MARCH 10, 2015 7:04 AM March 10, 2015 7:04 am
A graduation ceremony in Shanghai at Fudan University, one of China’s most prestigious.Credit Aly Song/Reuters
Henan Province in central China is mostly a flat expanse of fields, towns and villages, whose 100 million or so people are sometimes slurred by others as bumpkins. Adding to the insult, the Chinese government has long skewed opportunities away from Henan in an area of life that matters intensely to many in China: getting their children into universities.
This grievance has stung enough that it is one of the few complaints to have ruffled the torpor of this year’s full gathering of the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislature.
People in Henan have long complained that education funds and national quotas for places in universities have been tilted away from them and other big, crowded rural provinces, in favor of the wealthier, more privileged parts of the country, especially Beijing and Shanghai. At a gathering open to journalists on Sunday, delegates to the congress from Henan denounced educational inequality, according to reports from the session. One delegate bowed before reporters to demand fair treatment.
“In recent years, the Ministry of Education has given Henan a lot of support and care and, on behalf of 100 million Henan people, I thank you,” said the delegate, Li Guangyu, a businessman who runs an education investment company, according to the main evening newspaper of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital. “I also sincerely ask that you continue supporting and helping Henan, and let more kids from Henan win a fair chance for an education.”
Other representatives from Henan also spoke up, and the provincial news media has taken up their cause.
“The vicious circle persists that it’s better to be born in the city than the countryside, and it’s better to be born in Beijing than Henan,” said a commentary on Tuesday in The Dahe News, a popular newspaper in Henan.
China’s system of university recruitment is just one way in which inequity and political favoritism undercut the government’s vows to deliver equal treatment to all citizens. But educational inequality especially riles families who see education, especially a place in a prestigious university, as an escape from a hard, uncertain life for their children.
Under China’s intensely competitive and stressful university entrance exams, or “gaokao,” each province and the major cities, such as Beijing, devise and score their own. Students indicate the universities and colleges they want to apply to, and their test scores are used to allocate spots, with the central authorities setting quotas indicating how many applicants schools should admit from each area. The political calculus of distributing quotas across provinces and cities works against students from big provinces, such as Henan, which also have large populations of farmers.
The central government has tended to allot a larger proportion of university positions to children from big cities, where keeping the population contented is seen as politically more important. Most of the best universities are also in Shanghai and Beijing, and they have been happy to go along with giving more slots to local students.
All that irks people from Henan and similar regions, especially because China’s household registration system means that people cannot freely move from one area to another for better schooling.
“My daughter went to nursing college, and my son is going to a vocational college,” said Rong Tiekui, a villager from Sui County in Henan, in a telephone interview. “But they would have had a better chance if there was equal educational opportunity. Everyone knows that Henan suffers from geographic discrimination.”
According to Mr. Li, the businessman, Peking University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, allocated 85 spots in 2013 for the 758,000 students from Henan who took the university entrance exam, making for a recruitment rate of 0.01 percent. The 73,000 students from Beijing were allotted 226 positions, a recruitment rate of 0.31 percent.
