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Supporting socio-economically disadvantaged students to improve their academic resilience is vital in promoting social mobility and halting intergenerational transmission of poverty. Based on the baseline data 2013-2014 from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) database, this paper examined the impact of preschool education experience on academic resilience of disadvantaged students using coarsened exact matching (CEM) and hierarchical logistic regression. Research findings show that disadvantaged children have less access to preschool education than their advantaged peers, with a kindergarten attendance rate lower than 70%; that preschool education can significantly improve children's cognitive ability and effectively predict academic resilience of disadvantaged students; and that preschool education is a better predictor of resilience of rural disadvantaged students than that of their urban counterparts. The government should reinforce subsidies for early childhood education that can serve as compensation for disadvantaged kids; and should further universalize preschool education to secure the opportunity of high-quality pre-primary school education for disadvantaged children.

Transfer payment is of great significance for poverty alleviation and balanced regional development. Based on the first-hand survey data from 18 key counties of 6 provinces in China's national poverty alleviation and development program, this paper uses propensity score matching to calculate the effects of transfer payment funds on the results of compulsory education in impoverished areas and uses Shapley value decomposition to decompose correlated factors. It finds that when the characteristics of students, families and schools controlled, transfer payment funds significantly lower student academic achievements in some subjects and aggravate the inequality of educational results, which may be the result of the reduction of local education funds caused by the "crowding out effect" of transfer payment. Suggestions are made in this paper to standardize the utilization of transfer payment funds, establish a linkage mechanism between the educational results of poor students and transfer payment funds, implement the assisting plan for teachers and students in poor areas, strengthen the "pertinent support for intelligence development", and unite multiple agencies to increase input in education, with the purpose of reducing the inequality of compulsory education in poor areas.

Improving the poor's overall quality through education and promoting local economic development and social progress is an important way for China to alleviate poverty. At present, China has formed a policy system of poverty alleviation by education with its characteristics and has achieved remarkable results. This article first elaborates the definition and impact of poverty alleviation by education, and then through the use of literature review and other research methods, it combs the policies of China's poverty alleviation by education in different historical periods. The aim is to summarize China's poverty alleviation by education, analyze possible policy problems, and finally make constructive suggestions for its future development.

Education, as one of the forms of human capital investment, especially in developing countries, is considered an important way for families to get rid of generational poverty. The contradictory "poverty caused by education" is an education problem in the new era. It is a social phenomenon in which family members (children) receive education and cause family economic poverty. Based on the connotation of "poverty caused by education," this paper analyzed its formation mechanism from the three levels of society, family, and school and tried to give some suggestions to reduce the risk of "poverty caused by education effectively."

The use of increasingly popularized information technology to improve education poverty and then promote the balanced development of education has become the development trend of world education. On the road to poverty alleviation, China has firmly grasped information technology to encourage school reform in areas with scarce educational resources. Among them, "Triple Classroom" was the accurate result of the deep integration of education, teaching, and information technology. Driven by the "Triple Classroom" project, the Shi Shi Middle School in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, built the online open course with the "Shi Shi Xiang Yun (SSXY)" online school as a platform. Thus, they send high-quality educational resources to areas with scarce educational resources and effectively promote education quality improvement in marginal areas.

Poverty alleviation by education is the soul of reshaping the development of impoverished areas. In the implementation of poverty alleviation, the collaborative model of impoverished areas driven by developed regions is essential for China's poverty alleviation work. In 2016, Changxing County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, and Zhijin County, Bijie City, Guizhou Province, established a counterpart support relationship. According to Zhijin County's education assistance needs, Changxing County has gathered its strength to implement management input, demonstration guidance, and training guidance for its weak schools. With vocational education as the starting point, Zhijin County has been "remodeled" and "implanted" education assistance and has achieved a win-win situation. This article takes the education counterpart support activities of Changxing County and Zhijin County as an example to explore the path and methods of regional education assistance in China under the vision of collaboration.

The development of education to improve poverty in the region has become an essential direction of the world's poverty alleviation work. In the poverty alleviation by education work in China, educators who are on the front line of poverty are determined by education and nurturing their wisdom, leading countless children from families out of poverty and toward hope. In 2016, Liqun Chen, the principal who retired from a prestigious high school in eastern China loving the Miao Townships, insisted on combining poverty alleviation with supporting aspirations, using the love and responsibility of a "teacher" to inject new spirit into basic education in ethnic areas. He ignited dreams and hopes for children in frontier regions. This article elaborates on Liqun Chen's help and aspirations in Taijiang County from the perspectives of students, teachers, and regions.

Drawing on Carol Bacchi's post-structural analytical approach, this study examines the nature of recent policy reforms in China in relation to vocational education (VE). The article reveals key problem representations that characterise the "Implementation Plan of National Vocational Education Reform" (IPNVER) issued by the State Council of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2019, and how these have arisen in light of previous reforms. These previous reforms relate to China's policies, laws and regulations with respect to the higher vocational education system since the 'opening up' in 1978. The study reveals that the VE policy in China is strongly governed by 'economic logics' in the context of neoliberal globalisation, even as it exhibits various 'Chinese characteristics', and that developing VE is seen as a solution to promoting Chinese economic and social development. However, at the same time, important issues are also 'silenced' as a result of the dominance of more economic logics in national VE policy. The article suggests policymakers need to pay more attention to developments in regional education, the social welfare issues of poorer working urban and rural peoples, and the mental health of citizens, while developing the national economy.

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 poverty by developing education for girls. In this process, the government, enterprises, institutions, and individuals have made tremendous efforts one after another. Teacher Guimei Zhang used her efforts to set up the first high school for girls in Huaping County of Lijiang, the poorest western part of Yunnan Province, China, providing valuable educational opportunities for school-age girls in poverty-stricken areas for free. The school challenges the current education system. Girls can enter the school based on their will without the entrance examination. All students have achieved impressive and outstanding outcomes. This article records in detail the school-running experience, process, and propositions of Huaping Girls' High School.

Poverty is a complex social problem, which has always attracted attention. 2020 is the year of a decisive victory for the Chinese government to alleviate poverty. Education plays a fundamental role in the fight against poverty and is the foundation for eradicating poverty and stabilizing poverty alleviation. Based on the literature in the CNKI database, this study took "poverty-alleviation by supporting education" as the subject, and conducted a bibliometric analysis of the publications in the field of China's poverty alleviation by education during 1988-2020. Through analyzing the research time distribution and keyword, the results of poverty-alleviation by supporting education were sorted out and analyzed around three hotspots: the main framework of poverty alleviation, key models, and technical support. It is proposed that the research and development of China's poverty-alleviation by supporting education should pay more attention to its evaluation and sublimation of empirical theory.

Poverty is a complex social problem, which has always attracted attention. 2020 is the year of a decisive victory for the Chinese government to alleviate poverty. Education plays a fundamental role in the fight against poverty and is the foundation for eradicating poverty and stabilizing poverty alleviation. Based on the literature in the CNKI database, this study took "poverty-alleviation by supporting education" as the subject, and conducted a bibliometrics analysis of the publications in the field of China's poverty alleviation by education during 1988-2020. Through analyzing the research time distribution and keyword, the results of poverty-alleviation by supporting education were sorted out and analyzed around three hotspots: the main framework of poverty alleviation, key models, and technical support. It is proposed that the research and development of China's poverty-alleviation by supporting education should pay more attention to its evaluation and sublimation of empirical theory.

Poverty in the long run, as the long-term source of pressures, has strengthened the vulnerability of juveniles and has increased the incidence of psychological or behavioral problems during their growth. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen preventive intervention for adolescents to avoid poverty's "scar effect" upon their physical and mental health. Explore the effect of group counseling using the Achieving Success Everyday (ASE) model on improving the resilience of junior high school students in impoverished areas. This single-blind, randomized controlled study adopted a within-subject experimental design of 2 (intervention group/control group) x 3 (pre- and post-treatment, subsequent follow-ups) and conducted group counseling intervention on seventh- to eighth-grade students in poor areas of southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (the group counseling lasted 8 weeks, with one session every week, 60 [approximately] 90 min for each session). The intervention effect was then evaluated using the Resilience Scale of Chinese Adolescent (RSCA), Core Self-evaluations Scale (CSES), and Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire (SCSQ). Before the intervention, there was no significant difference between RSCA, CSES, and SCSQ in the intervention group and the control group. After the intervention, the program significantly improved overall resilience scores, including three dimensions (goal focusing, positive cognition, and interpersonal assistance). And at the same time, the level of core self-evaluation and coping style has been improved, and the effect can last up to 3 months after the end of the intervention. Group counseling based on the ASE (Achieving Success Everyday) model can effectively improve students' resilience and has significant effects on improving the core self-evaluation and coping styles of the subjects.

This paper described how university students from Macau took social responsibility in China through Service-Learning project. It was an introductory experience for the student participants and for the children in the mountain area as well. This study aimed at raising children's interest in learning and their desire of continuing study. Results were reported in four themes: (1) increasing personal competence of teamwork spirits, leadership and service skills; (2) students' perception towards poverty issue and education in China rural and mountain areas; (3) having commitment to the next service; (4) realizing that Service-Learning must be a mutual process. This paper also provides an overview of how a living-learning community dedicated itself to community service to educate residents holistically.

This study took the student aid data of a normal university in northern Jiangsu Province in 2018 as the object of study, and studied the characteristics of student aid work in local colleges. Through the analysis of the data, it is found that the characteristics of student aid in local undergraduate colleges and universities in China are as follows: the main source of investment is government, supplemented by colleges, and the amount of social aid is small and unstable; the function of the aid work is still mainly to help the poor, supplemented by awards for the students with excellent academic performance, and aid for poor students without extra requisites are large in amount. The projects rewarding outstanding students from the college funds are few in ordinary local colleges and universities, with low reward amount per capita; the willingness of college students to apply for student loans is low, as loans need to be repaid, the attraction of loans to poor students who can afford partly of the cost is weak, compared with many non-repayment and non-academic performance requirements aid projects.

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 to promote equity and quality of education for students with disabilities. This highlights the need for additional efforts by all levels of government authorities. This column presents a summary of current issues related to the educational provision for students with disabilities in remote or rural areas of China and brief descriptions of main policies in rural education and special education. Suggestions for how to improve the development of special education in rural areas are also provided.

Migrant workers in China and their children too frequently are treated as outsiders in the city. This paper explores and compares the opportunities for female Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) students in western rural areas of China. Learning from migrant girls how they perceive and evaluate benefits in and from their schooling provides us insights into how TVET played a role in achievements that rural migrant girls value and enact. The capability approach specified for education is used as a structure to assess TVET as experienced by its participants. This research shows that despite its deficiencies and obscurity within socio-economic structures, for the current generation of young rural migrant girls, TVET education was highly accessible, provided a singular opportunity and space to equip them with some skills and knowledge, and enhanced their capabilities to participate in a rapidly changing urbanizing economy. TVET education created changes on both individual and collective levels. Rural migrant girls' opportunities were constrained by unequal migration patterns and were structured along intersections of gender and ethnic lines. Implications for improving TVET policy include improved information flow, diversification of TVET curriculums, standardization of regulations, and increased opportunities for female and ethnic students.

This study examines the beliefs and practices of 22 teachers identified as highly effective in Yunnan Province, China, who work with students facing significant academic and social challenges. In many cases, the selected teachers work with students at the extreme end of the at-risk continuum, including students having multiple disadvantaged characteristics such as ethnic minority status and poverty. Specifically, this paper shares findings about how these teachers address their students' needs in three domains--academic, affective, and technical needs. Descriptive data from classroom observations are presented. From the themes regarding teachers' beliefs and practices that emerged from the qualitative data, the findings reveal that these teachers address students' affective, academic and technical needs concurrently through their thoughtful instructional delivery and interactions with students. The teachers not only provide academic support (e.g., using a variety of instructional strategies communicating high expectations) to their students, but also offer socio-emotional support by being caring yet firm toward students and by soliciting technical support to create a safety net for the students' well-being.

The One-Village-One-Preschool (OVOP) initiative aims to guarantee early childhood education (ECE) to all children in high-poverty villages in China. A challenge to policymakers is to balance expanding the scale with lengthening service duration. Following 23,775 children from preschool (4-year-old) to fourth-grade (10-year-old) in a poverty-stricken county, we found: 3-year and 2-year-OVOP groups started off the first-grade with a similar level of performance in Chinese, English, and math, lagging behind the well-resourced township-public-ECE group by 0.14 SDs. However, by the third or fourth-grade, the 3-year-OVOP group had emulated the township-public-ECE group, whereas the 2-year-OVOP group lagged by about 0.2 SDs. Our finding suggested that 1 more year in ECE for children in high-poverty-villages can counteract the long-term fade-out effect.

Indigenous languages in poverty-stricken areas are often threatened by competition from the majority languages driving economic progress. Within the framework of the economics of linguistic exchanges, this paper discusses the possibility of transferring linguistic capital into economic capital, and the revaluation of minority languages to promote multilingualism in underdeveloped regions. A mixed-method approach (questionnaires, focused interviews, ethnographic observations) was adopted to investigate the linguistic use of and attitudes towards Hani, Mandarin and English among 142 Hani participants in Yuanyang County, China, and the dispositions of 1,395 participants outside Yuanyang towards four types of objectified linguistic products used in two submarkets. The qualitative and quantitative data from Yuanyang show that with a conservative monolingual attitude, young Hani are shifting from Hani to the national lingua franca, Mandarin, for socioeconomic reasons. However, outsiders favour the utilisation of multilingual resources in the submarkets of local tourism and sales of regionally specific products. The findings demonstrate that there is room for the revaluation of indigenous language in these submarkets, implying that minority and majority languages may coexist and develop in harmony if the local Hani and poverty alleviation workers can begin to transfer multilingual resources into economic capital in the submarkets.

The outflow of college graduates will damage the accumulation of regional human capital and affect regional economic and social development. This article uses the administrative data of the employment monitoring system for college graduates in a province in central China in 2018 and establishes a multivariate logit model based on the Todaro model, opportunity inequality theory, and the relative poverty hypothesis to analyze first employment place preferences and group differences of college graduates. The study found that college graduates tend to peer flow (returning to urban employment at the same level as the city of origin), and family background will promote peer flow. Also, graduates are more willing to work in large and medium cities with higher economic levels, and this employment ratio shows obvious differences in majors, college types, gender, and educational levels. Finally, college graduates from relatively low family status are more likely to experience upward or downward flow.

This study explores how China's education responses to COVID-19 from a perspective of policy analysis. Specifically, it involves building an educational policy system for COVID-19 to examine educational governance framework, school management and teaching, policies for teachers during the epidemic. The education policy during the epidemic has achieved positive results. Those results aim to ensure the physical and mental health of teachers and students, ensure the supply of epidemic prevention materials and educational resources, ensure the quality of students' learning, and enhance the application ability of teachers' teaching technology. The process of policy changes and effects of policy implementation have been examined to analyze how China's education responses to COVID-19. The characteristics and experience of China's education policy in response to the epidemic concentrate on forming a governance system under the centralized and unified leadership of the Communist Party of China, building a pattern in which families and schools cooperate closely to promote the smooth development of education and teaching, transforming from an emergency substitute during the crisis into an important motivation to promote the transformation of education paradigm, and paying great attention to remote and poor areas and disadvantaged student groups.

Purpose: The purpose of this report is to demonstrate open and distance education (ODE) can support poverty alleviation. Taking the practices of the Open University of China (the OUC) as an example, this paper aims to reveal how open universities make contributions to local residents in rural and remote areas. Design/methodology/approach: Focusing on 25 poverty-stricken counties, the OUC had invested 58 million RMB to its learning centers in these counties from 2017 to 2020. The first one is to improve ICT and educational facilities in these learning centers. The second approach is to cultivate local residents with degree programs through ODE so as to promote local economic development. The third one is to design and develop training programs according to local context to meet the specific needs of local villagers. Findings: After 3 years working, cloud-based classrooms and computer rooms have been set up. Bookstores have been founded and printed books have been donated. Hundreds of thousands of digital micro lectures have been supplied to these learning centers which have been improved and fully played their functions. Nearly 50,000 local residents have been directly benefited. Village leaders have helped lift local residents out of poverty. Poverty-stricken villagers have been financed to study on either undergraduate or diploma programs. Local residents have improved their skills by learning with the training programs offered by the OUC. Originality/value: ODE is proved to be an effective way to eradicate poverty. Open universities are proved to be able to make contributions to social justice. By fulfilling its commitments to eliminate poverty within the national strategy framework, the OUC has built its brand nationwide.

China has made great improvement on subsidizing poverty-stricken students, but the current approaches of granting subsidies is not scientific or humane. Poverty-stricken students who couldn't get sufficient subsidies in suitable ways need some new and more scientific granting approaches, which inspires me to go about this study. The approach, we have introduced, which has been adopted by University of Science and Technology of China, using Big Data, with which college grant subsidies according to scientific investigation and data analysis of students' consumption in school canteens, is the key to resolve this problem. By adopting this approach, colleges and universities will do a better job in aiding poverty-stricken students financially and emotionally, which will be a meaningful improvement.

This article juxtaposes "world culture" and "policy borrowing and lending" literatures to understand policy formation in China. Through reviewing China's student nutrition policy evolution since the International Conference on Nutrition in 1992 to the launch of China's landmark national rural student nutrition program in 2011, I examine what the key explanations to the policy developments in China were. This paper analyzes both quantitative and qualitative data from the MOE, State Council, and media sources, and draws on policy documents, scholarly publications, civil society activities, and international aid flows. Findings show that although neither "world culture" nor "policy borrowing and lending" frameworks could fully explain the case in China, local actors became increasingly active in student nutrition, as suggested by "world culture theory," even when local conditions such as rural-urban poverty gaps were decreasing. In addition, the lack of international aid alignment and domestic politics may have led to the decoupling in policy and practice for China's student nutrition agenda.

This article presents an explanation to the paradox of why increased household incomes in rural areas in China are accompanied by decreased motivation for consumption. The empirical analysis shows a reduction in rural residents' consumer spending with the exception of spending on medical treatment and education. This effect is stronger in poor families or families with school-aged children. The authors argue that motivation for consumption has been sinking in rural areas in China because income inequality among the rural populations has stimulated spending on improving human capital to promote individual security and social mobility as a chance to squeeze into the middle class.

The condition of poverty is pervasive worldwide and is multifaceted in its ability to have a deleterious generational impact. Although China has greatly reduced the proportion of people living in abject poverty over the past three decades, there are still millions of families living in extreme poverty. This study investigated the influences of families' socioeconomic status on students' educational achievement in China with regard to the National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) scores and subsequent college enrolment. We interviewed 132 recent high school graduates from schools in six urban cities from low-socio-economic status (SES) homes. The findings revealed that school climate (general school quality, student-teacher interactions, and peer pressure) and home environment (parental support, student-parent relationship, and family size) negatively impacted their educational achievement. Students were cognisant that the schools they attended did not have the same high reputation as schools attended by their more affluent peers and felt that their teachers openly discriminated against them. Additionally, their parents did not have the time or financial resources to help them advance educationally. We propose the low-SES Educational Achievement Framework to illustrate the phenomenon of environmental conditions that may influence the low-SES students' NCEE scores and ultimately result in low college enrollment rates in China.

When disadvantaged families seek to achieve upward social mobility, their most important breakthrough point is for their children to receive an education, and cultural capital is the most likely driving factor influencing educational attainment. In China, although the privileged classes have an advantage in terms of cultural capital, exhibiting a phenomenon of cultural reproduction, premium cultural capital does not display clear class divisions or exclusiveness, and students from disadvantaged families can compensate for their family's lack of cultural capital through important figures or other avenues. More importantly, the circumstances of disadvantage engender cultural capital characterized by disadvantage, greatly promoting the academic success of students from disadvantaged families. For "successful descendants" to emerge from humble families, impoverished families must not only actively compensate for their family's lack of cultural capital, but must also strive to produce the cultural capital particular to disadvantaged families; at the same time, the state and society must also provide multifaceted support.

Comparing China's 2006 and 2015 Africa policies, this article reveals how China's political discourse has become more confident, practical, and depoliticised. In particular, this paper shows how education is allocated, promised, and embedded in China's 'shared' agenda, which is centred on development co-operation and mutual learning. It then reflects on the extent to which China may move towards traditional donors. This paper concludes that, despite fragmented convergences in the discourse and an increased recognition of a Chinese model, China maintains its distinctive role and position in the post-2015 era.PuP

In this article, Xin Xiang investigates what dushu, or "schooling," means for rural senior secondary school students in a high-poverty county in southwestern China. With the persistence of China's rural-urban education inequality and alarming reports about secondary school dropout rates, rural students' and their families' attitudes toward schooling have become a topic of academic as well as public debate. Drawing from repeated interviews with and observations of twenty-seven students conducted over a year, Xiang uses portraiture methodology to illustrate the different dimensions of meaning these rural youth attach to dushu: the means to a future of comfort and dignity, a family responsibility and collective investment, and a path toward individual freedom and actualization. This portrait also reveals the deep contradictions that define these students' experiences of dushu and how it often denies the hopes they attach to it and demands painful compromises.

Countries around the world have adopted different policies to address the global issue of poverty, though their poverty line varies. China has achieved remarkable results in poverty alleviation through education. Aware that poverty eradication must rely on intellectual support, the country has shifted its anti-poverty theory and policy actions from a passive, one-off poverty reduction mode based on 'blood transfusion' to an active and sustainable mode aimed at improving the 'blood making' capacity of the poor population, namely the Chinese mode. Education is the fundamental way of such a mode. China has always focused on nine-year compulsory education in implementing anti-poverty policies; conducted classified and tiered efforts in education against poverty and made policies more targeted; adopted diverse policy instruments and shifted the focus from subsidy to educational capacity building; developed quantified poverty alleviation indexes to set standards for policy evaluation; and included education against poverty into the national anti-poverty strategic plan. China will further advance poverty alleviation through education, and form a unique and effective anti-poverty mode, so as to contribute to the building of a community of shared future for all humankind.

This paper presents a case study of the microeconomy of a typical underdeveloped village in southwest China and the role of elementary education in the village economy. The paper begins with a brief review of relevant theories on the economics of education and the current social conditions and state of education in the village under study, and then tabulates and summarizes the income and living expenses of the villagers. The results of this analysis of income and expenses show an enormous gap, where a large proportion of the meager income earned by the villagers is "missing." Further analysis explained the "missing" money: first, it was largely invested in compulsory and higher education; and second, an unusually high proportion of the villagers' income was spent outside the village. These findings at least partially explain the impoverishment of the village under study (i.e., due to overinvestment in education, a skewed orientation toward external spending, and investment in education outside of the village). This structure of investment and spending siphons off the villagers' disposable income, smothers economic activity in the village, and ultimately exacerbates the impoverishment of the village under study. [This article was translated by Carissa Fletcher. ]

Over the past 30 years in China, the development ideology--a model of economic development that is characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and modernization--has brought about many changes and consequences, including increased migration by the rural population, sharp adjustments in urban-rural education policy, the decline of rural society, and a deteriorating educational context facing rural left-behind children. At the family level, labor force migrations have had a far-reaching impact on left-behind children. At the school level, the decline of rural education and urbanization trend have derailed the healthy development of left-behind children. At the community level, the deterioration of rural values amid rapid urban-rural changes has aggravated the developmental risks facing left-behind children. Among rural left-behind children, those who are older (post-compulsory schooling age) and girls, and from poverty-stricken backgrounds face more developmental risks. The authors take into consideration empirical research from regions such as Sichuan and Henan, provide an account of the educational and developmental challenges facing rural left-behind children, and reflect on the developmentalist ideology underlying societal changes. [This article was translated by Jeff Keller.]

The challenges of securing educational change and transformation, at scale, remain considerable. While sustained progress has been made in some education systems (Fullan, 2009; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009) generally, it remains the case that the pathway to large-scale, system improvement is far from easy or straightforward. While large-scale comparative assessments, such as PISA, increasingly define the contours of contemporary policy-making, the international pursuit of better educational outcomes and higher student achievement persist. Despite various critiques of PISA (Alexander, 2012; Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013) and questions about the legitimacy of cross-border generalizations from its data (Luke, 2011) for the foreseeable future, at least, this pervasive international assessment and the global education reform movement that has erupted from it, is likely to remain a potent policy force. It has been suggested that the main reason why meaningful, educational change at scale, remains, for many systems, an ongoing aspiration is because the "wrong policy drivers" have been chosen (Fullan, 2011). In other words, the wrong strategies and solutions have been selected and applied. This may indeed be the case, as around the world there continues to be evidence of considerable intervention in education systems but relatively little to show for it (Payne, 2008). An alternative explanation for the failure of much large scale reform points towards a preoccupation with human capital solutions, partly fuelled by evidence from large-scale assessments and the rhetoric of "what works" (Whitty, 2016), that obscure certain inconvenient truths. This article considers four of these inconvenient truths that directly affect, and in many cases prevent, attempts to secure education reform and change at scale.

One of the Millennium Development Goals is to ensure universal access to primary education by 2015. However, primary school dropout remains a challenge in many developing countries. While official statistics in China report aggregated primary school dropout of only 0.2%, almost no independent, survey-based studies have sought to verify these dropout rates in rural areas. The primary objective of our study is to document the dropout rate in primary schools in rural China and compare the dropout rate of ethnic minorities and Han students. Using a first-hand dataset of 14,761 primary students in northwest China, we demonstrate that the annual dropout rate in poor rural areas is 2.5%, suggesting a cumulative dropout of 8.2%. Importantly, Hui and Salar minority students drop out at rates that are significantly higher than the official rates. Most noteworthy, 23% of Hui girls and 22% of Salar girls are dropping out by the end of grade 6. Our findings call for more attention to China's primary school dropout issue--especially in minority areas. Policymakers should begin to examine new ways to increase the chances for minority students to succeed in the educational system.

In China, firms actively participate in poverty alleviation to comply with the national policy and to build political connections. Whether firms curry favor with the government by increasing spending on poverty alleviation is an interesting research question under the context of anti-corruption campaigns. Using hand-collected data from the period 2016–2018, we examine how anti-corruption campaigns have influenced corporate poverty alleviation spending at the city level. Our results show that anti-corruption campaigns are positively related to corporate poverty alleviation spending. We further identify two possible channels through which the anti-corruption campaign increases corporate poverty alleviation spending: (1) political connections and (2) stock price crash risk. Finally, we find that the effects of the anti-corruption campaign on corporate poverty alleviation spending are stronger in firms located in cities with lower degrees of marketization, a lower media index, and a higher poverty rate, as well as in firms receiving fewer government subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We construct a multidimensional poverty index for chinese counties. • We establish a staggered DID model that controls for selection bias. • Highways significantly reduce county poverty. • The poverty-reduction effect of highways is conditional. • The poverty-reduction effect of highways diminishes with increasing altitude. This paper establishes a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to estimate the impact of highways on regional poverty using county-level panel data from China. We construct a multidimensional poverty index and use satellite-monitored night light brightness as a proxy indicator. The results demonstrate that highways significantly reduce county poverty and that the poverty reduction effect becomes increasingly pronounced over time. This result remains robust after controlling for non-random highway route selection. Furthermore, the poverty reduction effect of highways is conditional, with a significant poverty reduction effect in the less economically-developed western regions and non-municipal counties, and no significant poverty reduction effect in the economically-developed eastern and central regions and municipal districts. Moreover, the poverty reduction effect of highways gradually decreases as the average altitude of counties increases. Our tests provide empirical evidence for effective road investments in developing countries that incorporate poverty alleviation targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that China's socialist economy had relatively high rates of extreme poverty while the capitalist reforms of the 1980s and 1990s delivered rapid progress. This narrative relies on World Bank estimates of the share of people living on less than $1.90 a day (2011 PPP), which show a sharp decline from 88 per cent in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, the World Bank's poverty line has been critiqued for ignoring variations in the actual cost of meeting basic needs. In this paper we review data published by the OECD on the share of people unable to afford a subsistence basket. These estimates indicate that from 1981 to 1990, when most of China's socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country's extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 per cent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil. China's comparatively strong performance is corroborated by data on other social indicators. Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes. These results indicate that socialist provisioning policies can be effective at preventing extreme poverty, while market reforms may threaten people's ability to meet basic needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of public programmes aiming to cover the entire population in China on elderly poverty in both rural and urban China. Using the three rounds of panel data based on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2011–2015, we examine whether public pension programmes reduced elderly poverty, comprehensively defined to cover both unidimensional and multidimensional poverty indices of the households and individuals. To utilise the longitudinal nature of the data, we apply the robust fixed‐effects (FE) model with propensity score matching (PSM) and the FE quantile model with PSM taking into account the unobservable individual characteristics. Our results show that public pension programmes reduced poverty in monetary and non‐monetary terms in rural areas, while the effect on labour market is not significant. The panel quantile regression results suggest that the programmes decreased inequality in both monetary and non‐monetary dimensions. However, poverty‐reducing and inequality‐reducing effects are not observed in urban areas. Our results provide strong evidence to underscore the success of the Chinese public pension programme in reducing poverty and inequality in both rural and urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature has examined early-life insult and later-life health outcomes. However, whether early-life exposure might persist into the outcomes of future generations remains unclear. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, this study examines the intergenerational effects of early-life health shocks during the great famine in China, distinguishes the intergenerational effects of in utero and early-life famine exposure, and estimates whether there is a sex-specific transgenerational response. Difference-in-difference results show that first-generation male in utero famine exposure (1959–1961) is associated with a series of health and economic disadvantages in the second generation, compared with the unexposed post-famine-born cohort (1964–1965) in China. The effect persists in the third generation but attenuates, and there is no same-sex transgenerational response. These findings may suggest a novel source of multigenerational persistence in health and economic poverty and may point to a need to consider evidence of transgenerational mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary workers' health problems in China have raised concerns recently. This study aimed to assess the relationship between temporary employment and three health outcomes with gradient severity and explore mediating mechanisms. Data was obtained from a national cross-sectional survey (China General Social Survey 2018). Compared with regular workers, temporary workers reported more frequent mood disorders (β = 0.197) and disturbance of daily activities (β = 0.132), however, there was no significant difference in serious health risks (inpatient treatment) between temporary and regular workers. Income poverty, subjective social status, and family relative socioeconomic status were significant mediators. The results suggest that temporary workers have higher general health risks, and economic deprivation is the main mechanism. Therefore, Chinese policymakers should provide more inclusive preventive health services beyond the existing health care system focused on critical illness to reduce the general health risks of grassroots workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living arrangements and health behaviors are considered to be associated with mental health, but their relationship has been less investigated by national survey data in China. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship of living arrangements and health behaviors with anxiety among Chinese older people and to compare the results between urban and rural areas. The study was based on the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey conducted in 2018, and a total of 12 726 old-aged respondents were included. Ordinal logistic regression was used to analyze the associations between living arrangements, health behaviors and anxiety. This study found that people living in nursing institutions are likely to be more anxious than their dwelling counterparts. Although we found no significant relationships of health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol and exercise with anxiety, older adults with greater dietary diversity were less likely to experience anxiety. Furthermore, different trends between living arrangements and anxiety, smoking and anxiety were also found among urban versus rural respondents. The findings of this study help to better understand anxiety among Chinese older people and shed light on health policy on older people protection and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realizing green economic recovery and eradicating energy poverty have become China's strategic priorities in the post-COVID-19 era. In the context of the active advocacy of green finance, to empirically investigate whether green finance can help eradicate energy poverty, this study utilizes provincial sample data to explore the energy poverty eradication effect of green finance. Our study also examines the regional heterogeneity and mediating effect. The main findings are as follows: (1) Green finance is a powerful weapon to alleviate China's energy poverty and accelerate green economic recovery, indicating that the green evolution of financial institutions is effective means to facilitate green economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 era; (2) green finance only eradicates energy poverty in low energy poverty regions and the eastern areas, and green finance can alleviate energy poverty in both high and low green finance areas; and (3) improved green finance not only directly eradicates China's energy poverty, but also alleviates current energy poverty by accelerating technical innovation and optimizing the industrial structure. Following the above main findings, this study advances a series of policy implications in terms of facilitating the green transition of the financial industry and realizing green economic recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of energy poverty on internal immigration based on the current situation in which reducing energy poverty is a necessary condition for ensuring sustainable development. The threshold effects model is applied to verify the significance of energy poverty in the prediction of internal immigration. The main results suggest that energy poverty significantly and negatively affects internal immigration. A heterogeneity analysis between coastal and non-coastal regions shows that the effects are more pronounced in non-coastal regions than in coastal regions. Further analysis reveals that there exists a kink in the threshold effects. The results remain robust using the specification of the kink threshold effects model. The policy implication is that a balanced development of energy infrastructure in different regions is required to achieve better social welfare for migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the differences in feelings of poverty and social assistance receipt among the different genders of heads of Chinese Dibao families. This article makes a preliminary analysis of the feelings of Chinese female heads of Dibao families about living in poverty and depending on social assistance and compares them with those of male heads. It finds that there are gender differences in the experiences between the female and male heads of Dibao families in China. The article argues that social assistance policies should be constructed or correspondingly adjusted in a targeted manner to become gender-sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's poverty alleviation projects have made significant contributions to global poverty eradication. This study investigates the impact of China's poverty alleviation projects on nighttime lighting in 831 state-level impoverished counties using the "NPP-VIIRS-like" dataset and discusses the difference of land use change under different nighttime light clusters in order to provide reference for future policy formulation and implementation. Our results show that the growth of total intensity of nighttime lighting (GRTNL) and the year-on-year growth rate of total intensity of nighttime lighting (YGRTNL) in China's impoverished counties are 103.74% and 9.69% from 2013 to 2021, respectively, which are both higher than the average levels of all counties (67.16%, 6.77%) and non-poor counties (64.68%, 6.56%) in China during the same period. Additionally, we discovered that impoverished counties that lifted out of poverty earlier had significantly higher nighttime lighting intensity than those later. Regional analysis reveals that the growth of nighttime lighting intensity shows a trend of decreasing from the central (1550.89 nW·cm−2·sr−1) to the eastern (924.57), western (762.57), and northeastern regions (588.07), while the growth rate decreases from western regions (282.46%) to the eastern (189.13%), central (178.56%), and northeastern (108.07%). We also identified that Gini coefficient of nighttime lighting has a trend of "slow and short-term rise-rapid and continuous decline". Moreover, nighttime lighting growth had similar trends with land use change, especially construction land. Overall, our study provides novel insights into the relationship between poverty alleviation effects and nighttime lighting in China's impoverished counties, which could inform future policy-making and research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA), were responsible for assisting the last 43 million of the 850 million people removed from extreme poverty since the Reform and Opening Policy initiated in 1978. It is worth discussing the politicalinstitutional singularities of the Chinese State and the intergovernmental mechanisms for implementation of these policies. It is an exploratory research, with bibliographic review, document analysis and interview. It is concluded that China is a multiethnic unitary state of socialist orientation with complex mechanisms of intergovernability, decentralization and subnational autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty alleviation through relocation (PAR) is a milestone project in winning the battle against extreme poverty and aims to relocate poor people from inhospitable areas and lift them out of poverty. The effect of PAR on poor households merits evaluation as it is also the basis for understanding the achievements of targeted poverty alleviation and preventing a large-scale return to poverty. This study analyzed the effect of PAR on poor households from the perspectives of income and multidimensional poverty, based on panel data of 1009 poor households from eight provinces in China. The results showed that the incidence of multidimensional poverty in poor households exceeded that of income poverty, and its decline was faster than that of income poverty. However, the overlap between multidimensional poverty and income poverty was low, at 26.3%, 4.9%, and 0% in 2016, 2018, and 2020, respectively. PAR showed a significantly negative effect on poor households' income and multidimensional poverty, and the longer the relocation time, the more significant the effect. PAR reduced the income poverty of poor households mainly by increasing their wage income and property income, and multidimensional poverty mainly by improving their living standards. The impact of PAR on income and multidimensional poverty is regional heterogeneous. Post-relocation measures should improve the income and capability of poor households through industrial development, employment assistance, infrastructure upgrades, and public service improvements. In addition, the income and multidimensional poverty standards should be jointly adopted in the governance of relative poverty. • This study assessed the impact of poverty alleviation through relocation on income and multidimensional poverty. • The overlap between multidimensional poverty and income poverty of poor households was low. • Poverty alleviation through relocation had a significantly negative impact on income and multidimensional poverty. • Poverty alleviation through relocation reduced the income poverty mainly by increasing wage income and property income. • Poverty alleviation through relocation reduced the multidimensional poverty mainly by improving living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to measure farmers' health poverty, (2) to examine the effect of health vulnerability on health poverty and (3) to identify countermeasures that may alleviate health poverty in rural China. Design/methodology/approach: This study built a health poverty measurement model based on the multi-dimensional poverty framework to evaluate farmers' health vulnerability. Further, this paper used an econometric model to assess the impact of health vulnerability on health poverty. The sample for this study comprised 1,115 rice farmers from Hubei province, China. Findings: The medical affordability poverty ratio was 17.95%, where farmers in the low-income group faced severe medical affordability poverty (27.46%). Results from the multi-dimensional analysis showed that, the health poverty ratios were 17.95 and 30.50%, respectively. Our results indicated that climate change vulnerabilities, living habits, medical facilities and medical accessibility were positively related to health poverty, whereas the regular physical examinations reduced mental health poverty. Research limitations/implications: Based on this study's findings, we proposed that: (1) to address illness-induced poverty among members of the agricultural community, national and provincial strategies and programs grounded on a multi-dimensional health poverty framework ought to be formulated and implemented, (2) mechanisms of health knowledge exchange may facilitate the improvement of farmers' health status, (3) robust and comprehensive metrics should be employed to understand and improve farmers' ability to absorb and mitigate the negative health impacts and (4) the improvement in both quality and quantity for medical facilities and medical affordability in the rural areas should be key priorities in governmental-wide initiatives. Originality/value: Existing studies for alleviating poverty caused by disease mainly focus on medical service support to those economic vulnerabilities after a disease happens. However, few studies have focused on the root causes of poverty caused by disease, particularly from the preventive perspective of health vulnerability. To fill this gap, this study, therefore, proposes the health poverty index and analyzes the impact of health vulnerability on health poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]