more vocational courses while also inculcating new attitudes and dispositions for the production line. Markets also leave ethnic minorities in a quandary about how to maintain the traditional values that are the bedrock of their communities, while risking the dislocations brought on by mainstream consumer culture. Markets can also make the education of girls less valuable to many individual households, as well as unleash a wave of rural migration to urban areas where jobs may be found but where educational opportunities for children are inadequate. The poor rural village of western China, including its girls, ethnic minorities, and urban migrants, remain underserved, both in terms of access and equity and in terms of the quality of the education they receive. This is not to deny the monumental gains made in educational access and equality under Chinese socialism. But the reforms launched since 1978, including administrative and financial decentralisation, have placed the urban middle class at a distinct and seemingly insurmountable advantage in the equation of state education, competition, and commercialisation. Whereas eastern China’s urban children are schooled and well fed, many poor rural families in the northwest exist on diets that stunt their children’s growth and learning abilities. As waves of rural migrants descend on urban areas and find limited educational opportunities for their sons and daughters, many urban middle-class families are spending more than ever on private schooling for their children.
Over the last few years, the Ministry of Education has been keen to promote ‘quality education,’ through a mixture of curriculum reform and encouraging new teaching approaches. The Ministry’s Zhu Muju was quoted last year by the China Daily as saying that the reforms are designed to "bring forth a new generation of high-calibre citizens, people who are competent enough to serve China's modernization drive." What does ‘quality education’ mean in a Chinese context, and what are the prospects for China achieving this?
Wang: Quality education has really been a hot topic in China for several years, and although you still hear it talked about, people’s passion has died down. It’s as though people have now realised that it’s doesn’t really amount to much. Whether it’s schools or students or parents, they all agree and ethusiastically go in for quality education on the one hand, but at the same time they still cling to university entrance exams. Quality education arose in opposition to the exam-oriented education system, but it has fundadmental weaknesses. Decision makers were quick to opt for a quality system, but their implementation was superficial, it stayed at the policy level, partly because of the failure to understand the scientific basis of quality education.
From a philosophical point of view, human development should be all-round; but realistically the country’s education, especially compulsory education, should concentrate on delivering basic quality education for the younger generation. The state should as a matter of urgency, at the same time as curriculum reform, settle on the basic knowledge and ability content to be achieved, especially establishing targets for nine years of compulsory education in three basic subjects (Chinese, Math and English); and it should decide course requirements to be achieved in each semester. Then it should monitor the quality education situation through sampling and comprehensive evaluation at different stages, so as to improve teaching methods and raise teaching standards.
Hu: Although there are thousands of articles and books that try to interpret it clearly and accurately, I haven’t ever understood what “quality education” really means. But one thing that is very clear to me is that if the state doesn’t reform the college entrance exam system, so-called “quality education” won’t have any future. Only if the entrance exam system is reformed—and a new assessment system and method created to test students’ all-round ability instead of just their ability to sit exams—only then might quality education have some real meaning.
Postiglione: There is no shortage of both praise and criticism of the quality of education in China. The Asia Society of the United States has recently published a report that praises the quality of education in China and asks American schools to learn from China’s educational success. Within China, some have expressed concern that market forces have actually lowered the quality of education for some. This is because the charging of high and arbitrary fees, learning-for-money, and competition has led to a widening of the educational gap between city and countryside, one district and another, and one school and another.
The prospects of moving closer to quality education are usually enhanced by ensuring that teachers possess the competency, professional autonomy, educational resources and community support to facilitate quality education. Quality education includes teaching, learning environments, curriculum development, and reform of the examination scoring system. The latter is probably the most difficult issue and the best place to start in implementing quality education. Reform of the examination scoring system will requires great courage, as it usually does.
Quality education in China as elsewhere refers to a multitude of aspects having to do with a student’s balanced development, including moral, intellectual, physical, and psychological development. Quality education is all about how to provide the conditions by which an individual can capitalise upon his or her abilities for a balanced development as a well-rounded person who can contribute to the welfare of the community of which he or she is a part and the larger national society. The discourse on quality education in China tends to focus more on product rather than process. However, quality education can only be achieved if the focus is on the process of learning, rather than singularly on the output of learning. China has been recently moving toward a more nuanced concept of a quality education—one which develops the talents, expertise, values and leadership skills of Chinese youth so as to promote and sustain a democratic, equitable, and innovative national society. It would not be surprising if schools also come to be seen as public spaces that bring people together to engage with the important issues of community identity and social development so as to give more direction and meaning to communities, while more actively involving citizens in more development activities for the common good. It is hard to achieve a quality education without improving several essential elements: full access for all to a school nearby their home, basic nutrition so children do not come to school hungry, basic teacher education for teachers who come to teaching unprepared and without essential skills to promote students’ learning, curriculum that is planned and developed with local as well as national needs, and a mechanism for assessment of schools that is formulated by all stakeholders in the school community.
What role do you think private or non-state education (minban jiaoyu) should play in China?
Wang: Private education ought to open up a new path for educational development in China, in areas such as innovation in teaching methods, optimisation of cost benefit ratios, the connections between education and employment, etc. But at present the profit-drive among private schools is too strong. So it is hard to measure its role and position.
Hu: Minban education is currently playing a modest role in China because nearly all of the educational resources are controlled by government. At the same time, the competitive environment the private schools face is not particularly easy. Although laws and regulations state that private schools should enjoy the same status and treatment as state schools, in practice the whole education system was built around the planned economy and was designed for state schools, and in a lot of specific ways private schools do not enjoy the same treatment as the state schools. An even greater disadvantage for them is that, at present, government departments act both as players and referees. To a large extent, they make up the rules of the game. In these circumstances it is difficult to demand that government departments create an equal rule for all schools, because this is like asking someone to use their right hand to cut off their left hand! But, taking a long-term perspective, government is in the process of re-defining the role it should play as the market economy is steadily established and improved. The developmental space for private schools may become greater and greater, and they will probably come more into play.
Postiglione: China has boldly moved forward in developing minban education. The central government has encouraged the development a large number of minban schools, colleges and universities. The law pertaining to minban education has finally been promulgated after a long period of time in which for-profit education was hotly debated.
Actually, minban education in China is not supposed to be private. Rather, it is meant to be composed of schools that are popularly run with the help of a variety of social formations. Therefore, the intention is not to make them separate from the rest of the system. Unfortunately, schools also have a tendency to close themselves off from the surrounding community. If there are really to be valuable minban education experiments to attain excellence, minbanschools would need to be more closely integrated within the larger school system so that other schools can benefit from their ability to operate more efficiently and effectively.
In many counties, the problem with minban urban education is that they simply siphon off the best students from gongban (public) schools, exploit opportunities to develop surrounding property markets for profit, and act to stratify educational opportunities in urban society. To be sure, this is not the case with all minban education. In some cases, social groups have worked to improve a pre-existing gongban school by converting it into a more innovative learning center.
Although there are a number of world class schools that operate under the minban banner, there are some minban schools in China that are just poorly funded places with unqualified teachers serving rural migrants communities on the urban periphery.
Minban primary and secondary schools have generally fared better than minban colleges and universities. Until recently, the quality of minban tertiary education has been far less than impressive. However, the tide is beginning to turn as some minban universities take serious steps to ensure the quality of their programs and enter into productive relationships with overseas counterparts.
What impact is the Internet having on education in China?
Wang: On-line learning has broken the mould of traditional teaching methods’ direct and face-to-face contact between teachers and students. It can make students study with more energy and initiative, it makes communication with the outside world easier, it offers contact with all kinds of information and teaching resources, it makes it possible to study and grasp new things at your own rate, and it is not limited by constraints of time or place. It could be said that this is a Copernican revolution for teaching methods and educational models.
But compared to traditional learning, on-line learning is also a double-edged sword. In front of the computer screen, although the student can network with the whole world (网罗天下), missing is the atmosphere of direct, person-to-person exchange. Even inter-active on-line teaching models give results that are far inferior to real classroom teaching, just as there is a great distance between TV concerts and listening attentively to live performances. In addition, because of the high costs (at least for the present) of interactive, on-line teaching, it is not possible for conventional teaching to adopt it universally.
It could be said that traditional teaching has already divided human knowledge into different subjects, now teaching with ICT has divided subjects into even more modules, fragmenting the content of teaching, so how can students gain adequate knowledge from these fragments? If students get addicted to games, chat, gambling and pornography, countless talent and genius may be wasted.
Some people predicted that education with ICT would replace traditional education. It seems that this was premature, not only over-optimistic, as plenty of evidence shows. In the United States, MIT supplies free access to ‘Open Course Ware’ on their website, but their greatest attraction remains the face to face exchange between teachers and students that comes with classroom teaching. Perhaps there is no way that either will replace the other, or eradicate the other, but, rather, from their conflict the comparative advantage of each will become evident (他们将在冲突中相互补充相互媲美)
Hu: I feel that [the Internet’s] influence up till now is extremely limited, the only area in which significant influence can be seen is that media sometimes makes a big fuss (炒作) about children playing internet games and neglecting their studies. In the foreseeable future, I don’t think the Internet can replace school education, which at the moment is completely traditional. After all, education is a long process related to human development and it has to be accomplished through a great deal of face-to-face real communication between people. If one day you can put silicon chips inside people’s brains, you could greatly multiply people’s knowledge and ability, but we would be pretty much like robots!
Postiglione: China’s Internet users are nearing 100 million and about half are under 24 years old, a third between 18 and 24. Will it have an impact on their education? Like any technology, the Internet can have positive and negative consequences. It can be used to liberate minds or make them slaves to the Internet predators, who market everything under the sun. A major challenge facing teachers and parents is how to instil Internet ethics among youth. There is a long way to go. But, this is no different from elsewhere in the world. All of the ills of youth on the internet are as present in China as elsewhere: internet depression, gambling, deterioration of social relationships, etc. The social problems triggered by Internet are legion. But, its potential is irresistible for any part of the world interested in building learning skills for a knowledge society. Unfortunately, the Internet is more often associated more with knowledge economy than knowledge society. The former emphasises learning as competition, knowledge as instrumental to profit, and students as human capital. The latter stresses learning as empowerment, knowledge for an informed citizenry, and students as agents for social development.
Given China’s rapidly changing labour market, what should primary and middle schools be doing to prepare children for their future working lives? What, if any, further reforms are needed in the vocational school system? How should these institutions harmonise with training programmes for migrant workers that the Ministry of Labour and Social Security is now beginning to offer?
Wang: Primary and middle schools first need to guarantee to endow students with basic knowledge and ability, whereas vocational schools should pay attention to improving students’ employability. In concrete terms, they should strengthen people’s ability to learn, to get a job, to keep a job, and to adapt to market changes. From a broader perspective, its not only education that needs to adapt to changes in the labour market in China, more importantly enterprises should exercise initiative and take responsibility for human resource development, and should get involved with schools in training people. As well as caring about the education process in schools, enterprises should provide schools with technical guidance and with places for student interns. This would at the same time help the enterprises themselves explore efficient paths for obtaining appropriate human resources.
Hu: This is clearly related to the third question [re. quality education]. Our primary and middle schools don’t treat children as living beings, looking at their whole development, but treat them as “examination fodder” (考试机器). The important point is that our education system needs an approach that is flexible enough to supply educational opportunities to match every individual’s needs during every phase of their lives. Moreover, schools need the power to make their own educational decisions (办学自主权) so that they can rapidly adjust their intake and the courses they offer in order to meet labour market demands. As for the floating [migrant] population problem, the ultimate solution has to be reform of the household registration [hukou]; other measures are treating the symptoms not the cause. Without fundamental reform to the household registration system, efforts to achieve educational equity will lack basic foundations.
Postiglione: In a rapidly changing society, there will always be a certain amount of uncertainty about future working lives. Therefore, educators espouse the idea that children need to be equipped with diverse thinking skills for a variety of real life problem solving situations. In short, education aims to provide young people with the ability to think logically, rationally, critically, flexibly, and innovatively so that they can quickly adapt to a shifting circumstances of their future working lives. In the meantime, there are immediate vocational needs that must be addressed in order for the economy to get a bang for its buck. This is why China has been moving ahead with community-based post-secondary education, especially the adaptations of the so-called community colleges, which have caught on in so many other countries. Among the supposed advantage of community colleges are their ability to react quickly to both market forces and the needs of their diverse student clientele. China’s zhiye gaozhong,zhiye jishe xueyuan and dazhuan institutions have learned to be more flexible in their instructional offerings and delivery methods. Moreover, community-based vocational colleges are increasingly capable of bringing migrant workers into the labour force and have great potential for adding value to training programs currently offered by the Ministry of Labour, especially by opening up a broader range of educational possibilities.
Our impression is that, with market forces now playing a major role in higher education, universities in Western China are struggling to attract high quality teachers and students. Do you fear a growing divide between eastern and western China in terms of university research and teaching capacity, and what do you think the central government should do about this?
Wang: Stratification is inevitable. The important point is, higher educational institutions in western regions should not necessarily compare themselves (攀比) to national key universities, they should concentrate on their own educational characteristics. For example, their development should cater to special field of local economy and culture. The institutional twinning policy that the central government is carrying out should be firmly maintained, and it may limit stratification appropriately.
Hu: Of course [there is a growing divide], and this kind of concern is completely reasonable. Just as with resolving the problems of basic compulsory education in western areas, the central government should adopt sloping measures. The best thing would be to exceed the favourable policies that are currently in place for eastern universities, so as to provide western universities with opportunities so that they can compete equally with universities in developed areas
Postiglione: The evidence is clear. The divide is real and growing rapidly. Western region colleges and universities will be at great risk if the pattern continues. There will be no significant change until the “Go West” policy succeeds. This is not to say that good universities cannot survive in western China. There are already several examples of top universities in Lanzhou, Chengdu, Kunming and other western cities. Moreover, some of the weaker universities have a few outstanding scholars that support dynamic departments. However, in most cases, research capacity is very weak in western China and most universities are struggling to keep abreast of their counterparts in eastern China and others in the Asian region.
First, western universities need earmarked funding for national and international advisors to provide better strategies for their future development. Second, they need advocates that can bring them into the circles of international cooperation for strengthening capacity in teaching, research and service. Third, they need to decide how to make better use of their scarce resources. Some might be better served with a focus on innovative teaching methods, than trying to spread a limited amount of research funding across departments. Fourth, some need to partner more in consortia relationships. Fifth, provincial governments need to remove obstacles to Sino-foreign joint programs, while at the same time more closely monitoring the results of these joint ventures in cooperative education. Sixth, NGOs need to work out strategies to get ethnic minorities in these universities into pathways that will improve their third language skills of English, something that will work to their benefit in the future development of their regions, as well as placing them on a par with other students in competition for short term overseas study programs. Seventh, western region universities can better capitalise on their multiethnic and multicultural characteristics. The global economy is multicultural and western regions universities have not fully capitalised on the special multicultural character of their human resources. Eighth, colleges and universities in the western regions have a very special role to play in equalising educational opportunities in their poor regions. Improving their capacities in educational research and social development, as well as partnering them with universities in eastern China and overseas, could produce a new dynamic that will help China reach the goals of Education For All in a timely fashion in 2015.
Government has set ambitious targets for expanding the percentage of young Chinese people who attend college or university. Do you think these targets are realistic, given that China already appears to have significant numbers of unemployed graduates?
Wang: Several years ago I said that the expansion of higher education should proceed more gradually. In 2005, the gross enrolment rate for higher education reached 21%, exceeding the plan and ahead of schedule. In these circumstances it is even more important for the expansion of higher education to slow down.
Hu: I think the target was too grandiose (宏伟). It exceeds the real economic level and development needs. But the key point is not whether the target is realistic, but the way it was decided. If Chinese universities had significant autonomy (自主权), the student enrolment rate would be decided by the market’s real need for graduates. Now the problem is precisely that the ‘visible hand’ [ie, of government intervention] is too powerful, it restricts the play of the market’s invisible hand. I feel the low employment rate of graduates could cause social instability and this should not be ignored.
Postiglione: The question is not whether the targets are realistic, but whether colleges and universities can deliver what they promise. Unfortunately, consolidation of strengthen in research and teaching is not always keeping pace with the rapid expansion in student numbers. More unfortunate is the fact that the focus on their shortcomings is singularly on delivery of jobs after graduation. Just as China had to get accustomed to fee paying higher education beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it will also get used to the fact that market economies do not guarantee employment to college and university graduates. Governments can work to modify the shortcomings of market forces but not control the market. The government should not be bound to guarantee jobs for graduates from minban colleges, a great many of which are still offering substandard education. It has already permitted the market to significantly influence enrolments rates in public colleges and universities, to the detriment of some academic fields like philosophy, sociology, literature, etc. which have shrunken subscribers among the new generation of job conscious students. Colleges and universities are not only for providing jobs. They are neither free nor compulsory. In most cases, the problem of finding suitable employment is not rooted in the education they have received, but in the state of the labour market in a particular year. Nevertheless, a problem often arises for students from poor rural areas who lack the information and sophistication for making informed choices, even while they have borrowed great sums of money which the need to repay. It is the government’s role to step in and protect these students, provide them with guidance, and support so that they can carry out their studies and have a high probability of graduating with a credential that is suitable to their skills and the needs of their communities.
Professor Wang Xiaohui is a researcher at Beijing Normal University’s Comparative Educational Research Centre. Born in Changchun in 1952, he studied at the Northeast Normal University, later taking a PhD. at Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. He has visiting fellowships in France and Taiwan, and has worked as a researcher in the Ministry of Education.
Hu Wenbin is Senior Adviser to Cambridge Education Consultations and, over the last five years, has played a leading role in design and monitoring of education projects financed by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development. Born in 1963, he took Bachelors, Masters and PhD degrees at, respectively, Central China Normal University, East China Normal University and Beijing Normal University. He worked for 12 years in the Ministry of Education’s Department of Policy and Regulation, before joining the World Bank in 1995, and has since worked mainly on international cooperation projects.
Gerard Postiglione is a professor at the University of Hong Kong, serving as director of the Wah Ching Centre of Research on Education from 2000 to 2005. He has worked as a research consultant in China for many international organisations, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, the Academy of Educational Development, DFID and the Ford Foundation. His publications include the recently published Education and Social Change in China: Inequality in a Market Economy (ed.), M. E. Sharpe, 2006.