This paper investigates the effects of family background on education in China in comparison to other Communist countries and to Western nations. The data for China are from the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China survey, and the data for the rest of the world are from the World Inequality Study which has pooled surveys with information on family background and education from 28 other nations around the world. In all, there are 141,438 cases. Since World War II, the mean number of years of education in China rose roughly in parallel to the rises in other Communist countries and to the rises in Western market economies. Of course, the level was much lower, as China entered the period as a very poor, highly rural country: those who were adults in the 1940s had grown up, on average, when China?s GNP was 2 percent of US 1990 levels (at parity purchasing power). The level of education in China is not significantly different from what would be predicted on the basis of worldwide patterns linking education to GNP and family background. Moreover, the main causes of educational attainment are much the same: multivariate analysis shows that the worldwide pattern linking education to GNP and family background is correlated r = .96 with the Chinese pattern. Analysis of changes over time reveals only one small but important difference: in China the educational attainments of children from well educated professional families fell spectacularly from those coming of age in the late 1940s (before the revolution) to those coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, and drifted yet further down after that. This pattern is starkly different from that of the Eastern European Communist nations where the children of highly educated parents continued to achieve high levels of education in the Stalinist period immediately following the imposition of Communism, with a small decline subsequently. The Chinese pattern is also different from the West, where the educational attainments of children of highly educated families hardly varied over the last half of the 20th century. But in other ways, changes over time in China were very similar to those elsewhere in the world. For children of poor families, educational attainments climbed slowly over time in China, as throughout the world, Communist and non-communist alike, with a slight fall among the most recent cohorts. Both the level and trends in education for children of poor Chinese families are indistinguishable from those in Eastern Europe and very close to those in the West. This suggests that the massive upheavals in Chinese education have not yielded better results for the poor masses than does economic growth alone. In all, educational outcomes in China seem to have followed the patterns typical of poor nations throughout the world, except for a brief but vehement prejudice against children from well educated professional families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]