Chapter Two Policies on China’s Basic Education over the Last Thirty Years

Abstract

China has witnessed great achievements in basic education with grand economic and societal transformations. A free nine-year compulsory education system has been established. One of the issues that hampered further development of basic education in China is inequalities between urban and rural areas and between different schools. Thus, the Chinese government has been engaged in promoting a balanced development of compulsory education in the last thirty years. At the same time, quality education has been integrated into the will of the nation in order to get rid of the problems of exam-oriented education through policies, which reflects the societal efforts to pursue good education and improve the quality of education. Huge gaps in the educational quality between different schools resulted in a series of problems, such as in school selection and transfer, as well as arbitrary charges for attending key schools. Policies have been focused on solving these problems. Keywords:basic education reform; China's basic education; free compulsory education; quality education