China’s Rural Poor Face Widening Education Gap : Schools: Fees can take a fourth of a farmer’s annual earnings of less than $50 a year. Rapid inflation has eaten away his real income, while city dwellers’ purchasing power has been cushioned by pay raises.

Mo Longshan, a shy 12-year-old girl with pigtails, finishes sixth grade this year--no small accomplishment for a child of China’s poor regions.

China’s poorest children--the ones who herd sheep, chip rock out of mines or gather firewood to help their families make ends meet--are often unable to afford school.

They are victims of the worsening gap between the impoverished western part of China and the booming cities and eastern seaboard.

The gap has widened in recent years as rapid inflation has eaten away farmers’ real incomes, while city dwellers have been cushioned somewhat from price increases by pay raises. Millions of rural people have flooded cities, looking for work.

China’s leaders insist the countryside remains stable. Still, concern about the potential for social unrest can be detected in recent calls to hold down the many types of fees levied by rural officials and to boost measures to alleviate extreme poverty, which is concentrated in remote rural areas.

Western analysts say the government has not done enough for rural education.

Official Chinese statistics say 2.6 million children are missing out on at least a five-year education, the minimum for literacy. A government survey found nearly 12% of 6- to 14-year-olds were out of school last year.

Enrollment in primary school is high: 98%, contrasted with about 50% just after the Communists won a civil war in 1949.

But a World Bank report said actual attendance rates are much lower--in some places, almost none of the girls and only half the boys go to school.

In southwestern Guizhou, a province of rocky hills where one-third of the people are poor farmers, the bank estimates 30% of children who enroll do not attend.

“Children in the distant mountain villages are being sacrificed. They’ve become a new generation of illiterates,” Li Chunling of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said in a report on rural education.

Charity has enabled Mo Longshan to go through childhood in Guizhou as a star pupil.

She gets 90 yuan ($11) to cover her annual school fees from a soldier in Inner Mongolia who sponsors her through Project Hope, a Chinese charity with government ties. It is the country’s most visible assistance to rural dropouts.

Project Hope built Mo’s white-tiled, four-story school in Jichang county two years ago.

All children in the area attend classes, said the principal, Chen Yilin, who like Mo and most of her classmates is a member of the Buyi ethnic minority. Before, when only grades 1-4 were offered in a rundown building, half the girls and a quarter of the boys dropped out.

Project Hope has built more than 700 schools nationwide, nine of them in Guizhou, and gives thousands of children stipends.

But that is a small effort in a nation as populous as China, said Gan Dongyu of the Youth Development Foundation, Project Hope’s parent organization.

“The government has not to any great extent been redistributing resources to the poor areas to help out in education,” said Jonathan Unger, a China specialist at Australian National University.

Unger, a sociologist who studies rural China, said rural teachers are poorly paid but fees are still painfully high.

In poor areas of Guizhou, for example, school fees can take a fourth of a poor farmer’s annual income of less than $50 a year.

Dropout rates are higher for girls because their families see no economic benefits in girls’ education, since girls join their husbands’ families after marriage, Unger said.

In cities, where average per capita annual income is estimated at nearly $300, school fees take a much smaller bite of the family budget and virtually all children attend school.

In a report in December, Li of the Academy of Social Sciences noted that during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when higher education came to a halt, the central government continued to push education in poor areas. Students and persecuted intellectuals sent to the countryside ended up serving as teachers.

Then, in the late 1970s, education funds began going mainly to developed areas, Li said. In poor areas, schools started to close for lack of funds.

The shift of the financial burden to parents began in the mid-1980s, when schools became the responsibility of local governments, which raise money from taxes and fees.

Inadequate government financing is a problem for schools in better off areas too. But most schools in developed areas are able to raise money by running farms and factories or renting out facilities.

Lynn Webster Paine of Michigan State University, who researches education policy, said teachers she met from far western Xinjiang laughed when asked how their school made money.

“It was ludicrous to them,” she said. “The few businesses that already exist in their villages aren’t making money, so how can the school?”

The government announced plans last year to try to eliminate poverty entrenched in the western mountains, deserts and rocky plateaus. Part of the program is an increase in the education budget for minorities from $25 million to $120 million.

China’s 55 minority groups live mostly in the remote rural regions, including most of the border areas, where education problems are most serious.

The World Bank says poor education results in larger, less healthy families, less use of new agricultural technology, less chance of finding work outside farming.

Mo Longshan sees school as a way out of poverty, but not out of her village.

“I want to be a teacher and help build up my hometown,” she said in an interview in her small house, where light peeked through holes in the walls. Three good-student awards decorated one newspaper-covered wall.

Her father said that with no education and little land, he earns “usually enough, sometimes a bit extra.”

“Her future is brighter,” he said.