A full century after it revoked its imperial civil examination system, China has happened to land itself at the crossroad of education system reform, with the prominent issue being that of "fairness" at the core.

More than 200 million primary and middle school kids commence their new semester at the beginning of this month, But regional discrepancy has made them living in two entire different worlds.

The one-semester tuition fee for a primary school pupil in Xihaigu area in northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, slated as the "most unfit for human settlement" by the United Nations ( UN), is 226 yuan (28 US dollars), or one percent of a private school student in Beijing.

As headmasters in China's eastern coast areas are busy purchasing more computers and multi-media equipment to reinforce hardware facilities of their schools, their peers in the outlying western regions are still worried about doing repairs to the cracked classroom ceilings, and enabling every student to have a seat.

Education resources discrepancy, too, triggered by regional differences and urban-rural contrast, has stood out as the focus of Chinese society. In 2002, Rural areas, where 60 percent of China's total population live, only got 23 percent of the state's 80 billion yuan (about 10 billion US dollars) of education input.

All those areas, which fail to implement the nine-year compulsory education, are in China's rural areas, and majority of the country's illiterate population are in the countryside.

Enlarged urban-rural difference is the main reason behind the education discrepancy. In the 1885-2003 period, annual per-capita income growth for Chinese farmers stood at 4.3 percent, while the figure was 8.7 percent for urbanites.

There are slim chances for the abject rural villagers to recruit good teachers, who remain unwilling to stay working in rural areas. As for those rural teachers, they are seeking the opportunities to "escape". Statistics show that the teachers in cities and towns hold overall higher academic degrees than urban teachers.

A country kid has to exert more efforts than rural student for a chance in colleges or universities, owing to the discriminated entrance ratio:Forty-nine percent of middle school leavers can enter colleges or universities in the national capital Beijing as against only 8.64 percent in southwest China's Yunnan Province.

Upon receiving the matriculation notice from Peking University, Yang Zaihong, whose home is in China's southwestern mountainous area, left for Chongqing to seek jobs during holiday.

Yang's family is heavily in debt owing 80,000 yuan (10,000 US dollars), which eas used to pay for the tuition fee of Yang Zaihong and his elderly brother.

"Knowledge can alter one's fate" has become a popular slogan in rural China, but to materialize it is another story. "If my mother didn't insist on my going to the college for study, I may go to Beijing not as a freshman but a migrant worker," recalled Yang Zaihong.

Non-government forces have become the "adjuster" to meliorate China's education status in the past decade. The "Project Hope" has drawn 2.7 billion yuan (about 300 million US dollars)in the past 16 years, established 12,000 "Hope primary schools", trained about 15,000 teachers and took 27 million students back to campuses.

Chinese Minister of Education Zhou Ji acknowledged that his ministry will exempt students of poor rural families from schooling fees. Government commitment has turned into reality. East China's Jiangsu Province has distributed 5.81 million textbooks to its up to 560,000 students in need.

(Xinhua News Agency September 8, 2005)