Family Background and Education: China in Comparative Perspective

This paper investigates how the drastic educational reforms during the Communist period changed the effects of family background on education in China, in comparison to other nations. Data are from the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China survey and the World Inequality Study; N=130,109 in 28 societies. Since World War II, the mean number of years of education in China paralleled, at a lower level, the rises in Eastern European Communist countries and in Western market economies. Multi-level regression analysis shows that China's educational level is not higher than would be predicted on the basis of worldwide patterns linking education to GDP and family background. Overall, the drastic educational reforms of the Communist period do not seem to have raised educational attainments, contrary to the Rousseau/Marx understanding of the primacy of private property as a generator of social inequality.