World Bank okays $120 mln education loan for Guangdong

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On Tuesday the World Bank announced the approval of a 120 million US dollar loan to China, with the aim of improving compulsory education in southern Guangdong Province.

With 107 million people and two first-tier cities, Guangdong still suffers from a significant urban-rural imbalance – a nationwide problem that the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) stressed needs addressing.

CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping outlined in his report to the 19th CPC National Congress that no one would be left behind when it comes to receiving a compulsory education, promising that going into the next five years and beyond, the Party would “strive to see that each and every child has fair access to good education,” no matter their family background.

Why is the World Bank helping China’s richest province?

Guangdong is China’s wealthiest province – in the first three quarters of this year it contributed 10.6 percent of the country’s entire GDP. However, in terms of GDP per capita, the IMF ranks Guangdong as 2016’s eighth best performing province or municipality, with 72,787 yuan (10,958 US dollars).

That puts it relatively far behind Beijing (first, with 118,198 yuan or 17,798 US dollars) and Jiangsu Province (fourth, 96,877 yuan or 14,586 US dollars), suggesting Guangdong’s output isn’t being evenly distributed across the province.

The Guangdong Science Center, based in Guangzhou. /VCG Photo

Shenzhen and Guangzhou – Guangdong’s two first-tier cities – together contributed 1.95 trillion yuan (294.3 billion US dollars) and 1.96 trillion yuan (295.8 billion US dollars) respectively to China’s GDP in 2016, just less than half of the 7.95 trillion yuan produced by the entire province.

But despite the impressive growth by Guangdong’s urban powerhouses, smaller cities and county-level jurisdictions show a much different picture.

Urban-rural divide

A report published in People’s Daily on October 9 showed that out of the 100 best performing county-level jurisdictions in the whole country, only one was in Guangdong, in 91st place. Jiangsu meanwhile had 20 counties in the top 100, including the best performer (Kunshan, a county-level city).

While Guangdong’s poor showing in the ranking can be put down to the fact that a significant portion of the province is urbanized and made up of two major sub-provincial cities (Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and 21 prefecture-level cities, a sizeable population (33.9 million people) still lives in rural areas of the province.

A village benefiting from poverty alleviation measures in Qingyuan, northern Guangdong Province, December 2015. /VCG Photo

The poorest prefecture-level city of Yunfu had a GDP of 77.8 billion yuan in 2016, which in per capita terms works out at 26,035 yuan (3,934 US dollars). That’s less than a quarter of the per capita income of Foshan, which China Daily reported as being 17,202 US dollars last year.

Guangdong can ‘provide lessons’ for rest of China

According to a study by HSBC earlier this year, the average Chinese family spends 42,982 US dollars on their child’s entire education, with 55 percent of the 946 parents surveyed saying they used general savings, investments or insurance to fund schooling.

The World Bank says that while Guangdong has, like the rest of China, achieved universal access to primary and secondary education, there is still a rural-urban divide in terms of learning facilities and teaching quality. The 120 million US dollar loan will be put towards building classrooms, improving ICT facilities and giving teachers an enhanced training and assessment system.

Amer Hasan, the World Bank’s senior economist, said the loan to Guangdong “will also help provide lessons on how to achieve more inclusive education, which will be relevant for other parts of China and other developing economies,” suggesting the loan is to some degree an experiment that could guide other provinces in addressing education inequality.

Children with their teacher outside a primary school in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, 2013. /VCG Photo‍

Shenzhen and Guangzhou are already regarded as drivers of modernization in Chinese education, with the Shenzhen government planning to increase its number of colleges and universities to 25 by 2025, as well as boosting the number of students from 200,000 to 250,000.

The 19th National Congress of the CPC, which concluded last month, saw delegates from the education sector discuss plans to advance nationwide reform in areas such as technical and vocational training, the college entrance examination and closing the urban-rural gap.

Dr. Wang Yan, a senior official at the National Institute of Educational Sciences of China, told CGTN that educational inequality in early childhood is one of the major concerns, so the government will expand pre-primary education by raising the gross enrollment rate to over 85 percent.