From the early 1980s, China underwent perhaps the world's largest and most comprehensive experiment of decentralization in education. There has been a shift from decentralization to some degree of recentralization, however, since the mid-1990s, particularly since the early 2000s. The purpose of this shift was to establish a stable and regularized…

Based on one of the most widely used datasets by foreign-based sociologists, this paper examines the rate of returns to education in rural China. Compared with the previous studies that showed rather low rates in rural areas throughout the 1980s, this study finds a considerably higher rate in 1996. A chief contributor is the rapid non-agricultural…