A research team with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has just released a report about social mobility in contemporary China.

The report says that social groups occupying upper positions on the social ladder, like managers, technological professionals and civil servants, have great chance of passing their title and social positions to their children since the 1980s.

At the same time, children from less advantaged groups have to step over far higher thresholds to get into these positions.

They face such obstacles as education, tax, the social security system, household registration system and employment policies.

In an open society, people should be able to move from one social class to another with ease. Nepotism is not a valid process in open societies.

The freedom to switch class should mean greater social vigour and social justice guarantees, but in China there are still so many barricades in the way.

The current situation in China is that people of different social classes have different professional skills, simply because of unequal access to education and an unequal allocation of educational resources.

In a modern society, education and the skills acquired from education are the most important driving force of social mobility.

After years of reforms in the household registration system, the social security system and employment policies have been changed to help social justice along.

But in education, the key vehicle for change, resources are still not equally allocated.

Spending on education in China is far from adequate to satisfy the huge demands of the country.

In the early 1990s, the central government decided to raise the ratio of fiscal expenditure on education against the gross domestic product (GDP) to 4 per cent before 2000. This ratio was the average in developed countries in the 1980s.

But this had still not been achieved a decade later. In fact the ratio fell in the years immediately after the goal was set. In 1996, the ratio fell to a historical low of 2.44 per cent, and it was not until 2003 that it had climbed to 3.41 per cent, the nearest to the target so far.

Expenditure is also uneven among regions and rural/urban areas, which is to the detriment of the least-advantaged in society.

According to a report in China News Weekly, the total investment in education in all sectors of society was 580 billion yuan (US$69.88 billion) in 2002. Seventy-seven per cent of the money was spent in towns and cities, where the population is less than 40 per cent of the country.

The rural population, more than 60 per cent of the nation, was handed a mere 23 per cent.

One of the latest trends in education is "elite education," which outlines which procedures, means and outcomes should be aimed for.

This trend, which does not prevail in all schools and regions, leaves students from rural areas and poverty-stricken families out in the cold.

The "Matthews Effect," which describes the social phenomenon under which the rich get wealthier and the poor sink deeper into poverty, has began to emerge in this country's educational institutes.

On one hand, the cities and towns get a continuous inflow of government funds. The schools here boast advanced facilities and excellent teaching and support faculties.

On the other hand, the less-developed areas, especially rural areas, have to finance their education with money they raise themselves.

These schools can hardly pay the teachers on time, let alone attract better-educated staff or offer further training to current employees.

Schools in poorer areas often have broken-down buildings, shortages of basic equipment and few staff.

Allocating educational resources in a fair way is of the utmost importance to ensure a reasonable social mobility, especially to enable members of poorer social groups to move up the social stratum.

The State should make all out efforts to satisfy the nation's demand for education with enough resources. At the very least, it should make sure there are enough resources to support compulsory education for all.

The government must also reallocate resources so there is an even spread among rural regions and urban areas. Investment must be undertaken in the spirit of fairness and justice.

Since resources for public education are seeing a marked deficiency, they are better used in making primary education, at the very least, available to all rather than adding more privileges to the already superb facilities in "elite schools."

(China Daily August 31, 2004)