C OvER sTORY
tember 2016, 47 percent of the of Shaanxi students and 49 percent
of Gansu students had an IQ below the norm, according to REAP.
In the past few years, various studies by Chinese scholars and the
REAP team have shown the real dropout rate of China’s rural junior
secondary schools is much higher than the official data. Many stu-
dents leave school but remain officially registered there, as dropout
out of compulsory education is illegal. For more than a decade, the
help from REAP, including providing eyeglasses, teacher incentives
and computer-aided studies, all worked in primary schools, but did
not work on junior secondary school students. “We think it is related
to the low IQ of a large share of junior high students who cannot
keep up with the fast pace curriculum in Chinese junior secondary
schools,” Rozelle told ChinaReport.
“The urban-rural gap is the biggest challenge for China to improve
the quality of the whole country’s human capital,” said Professor Shi
Yaojiang, director of Centre for Experimental Economics in Educa-
tion of Shaanxi Normal University and education director of REAP,
in an interview with the Chinese edition of ChinaReport.Poor Feeding and Parenting
“Historically, early childhood interventions have focused on chil-
dren of preschool age. But we now know that interventions encom-passing the period before conception through the first two years of
life can greatly reduce adverse growth and health outcomes, and help
ensure young children reach their full developmental potential,” said
Professor Stephen Lye of the University of Toronto, in the World
Health Organisation’s (WHO) news release about The Lancet series
he co-authored.
Developmental delays or stunts of infants in poorer areas can be
traced to nutrition and parenting problems, including those in Chi-
na. The WHO, World Bank and UNICEF, which provided contri-
butions and guidelines to The Lancet series, have called for a global
commitment on providing proper nutrition, responsive care-giving
and protection for the first 1,000 days of life for children in those
countries, the most critical for brain development.
Various studies of babies in China’s less-developed northwest and
southwest counties have detected a high ratio of malnutrition, in-
cluding anaemia and intestinal worms. Lack of interaction between
caregivers and their babies is common. Their studies show that this is
largely caused by caregivers’ ignorance and heavy workloads.
During their research in rural areas in China’s southwest and north-
west, Liu Peng and her colleagues at CDRF saw many caregivers
there, particularly grandmothers, carry their babies all day on their
backs, or tie their babies to the cradle so that they can work on farm-Three-and-a-half-year-old Zhang Zihan plays at home with her grandma and their parenting trainer
Zhang Yalan, Huachi county, Qingyang City, Gansu Province, June 15, 2017. The programme was
initiated by the China Development Research Foundation in September 2015. Zhang’s parents work in
Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. “The desk can be used as a place for a computer!” the little girl
said when she saw a desk in the picture. In their regular video dialogue via a smartphone, her parents
were very happy to see their daughter learn a lot from the programme, her grandma told ChinaReportIn an in-home visit, a village parenting trainer
(the man in the photo) shows the parent and
the 16-month-old baby a way to play and
read together as part of a Save the Children
in China project, Zhanyi district, Qujing City,
Yunnan Province, April 2017
Photo by save the children in china Photo by Li jia