92 5 Rural Teacher Issues
teachers as those teachers who are temporarily employed in the state primary and
secondary schools but with no official institutional post. They are paid by the
school they are working in and may also receive income from local government
(Zhou 2011 ). They are invariably on lower salaries and have fewer benefits than
official teachers. Before the 1990s public teachers or “minban” were employed
from local revenues with or without qualifications as temporary teachers and were
common in rural areas. After these teachers were declared prohibited, substitute
teachers began to be permitted to fill teacher shortages. The main difference is that
substitute teachers generally had to pass a minimum qualification test, whereas
“minban” and public supported teachers did not.
Public teachers first appeared in the earlier years after the funding of new China
based on the principle of “Poor country runs big education system”. By 1951
primary public teachers grew from 105,000 in 1949 to 425,000 in 1951, and the
proportion of public teachers out of the total grew from 12.6 % to 34.8 %. Public
teachers in secondary schools grew from 28,239 in 1949 to 228,000 in 1951, tak-
ing 31.2 % of the national total. It expanded fast during the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution (GPCR) between 1966–1976, when the child-bearing rate
reached its peak with fast growth in the number of school age children. During
the GPCR teachers colleges had been closed causing serious shortages of trained
teachers. As a result large numbers of untrained people became teachers and
most were selected for ideological rather than professional skills. Public teachers
increased from 1.770 million to 4.710 million over a ten year period. By 1977,
56 % of all teachers in the country were public teachers supported by local contri-
butions and almost all of these were rural teachers (Zhou 2011 ).
It became increasingly clear that the “Four Modernisations” that included edu-
cation could not be achieved without regularizing and professionalizing the work-
force of rural teachers. The use of public teachers on a large scale in rural areas
was regressive and unfair, and was impeding progress towards universal access to
education. Political reforms changed the climate for development and after 1985 it
became a priority to improve the quality of rural teachers. This meant that public
teachers were phased out and were either dismissed or retrained and transferred to
official teacher status.
It proved easier to pass the legislation than to implement it. It remained the case
that in remote and poor areas qualified teachers were unwilling to work there and
it was difficult to recruit and retain teachers. Shortages of qualified teachers per-
sisted in rural areas. Large number of substitute teachers appeared after the 1980s
when public teachers were officially abandoned. In 1997, the number reached a
peak of over 1 million (He 2010 ). Public teachers therefore remained as a signif-
icant but smaller proportion of the teacher workforce with even less status than
they had before. Their placement, social status, salaries and benefits continued to
catch public attention and they were the subject of debates on how to realize the
goal of having all teachers qualified.
In August 1992, State Education Commission, State Development Planning
Commission, Ministry of Personnel and Financial Department released The
Suggestions of Improving and Strengthening Public Teachers and Resigning