Novo Império do Meio, um gigante com pés de barro

«China has invested huge amounts in physical infrastructure, but neglected its human capital. Do not be fooled by league tables, such as the oecd’s pisa rankings, that show Chinese high-school students outperforming those of nearly every other country. The Chinese figures are not for the whole country, but only for the better schools in the richer cities.

The children of rural migrants are barred from such schools, thanks to China’s brutal hukou (household registration) system, which excludes people with rural origins from many public services in big cities. Migrant workers’ children must either pay to attend awful urban private schools or stay back in the countryside with grandma and go to a mediocre government school there. Such discrimination is keenly resented.

After decades of research, Mr Rozelle and Ms Hell present some startling data. Their team gave an iq-like test to thousands of rural Chinese toddlers. They found that more than 50% were cognitively delayed and unlikely to reach an iq of 90 (in a typical population, only 16% score so poorly). There were several reasons for this.

Half of rural babies are undernourished. Caregivers (often illiterate grandmothers) cram them with rice, noodles and steamed buns, not realising that they also need micronutrients. Studies in 2016 and 2017 found that a quarter of rural children in central and western China suffer from anaemia (lack of iron), which makes it hard for them to concentrate in school. Two-fifths of rural children in parts of southern China have intestinal worms, which sap their energy. A third of rural 11- and 12-year-olds have poor vision but no glasses, so struggle to read their schoolbooks. (...)

Among the entire labour force in 2010, 44% of urban and 11% of rural Chinese had graduated from high school. Among the current crop of students, the figures are much better: 97% of urban students graduated from high school in 2015, and 80% of rural children went to a high school of some sort. But the rural “high schools” were often dreadful, opened rapidly to meet official targets and staffed by teachers with little interest in teaching. The authors tested thousands of children at “vocational” rural high schools, and found that 91% had learned practically nothing: they scored the same or worse on tests at the end of a year of schooling as at the beginning.

Currently, 70% of the Chinese workforce is unskilled. Such labourers can do repetitive factory work, but as their wages rise, those jobs will move to poorer countries such as Vietnam. To escape from what economists call the “middle-income trap”, China needs rapidly to improve its people’s skills, so that they can handle more complex tasks. Yet its workers are far less educated than those in other middle-income countries, such as Mexico, Turkey and South Africa. They are also less educated than workers were in countries that recently grew rich, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when those places were no better off than China is today.

Much of the blame for all this rests with Mao, whose Cultural Revolution was “perhaps the largest intentional destruction of human capital the world has ever seen”. But the authors also blame “an almost unbelievable oversight” on the part of China’s more recent leaders. Correcting that is arguably the most important challenge facing China’s current rulers. They have the resources to succeed. A country that invests a whopping 43% of gdp can surely afford to spend a bit less on bridges and a bit more on its people’s brains. The authors offer sound prescriptions: improve rural schools, end discrimination against rural children, teach rural parents to read to their babies (instead of policing how many they may have), and so on.»

The biggest obstacle to China’s rise is struggling rural children