The Beautiful Tree (16 page)

Zhan Wang Xiu (the proprietress) greeted us warmly and ushered us into her tiny living room, again making us take off our shoes to sit comfortably on the earthenware bed. Although the late afternoon was cool, no fire warmed the bed this time. There was also no light; although the village apparently had electricity, there was no supply tonight. The classrooms were also very dark—we peered in and saw children working hard at their desks. The living room was wallpapered with newspaper. And she told us her story. Zhan Wang Xiu and her husband started the school in 1998. Now it had 52 students—38 girls and 14 boys. There were three teachers—the husband and wife and their 18-year-old son, whom they had persuaded to stay in the village and teach with them.

Why did they start the school? Their village was very poor, she said, and the public school was over an hour away (we saw later when we returned that children could walk the route almost as quickly as we could drive it). The villagers especially do not pay attention to their girls, who cannot attend the public school because their parents don’t want them to travel that far or because they cannot afford the school fees. So the aim was to start a school mainly for these girls. She had seen how the girls “got cheated”—Xiang’s translation; I suppose she meant “harassed”—when they traveled on foot or on the three-wheelers to the school and wanted to spare them from this. The best way to eliminate poverty, she said, was to reduce women’s illiteracy, not to build a road (for which the local government, far from the village, was apparently agitating).

She told a complicated story of how she and her husband were once public school teachers; she was hospitalized for a while, and her husband wanted to look after her; he lost his job too as a result. Returning to being peasant farmers, they realized that their true vocation lay in teaching and so decided to start the school. Every day they were happy, she says, because the children were around them. But before they started the school, the adults in the village wanted evening classes in literacy for themselves. Once the county saw the success of these classes, she said, they were given permission to open the school. They put all their own money into the school, which they set up in their own home after moving their own parents into another house in the village to make room for the classrooms. They charged 18 yuan (about $2.25) per term, but if three children were from one family, the third attended for free. (It was noticeable how little purchase China’s “one-child” policy seemed to have in the remote villages.) She said that 60 children in her village were still illiterate, and she wanted her school to expand. Some village children did go to the public school that we had passed, but its fees were 75 yuan ($9.38) per term, plus textbooks—too exorbitant for most of the villagers.

Again, her big problem is finding teachers. Once they employed a woman teacher, at 800 yuan ($100) per
year
, but she decided that the salary wasn’t enough so she left for a job in Zhang County town. Their fifth-grade students were now facing graduation, but they needed teachers. So they asked their eldest son, who had passed high school, to come and help, and he agreed. He seemed happy enough. They didn’t pay him, except in kind, she joked, and he—coming to join us on the family bed—laughed too. They wanted to help him to go to university, but “What can I do?” she said. So he stayed to help the poor in their village. He has worked there for two years now. And he just received a prize from the government as the best third-grade teacher.

Her husband, Chen Wang, arrived at nightfall. He taught all day and then left to work in the fields. “The fields still need us,” he joked. His warm greeting touched me deeply. He implored us to stay the night; I was really disappointed, but Xiang said we couldn’t, as our driver was waiting on the main road and we needed to be in Lanzhou the next day. But we must stay for dinner? Reluctantly, we told him we couldn’t; boarded our hired three-wheeler, which fortunately had a headlight; and went slowly down through the dark, negotiating the gorge, to driver Wang, who met us by the roadside and was very agitated because he thought something bad had befallen us in the mountains.

We arrived back in Lanzhou in time for lunch, then went to the Provincial Education Bureau to gain permission to do the study. The head of the Education Bureau was not in his office when we arrived; but when told by phone that a foreigner was waiting to see him, he said he would be there in 30 minutes. He actually arrived within 10 minutes, gave us scalding hot tea in paper cups, was very friendly, but told us, apologetically, that he had to follow the regulations, and so we must talk to the director of international cooperation and exchange first, a Mr. Ming Ding. Then he would happily do all he could to help our interesting project.

Sitting at the computer, Mr. Ming’s assistant Mr. Zheng was rather put out that we arrived without an appointment; in any case, Mr. Ming was away and was far too busy to see us. He greeted me in impeccable English—as the interview progressed, I was very pleased that I realized his English was excellent, for otherwise I would have tried to speak with my student Xiang behind his back. Unfortunately for his story, Mr. Ming then arrived and greeted me in a very friendly fashion, waving aside Zheng’s scruples. He invited me into his office, all smiles. “Let them talk, I’m here now, they’ve come a long way!” Xiang translated. Zheng joined us with his notepad.

Xiang introduced me and the project. Through him, I tell Mr. Ming that many people believed that private schools were only for the elite, but my research in India and Africa had shown private schools for the poor, and so forth. Was the same true for China, I wondered? To answer this question, I told him, we went to the mountains in Zhang County. “Who gave you permission?” interjected Mr. Ming, as he jerked forward in his seat at this point in the translation, deeply concerned. “Who did you report to there?” I reassured him that it was not a research visit, just a tourist visit to see if the research was possible, and we did pay courtesy calls, as was the truth, to the Education Bureau and other bureaus. So I continued, but the atmosphere had changed now, and Xiang’s voice became more hesitant and nervous. So, I continued, we found five private schools for the poor, and now that we knew the phenomenon existed, we were seeking permission to do a wider study.

Mr. Ming was silent for a while. Then he leaned forward and said that he had some questions and comments. First, what are the aims and objectives of your project? I asked Xiang to explain them again. Ming looked very puzzled. Zheng then asked in Chinese, who was funding it? I told him of the John Templeton Foundation. He asked of its aims and objectives, and I tried my best to describe an American philanthropic foundation. Then Ming took over the questioning again. He spoke slowly and coolly: “We will need to be convinced that there is a research project to be done. In your case, it is hard to see how this is possible because the People’s Republic of China has achieved universal basic education. This means that public education serves all the poor as well as the rich. So there are no private schools for the poor, because the People’s Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a
logical impossibility
.”

I felt suddenly immersed in George Orwell’s
1984
. Black was white, and white was black. What I’d seen did not exist because it was logically impossible. I had not expected anything like this. My mouth got dry, my body tensed. And as English-speaking Zheng was sitting there, I could not ask Xiang what on earth we should do next.

He continued: “Of course we are pleased to welcome research that helps the poor. We are not saying that everything is perfect in the public schools that the People’s Republic has provided for all. A good example of research”—I couldn’t believe that I was going to hear this again—“is the DfID’s Gansu Basic Education Project, which is providing SDPs, school development plans, which are a valuable way of helping the poor, and we are grateful to the British government for sponsoring this important and worthwhile project. Why don’t you find a good project to do, like school development plans, rather than your strange ideas?”

Suddenly, I thought I better understood DfID’s motives for setting up its project. When I’d been traveling in the mountains, it became even more preposterous that what the poor needed was school development plans in the public schools! What a terrible crying waste of 11 million pounds, I’d thought. Now, I saw DfID sitting with bureaucrats like these, thrashing ideas around and finding the only thing that was harmless and unthreatening to the Chinese government. Who would complain if it were known internationally that the only thing lacking in Chinese schools for the poor was school development plans? That was much less threatening than the news that villagers were too poor to send their children to public schools, or that the public schools were too inaccessible, especially for girls. Perhaps that was it?

At this point, (English-speaking) Zheng was called out of the room, so I asked Xiang if he had told Mr. Ming that we had seen the private schools for ourselves in the villages. Yes, yes. Shouldn’t we remind him? No, no.

Mr. Ming slowly continued, while Xiang translated: “We have a close relationship with DfID, and we are very pleased to host the SDP project. Indeed, when your prime minister, Tony Blair, visited China he was very pleased to meet with delegates of the Gansu Basic Education Project. Now if you were to show to DfID that your ideas made a worthwhile, practical project, then we would obviously take this seriously, because we respect their judgment. But as it stands, I don’t see that you have a viable research project. Of course, you may apply for permission and we will consider it carefully.”

We closed the meeting politely, with me apologizing profusely. I was crestfallen. I realized how stupid I had been in not realizing that my work might be threatening to the Chinese government. But the cat was out of the bag. What to do? Xiang, however, told me not to worry. He pointed out that we hadn’t yet asked for permission. We only visited to ask how
we might go about
getting permission! So we hadn’t actually been refused. The way was still open for us to conduct the research. But how? I certainly didn’t want to put Xiang and the team he had assembled at risk. He said they would not be and not to worry, they would get permission. And a few weeks later, much to my surprise, once I was safely back in England, and after several sumptuous banquets to get to know bureau chiefs better, they did.

So we conducted the research in Gansu province. Xiang hired a dedicated team from the Gansu Marketing Research Company, a specialized research organization with a network of researchers across the province. We used a large team (48 research supervisors and 310 researchers), distributed across all 14 regions of Gansu. We gave all researchers and supervisors a two-day training session. Just as in the other studies, the aim, we told them, was to locate
all
private primary and secondary schools in rural Gansu. For comparison purposes, researchers were also asked to locate a public school “nearby” each located private school, defined as being within a maximum of one day’s travel for the researchers, who were traveling mainly on foot. The researchers were allocated to areas that they knew reasonably well. They could ask for lists of private schools from the local education bureau, but were warned that such lists might not be forthcoming, nor complete. In addition, they should ask local residents, in markets or on the street, whether other schools existed, unacknowledged by local authorities.

Because we were using such a large team, quality control was especially important. All questionnaires from the school had to be imprinted with the official school stamp and contact telephone number. Researchers were required to photograph each school to prove that they had visited it—I have a large album of all these schools now. All schools were subsequently telephoned, if possible by the supervisors, to check whether the researchers had in fact conducted the survey and observation.

What did we find? In total, there were 586 private schools located in the villages, serving village populations.
²
These were our “private schools for the poor.” Of course, this figure is a lower bound, as we cannot be sure we found all the schools that were not on the provincial list of schools: officially, Gansu province has only 26 primary schools, all of which are based in the cities and larger towns, not in villages.
³

The researchers also identified 309 government schools that were in villages “nearby” the private schools. (The number is smaller than the private school total because in some areas, the researchers found no “nearby” public schools.) These were only a very small fraction of the total in Gansu—there are 15,635 primary schools alone. The researchers told us that in the major towns and the larger crowded, bustling villages, they would find a public school, often a fine two-story building, sporting, as we too had found, a plaque marking it as a recipient of some foreign aid. To find the private schools, researchers had to abandon public transport and either walk or hitch a ride on one of the three-wheelers to travel up the even steeper mountain paths to the small clusters of houses that made up smaller, more remote villages. And there, nestled on mountain ridges, were stone or brick houses converted to schools, with the proprietor or headmaster living with his family in one or two of its rooms. Sometimes the school was purpose-built, constructed by the villagers themselves. Over and over again, researchers followed these trails high into the arid mountains to discover the private schools.

In the 586 private schools for the poor, it was reported, nearly 60,000 children were enrolled, an average of about 100 children per school. The largest school had 540 students, whereas the smallest had 5. There was a slightly higher percentage of girls in the private than in the public schools. Unlike the other country studies, private schools for the poor in China did not cater to a huge proportion of the school population—we estimated around 2 percent of schoolchildren were in private schools. However, the fact that they were there at all, apparently completely unknown to the regional officials, seemed itself remarkable enough.