SYA's Capstone Project
Every SYA program had a capstone project. For European countries, the students were divided into groups and assigned different locations in their country to focus their studies in that location. For us, we were divided into topics, such as Education or Politics, and we were to study a specific issue in Beijing. (In a way, the home office was much more conservative with the China program, and they did not allow us to travel in the first semester.)
My group of 4 decided to study the Beijing education system in primary school and its relation to housing prices because it seemed like a relatively simple topic. A news story about a 11 square meter house selling for 5.3 million RMB (around 800,000 USD) caught our attention, and we wanted to investigate this topic. With our logic, since the education system had a school district system similar to the US's, the better the school was, the more expensive the housing in the surrounding school district would be. The first day out, we realized that our vision of the education system was completely wrong. In fact, using the school district system wasn't the only way to get one's child to attend a school, and living in a school district may not even qualify one's kid to attend a school.
To save you from reading our 20 page paper in order to understand the complexity of this issue, I have "condensed" the main points that we have learned to paragraphs still too long to be completely understandable. The system is simply too complex.
China’s primary school enrollment rates have risen from 20% in 1949 to an estimated 99.7% this year. Much of the change was credited to the Law of Compulsory Education (1986), which ensured that “school-age children and adolescents enroll in school near the places where their residence is registered” by designating specific school district zones for each primary school on the basis of school size, local school-age population, surrounding traffic conditions and administrative requirements. Since Chinese people place a high priority on their children's education, housing prices in good schools districts understandably rise.
We analyzed two schools: Beijing No. 2 Experimental Primary School and Beijing Mechanical Primary School both located near Xidan in Xicheng District. In case nothing made sense in the previous sentence, the No.2 Experimental Primary School is one of the best primary schools in Beijiing, while the Mechanical Primary School is not. They are both located near the center of the city and near a commercial shopping area.
The disparity between the two districts was clear in the graph below.
However, a graph cannot represent the entire situation. Many of the houses in the school district for Mechanical Primary School were reserved for military. Many houses in general were bought a long time ago at a much cheaper price. Many people didn't even use the house-buying method to register their kid at a certain school.
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| Property developer of an apartment complex in the school district of one of the best primary schools in Beijing. |
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| The president of the No.2 Experimental Primary School; he refused to answer our questions. |
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| A committee member of the Zhongguancun district committee of education. |
The committee member, Mr. Wang, told us that many large companies can donate items to a school in exchange for several of their employees' kids to be able to attend that school if the employees had a collective registered hukou. They can't, however, donate money because this would be seen as "bribery." None of these rules were written, and so these methods are often borderline illegal. The No.2 Experimental Primary School used to receive a ton of donations from large companies, so many of the students in the school did not live in the district. Recently, on April 26th of this year, Xicheng district (where both schools are located) mandated that students attending a school through a collective registered hukou could only be randomly assigned to a school, ending this entire donation-exchange process.
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| In order to make this confusing system a bit less confusing, here is a slightly helpful graph that is still, indeed, confusing. |
Using me as an example, my parents had a Beijing hukou, so when I was born, I had the same hukou as them. I had the privilege of receiving better healthcare and education than the majority of the Chinese population simply because my parents studied in Beijing. When my mom first started working, she did not have her own house, so she placed her hukou in her workplace and did not change it when she got her own living space. In this case, both my mom and I had a collective registered hukou. My father was in America when I was born, so I'm not sure how the scenario would have turned out if he was working in China at that time. If my mom worked in a company with enough money and influence, she could've sent me to a school of her choice. However, if I was reaching primary school age right now and my mom's hukou was specifically in Xicheng district, I would have been randomly assigned to a school in my district. The entire system changes so much that there is no stability for the parents.
Since relying on the collective registered hukou is too risky, most parents just stay on the traditional path of buying a house in a school district. Even then, the inequality is apparent. Clearly wealthier people have an upper hand in buying houses in a school district, but some housing is owned by companies instead of the government so that only their workers can buy the housing. In other cases, some families bought the housing so long ago that the low prices didn't affect the families. However, buying houses now proves to be too expensive for many families, so the education inequality is clearer.
There are currently some policies put in place to try to reform the education system. There is already a cap in certain districts on the housing prices. For example, the school district for the No.2 Experimental Primary School has a cap of 170,000 RMB per square meter. Also, some underperforming schools have merged with prestigious schools as a branch in order to evenly distribute resources and attract more people to the underperforming schools. Several schools have tested teacher-swapping for an even distribution of good teachers. All of these policies are small steps toward solving the huge education inequality problem.
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| My team and I walked around the committee member's office building. |
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| A real-estate agent who repeatedly told us not to use his name or company. |
We encountered a lot of problems with unwilling professionals. A lot of real-estate agents turned us down because they thought that we were Western journalists willing to shine a harsh light on the Chinese education system. The real-estate agent pictured was really helpful and answered all of our questions, but even he constantly reminded us not to use his name or his company in the news story he thought we were going to write, despite us saying that we were only researching for a high school project. The principal of the No.2 Experimental Primary School definitely did not want to be caught up in a potential scandal caused by high school students. The CCP is always reminding its media and its people that they seek the most equal education system that exists, and because that goal is impossible to achieve, the inequalities have to be kept hidden to media outlets that are eager to "expose" the Chinese system. That is what factored into a lot of the paranoia that surrounded the people we interviewed.
The project was a lot harder than we expected, and we spent almost double the time that other groups spent on research. However, the people we met and the things we learned made the entire project very worthwhile.
