launched three years ago to improve rural parenting. Her mother
had been taught the story she told Rao by a parenting trainer earlier
that day. Such early intervention programmes can yield enormous
returns – both for the families and for the country. China saw 51 mil-
lion births between 2014 and 2016, the majority of them to families
holding rural hukou (residence permits), even though 56 percent of
Chinese now live in urban areas. But while thousands of poor rural
families are benefitting from such programmes, millions more don’t
have the chance – and only a national intervention can help them.
Invisible Crisis
In October 2016, The Lancet, the world’s premier medical jour-
nal, updated its series “Advancing Early Childhood from Science to
Scale,” which warned that an estimated 43 per cent, or 249 million,
of children under five in low-and middle-income countries face an
elevated risk of falling short of their development potential.
This risk is evident in China. In May, at a forum in Tsinghua Uni-
versity on China’s left-behind children, whose parents are working in
cities and leave them in the care of rural grandparents or other rela-
tives, Lu Mai, secretary-general of the China Development Research
Foundation (CDRF), noted that they found that five year olds in the
Yunnan countryside lagged behind even three-year-old children in
Shanghai. Between 2013 and 2015, the Rural Education Action Pro-
gramme (REAP) team jointly established by Stanford University and
the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, conducted a Bayley Scale Test, an internationally-accepted
test of infants’ development, on 1,800 babies and toddlers in poor
rural areas in Shaanxi Province in China’s northwest. 53 percent of
those at the age of 24 to 30 months had low cognitive development,
up from 28 percent when they were six to 12 months old, 32 per-
cent at 12 to 18 months, and 41 percent at 18 to 24 months. The
problems worsened as the children grew older. In a joint survey in
September and October 2015 by Save the Children in China, REAP
and the China National Health and Family Planning Commission
(NHFPC), about 47 percent of the 448 babies and toddlers tested in
poor rural areas in Yunnan and Hebei provinces scored below the av-
erage level in the cognitive portion of the Bayley test, and 53 percent
in the social-emotional portion.
About one-third of China’s future population, or about 440 mil-
lion, are “in danger of being permanently handicapped (cognitively),”
stressed Professor Scott Rozelle, co-director of REAP in his speech at
the Stanford Centre at Peking University on June 2. He described it
as China’s “invisible crisis” which would hamper expectation of those
rural parents and China’s growth prospects.
The crisis is already visible. In 2015, only 24 percent of China’s
migrant labour force had completed a secondary school education,
the lowest among major middle-income countries, including Mexico,
Turkey and Thailand, according to estimates based on official data in
research by Chinese and US scholars, including Rozelle, published
in the winter issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a publica-
tion of the American Economic Association. The latest figure is that
only 25 percent of China’s migrant workers held a secondary school
diploma or above in 2016, according to the annual report on China’s
migrant workers released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Besides the poor quality of primary schools, competitive entrance
exams and the high cost of secondary school education, developmen-
tal impairment is believed to be a significant factor. In the Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children, an IQ test, administered on 2,500
Grade 8 students in 100 rural schools in Shaanxi and Gansu in Sep-Breakdown of China’s public spending on education
Investment yield curve of human capital
Babies and toddlersPreschool agePrimary school
sec
ondary school
University educationIntervention on babies and toddlers (0-3)Preschool intervention (4-5)schoolingAdult training