China has been promoting student-centered education under the current curriculum reform. However, teachers in rural schools continue to exercise tight control of the classroom, with lecturing taking up most of the class time. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews in a rural elementary school, this study analyzes the rationale of rural…

China's elaborate system of local mediation committees has piqued researchers' curiosity for decades and sparked an argument in these pages. Crucial questions--concerning how much mediation actually takes place, what kinds of disputes are mediated, who seeks mediation, and how successful it is--have gone unanswered for lack of data. This article…

Much educational effectiveness research has been conducted over the past 40 years in developed countries, whereas few studies have focused on developing or newly industrialized countries such as the People's Republic of China. The case studies discussed in this article are part of a larger multiple-case, mixed-methods study that investigated 6…

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…

There has been a substantial disparity in the job prospects between higher education graduates from urban regions and those from the countryside in China. In other words, higher education graduates from cities find it easier to obtain jobs and to obtain better jobs than their peers who have grown up in the countryside. Against this background, the…

This paper discusses effects of home language usage on minority student educational attainment in western China. Using survey data, the author finds that non-Chinese-speaking minority students are at a disadvantage in the transition to senior secondary schools. However, their transition to junior secondary schools is even more complicated. Rural…

Currently, the rural-urban disparity in access to higher education opportunities is primarily trending toward continuous shrinking; however, this disparity is still very clear and is especially marked in terms of opportunities to attend the top universities. Urbanization and the extension of admission to colleges and universities have played an…

Based on a survey of student enrollment at fifty colleges and universities of varying types in ten provinces and urban districts, including Shaanxi, Fujian, Hunan, and Shanghai, we analyzed the overall disparity in urban and rural women college students' access to education, as well as the urban-rural disparity across different types of…

This article reports the findings of a survey administering the personal well-being index (PWI) in six Chinese cities (N = 3,390) to ascertain the personal well-being of China's urban population. The specific aims of the study were: (a) ascertain whether Chinese urban residents are satisfied with their lives; (b) validate the PWI using an urban…

The widely reported economic divide between the richer eastern provinces and the poorer western provinces in China has an exact parallel in the development of basic education. As a result of geographical, historical and social factors the quality and management of the education system lags considerably behind the east coast. A pioneering project…

Younger (13 years) and older (17 years) adolescents (N = 160) from urban and rural China responded to written scenarios in which children's rights to self-determination and nurturance conflicted with the desires of authorities. They also evaluated scenarios in which children's desire to exercise self-determination was in conflict with their own…

Analysis of in-depth, qualitative interviews with students, faculty, and administrators shows that Chinese minorities face substantial obstacles in higher education access. The article identifies several factors that limit ethnic minority student access--including background education, limited government funding, and low entrance examination…

Based on some problems lying in current rural secondary education taking Ling County as an example, this paper proves the necessity and feasibility of moving rural secondary schools to town in the current condition: it is an objective demand by the changes in students; it is a necessary demand to optimize resource allocation and to improve…

The number of farmers in China has been more than 900 million since the mid 1990s. According to the China Villages Statistical Yearbook 2006, by the end of 2005 the number of farmers in China had reached 949.075 million, or 72.6 per cent of China's total population. The "three-dimensional rural issues" concerning agriculture, the…

This article examined the differences between rural/urban older adults in their trajectories of activities of daily living (ADL) over a 4-year period. The sample included 2,490 community dwelling older adults who completed three waves (1998, 2000, and 2002) of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey. Among them, 63.5% were from rural…