ABSTRACT
Chinese policy advisors, as well as the general public, see surmounting the “rural problem” as the key to overcoming China’s delayed modernization, and they identify education as central for “solving all lingering rural problems and lifting millions of farmers out of poverty.”2 They also see education as a private benefit that enables individuals to improve their own lives. While it is agreed that education is both a public and private good, the question of who should pay and how much is more contentious. Education is therefore a pivotal domain in which the public discourse about entitlements (claimed and held by the people) and responsibilities (assumed with difficulty by the governing authorities) is negotiated. How the balance of entitlements and responsibilities is constituted in relation to rural education is of crucial importance for inequalities and social justice in China. This is because throughout the 1990s and 2000s the taxes and levies to cover education expenses comprised the largest part of the onerous “farmers’ burden” (Guo 2002; Wang and Wang 2003), and because educational disadvantage has a negative impact on the life chances of rural children, thereby tending to sustain rural-urban inequality.
