China’s urban-rural gap is a threat to growth. Is the divide too wide to fix?
- Researchers report waning optimism about social mobility among rural Chinese as education disparities create obstacles for economy
Zheng Yajun, a mainland-born PhD graduate of the University of Hong Kong, knows from personal experience how difficult it is to break through China’s urban-rural divide.
Raised and educated in a remote small town in the northwestern province of Gansu, Zheng sat for the national college entrance examination twice before she was admitted to Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University in 2009.
Zheng did not find life easy at Fudan, where she struggled to understand her instructors and fellow classmates from big cities. Many of her classmates from less developed regions had a similar experience, she said.
“In my first year of university, I couldn’t understand why – although I had worked hard since childhood and never wasted a day – I still looked so bad compared to other students [from big cities],” she said in a widely circulated interview last year.
She managed to survive the fierce competition. After her graduation from Fudan, she expanded her master’s thesis on the gap between urban and rural students at top universities in China, and her findings were published early last year.
Zheng’s book, which discusses class differences from a sociological perspective, is one of the most prominent of several works on similar topics published in recent years in China, sparking widespread media coverage and public debate.
These discussions all point to the same question: are class divisions and the rural-urban divide irreparable in today’s China?
