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Is Chinese Education Underfunded?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2010

Andrew Kipnis  and
Shanfeng Li
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Abstract

Scholarship on education in China has correctly emphasized the massive inequalities in reform era educational funding. In describing these inequalities, however, scholars have made dubious claims about the supposedly low level of funding for education in China in relation to other countries. In this article, we examine the statistics on which this claim is based and detail the ways in which education is funded in China that do not get counted in the statistics. We conclude that though funding for education in China is unequal, the total level of such funding may not be low. Moreover, the official statistics are not a reliable guide to comparative discussions of educational funding.

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 202 , June 2010 , pp. 327 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2010

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References

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3 See National Bureau of Statistics (comp.), China Statistics Yearbook 2001 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2001), p. 897Google Scholar. The fact that the UN and other international agencies publish such statistics but base their numbers on data from individual countries compounds the problem. Readers might imagine that the UN has either independently verified the data or at least ensured that each country is counting spending by the same methods. In the Chinese case, it is clear that the UN data simply reproduces that from China's statistical yearbooks. As the many footnotes to the UN data make clear, the data from different countries is not really comparable. This incomparability also makes the 5% average figure questionable.

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