Invisible China

In 1962, Michael Harrington's The Other America described the challenges facing “invisible” American communities, helping inspire the war on poverty. Explicitly referencing Harrington's work in their title (7), Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's Invisible China presents a shocking picture of China's rural education crisis, a crisis that remains largely unknown and underappreciated even within China itself. In this eye-opening and important book, Rozelle and Hell describe how China's underinvestment in rural health and education will consign China to the “middle income trap,” given the human capital levels required to become a high-income country. With a Chinese translation (186), the authors aim to shock Chinese policy makers into addressing these human capital challenges in “invisible China,” six decades after Harrington's work did the same in the United States.Invisible China is most compelling in three deeply researched empirical chapters documenting rural human capital challenges, focused respectively on vocational education, student health, and early childhood cognitive development. These chapters provide a jarring corrective to narratives of China's unstoppable rise to global economic dominance, based on nontechnical summaries of dozens of large-scale randomized controlled trials conducted by the authors and other members of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford. Scholars of rural China and the Chinese economy will already be well aware of REAP's work—from 2005–16, REAP was responsible for more than half of China-focused impact evaluation studies in international scholarly journals (189)—but the book adds immense value in combining technical findings into a single coherent argument: “invisible” rural China faces a human capital crisis that current policy initiatives and funding do not adequately address. As documented in the book, over half of rural toddlers are cognitively delayed, over half of rural babies are undernourished, 40 percent of rural schoolchildren have intestinal worms, and 30 percent of rural students need but do not have glasses. Since rural China is home to 70 percent of China's children, the resulting cognitive challenges for China's next generation will prevent China from achieving school attainment levels on par with other upper-middle- and high-income economies. Rural human capital underinvestment will consequently stall China's development, with devastating consequences for social stability as well as global economic growth.Although the book includes helpful policy recommendations, its analysis remains pessimistic: not only are China's rural human capital problems entrenched, but underlying institutional dynamics constrain potential solutions. This discussion of underlying institutional determinants of China's rural human capital challenges will resonate with development scholars and practitioners. Already, China has followed much “best practice” international development advice by expanding vocational education, increasing teacher salaries and training, providing free textbooks, improving school infrastructure, and updating curricula. But these interventions have not addressed the deeper institutional challenges that undermine investment in rural human capital, as described in the concluding chapter: the hukou (household registration) system, decentralized fiscal expenditure, and cadre career incentives emphasizing short-term economic growth. Implied by the authors, but not explicitly stated, is that addressing these institutional challenges would require political rather than technical solutions.Compared to the empirical chapters focused on China's rural human capital challenges, the book's comparative analysis of the dynamics of the middle-income trap is somewhat less compelling and may present an overly negative picture of China's prospects. This analysis, the focus of the first three chapters, is based less on existing middle-income-trap literature than on the observed cross-national correlation between high school attainment levels and per capita income. But by comparing China's current education levels to a small set of middle-income “graduates” when they were already much richer than China, the authors misrepresent China's current position; when middle-income “graduates” had China's same relative income levels, they were actually less educated than China today.1 To strengthen the comparative analysis, the authors could have referenced more of the existing middle-income-trap literature and more clearly explained the lessons from successful East Asian cases, rather than focusing the book's comparative cases on “trapped” Latin American countries.2Additionally, the authors argue that fast growth makes China particularly susceptible to the challenges of low education in a middle-income economy (163), yet contrary to this assertion, historically, countries that rose to middle income fastest were those most likely to continue growing to high income.3 To better understand how China's rapid yet uneven growth will affect future rural human capital development, a further temporal and spatial disaggregation of the underlying REAP studies would have helped. The studies presented cover nearly two decades, and many focus only on poorer western or central provinces in China, yet in the book these findings are generally aggregated as if they provide a current snapshot of the entire rural population. Although the book came out in the final year of China's antipoverty campaign, which focused on poor rural areas, this campaign and its effects do not feature in the book. Have recent rural growth and the antipoverty campaign helped alleviate the described challenges? And does regional inequality resulting from uneven growth constrain China or provide a possible path toward convergence, similar to the European Union fiscal subsidies and market integration that the book argues enabled Spain, Greece, and Portugal to transition to high income despite relatively low education levels (66)? These important questions are not addressed.Overall, however, these minor omissions do not undermine the book's strengths, and Invisible China remains essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the Chinese economy. The authors shine an unflattering spotlight on “invisible” rural China and in doing so convincingly show that China must rapidly implement far-reaching policies to address its rural human capital crisis

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• Invisible China

  Open Access•Xueli Huang, Yue Yang•Social Justice Research•2024

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