116 6 Financing Compulsory Education in Rural Areas: The Development ...
the enrolment rates for rural areas was much lower than in urban areas, and drop-
out rates remained high. Participation had improved during the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution (GPCR) as a result of policy to locate a school in every vil-
lage and use it for propaganda. After the fall of the Gang of Four the impetus
weakened and it ceased to be clear how adequate funds could be found to maintain
existing schools and provide necessary facilities and teachers.
A sustainable funding system is the key to the development of rural compul-
sory education because poor counties cannot finance their school systems from
domestic revenues. The funding has a direct impact on the scale, speed, quantity
and quality of implementation of the goals and targets of compulsory education
policy. The geographic scale of areas where participation has been historically low,
and the magnitude of the population of school age children are unprecedented with
over 150 million of primary school age in the 1980s. The stock of schools was
degraded by the GPCR and many teachers were “minban” supported directly from
meager local revenues.
The convention in China is to consider educational investment in an area as a
whole. Compulsory education finance in China involves all the expenditure related
to activities of compulsory education including funds needed for capital expendi-
ture, expenditure on the purchase and maintenance of teaching equipment and
books, for teachers’ salaries and for initial and in-service training of teachers, and
for remitting student fees and special support for students from difficult families.
The distinctions between recurrent and capital expenditure are recognized but
are not as distinct as in many other countries. In the 1980s funds could be moved
between budget headings as a result of changing patterns of demand and the local
politics of resource allocation. Local decision making might not reflect national
policy, most obviously in the extent that it tended to favour central schools and
secondary schools over small and remote primary schools. The task of funding
schools has always been constrained by the availability of funds, by distributional
mechanisms that favoured richer rather than poorer areas, and more recently, by
large scale movements of population.
In China as in many other rapidly developing countries the State is the provider
of most educational services. This is both because the State is the only institution
that has the capacity to reach all parts of China, and because is has the responsibil-
ity to provide basic services to all the people. Compulsory education to grade 9 has
been mandatory since 1986 and the law is enforced in almost all parts of China.
The mandate implies that funding for implementing compulsory education will be
provided by the State and where this is not the case the State will be responsible
for systems that raise and distribute funds from enterprises and local authorities.
This is inevitable because basic education in China is seen as a public good and
it mirrors the situation across the world where over 170 countries have predomi-
nantly publicly funded education systems and essentially free compulsory educa-
tion at school level. This includes the majority of OECD countries e.g. the UK,
Australia, the USA, Canada, and Japan which all publicly finance schools systems
up grade 12. As countries in Asia become richer public finance also provides the
great majority of the resources available e.g. in India and Thailand (Liu 2010 ).