Among the East Asian nations, a recurring predicament faced by educational institutions is that of providing inclusive but high-quality education. Active involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in education is valuable in China. Adream was such an NGO on education in China, established in 2008 with a singular and noble objective:…

This paper aims to investigate whether online private supplementary education, also known as shadow education, can alleviate educational inequality and what types of mechanisms can help alleviate it. We investigate this using an online learning platform dataset (3,603 anonymous students from China) with additional data from multiple sources and…

This article examines the impact of rural origin on higher education access among one ethnic group, the Uyghur, a Muslim minority group who reside mostly in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Uyghur university students, graduates, and the faculty who…

Distance higher education plays a critical role in the promotion of regional equality in China by contributing to the availability of higher education. However, unbalanced regional development of distance higher education can lead to a widening of educational inequity. The study on which this article reports sheds light on the issue of unbalanced…

In recent decades, China has experienced rapid economic development, and the education system has significantly improved, especially in special education. However, there are still some issues directly influencing access to and quality of special education in remote and rural areas of China, although the Chinese government has enacted some policies…

Purpose: Private supplementary tutoring has been increasingly used by parents as part of wider strategies to assist their children's education careers in China. With a theoretical lens of parentocracy, this article aimed to investigate the influential parental factors underlying the demand for private tutoring, focusing on parents' socioeconomic…

China implemented a policy to improve education equity through investing in boarding programs of public schools in rural and less-developed areas. However, this policy has not been informed by empirical research in the Chinese context. By using the nationally representative longitudinal data, this study investigates whether and to what extent…

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two ethnic villages in Southwest China, this article examines rural teachers' performative engagement with education reform, audit culture, and neoliberal market mandates in their daily practices. Teachers are at once pedagogical agents, street-level bureaucrats, and tourism entrepreneurs who both perform to…

In 1998, the People's Republic of China implemented an education policy, the "School Consolidation Policy", which entailed merging small rural schools with larger ones. It has had a massive effect on rural people across China, and as a result of it, over 60% of schools in outlying areas have closed. The policy's implementation and…

Based on the data collected in a one-year long fieldwork in Zhong, a county located in middle part of China, this article reconsiders the concept of "useless schooling," which was proposed in recent studies on the perceptions of value of education among lower-class rural residents in China. It calls for a understanding of those changes…

With the increasing population of Chinese migrant children in China and the call for addressing educational equity and revising education goals on behalf of the whole child, research indicates that those children experience various challenges regarding their education and well-being including unequal access to education, low quality of education,…

As a measure to eradicate poverty, education has become the choice of more and more countries in the world. The development of girls' education is an important means to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In the practice of poverty alleviation through supporting education, the Chinese government strives to solve the problem of…

This study examines the differential patterns of school success of rural students as a result of China's market transition. The process dimension, how families from different social backgrounds within rural society get involved in rural schooling and how this contributes to the inequality of school success within rural society, is investigated.…

In China's latest school funding reform, the central government remarkably increases input in basic education. However, this fiscal re-centralisation of education provision is implemented through a highly decentralised administration structure and yet local governments have long been criticised by the public for their inefficiency and misconduct.…

Our study sought to understand changes in gender inequality in education across four generations of rural Chinese women's educational experiences in a small community in southern China. The 24 interviews and numerous informal conversations with 12 women showed that gender-based favouritism for men and against women undergirded family expectations,…