The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  This interested me greatly because the hint that circumstances had not been so good before in public schools (and hence might still not be great in other places that weren’t blessed by DfID’s munificence) raised the possibility that what I’d seen in other countries—inadequate public schools leading parents to abandon them for the private sector—might also be present in China. Why wouldn’t poor parents in rural China also seek out something better for themselves if public schools were not good enough?

  I asked him about the quality of the public schools in Gansu, and he replied that there are excellent public schools in every county town—like Linxia, the base for the DfID project. But, I pressed him, not everyone can go to these schools in the towns. He agreed, there were some terrible public schools in the remoter rural areas—hence the need for the DfID project. So, I persevered with this line of questioning: “Where does an aspirational peasant—,” “farmer,” he corrected me, “—where does an aspirational farmer send his children?” Liu said, “To the upgraded public schools.” But where did they send them before the schools were upgraded? Did they go to private schools? He didn’t think this was possible. “No, there are no private schools in the rural areas.”

  I ordered more beers. As we talk, I looked over his shoulder to the two large fish tanks in the lobby. There were six or seven very large colorful fish in each and a host of guppies. Very pretty, I thought. Then I noticed one of the larger fish pursuing a smaller fish, only to swallow it whole. Then I realized the larger fish were continually pursuing and eating the smaller fish. It dawned on me: the smaller fish were the food for the larger fish! I chuckled to myself, this was China, very practical. And I recalled that when Liu and I had met earlier on the International Finance Corporation project, we were taken around a posh private school in the finer suburbs of Beijing, where ducks swam in a small pond in its courtyard. The hosts had proudly showed off this feature. A 10-year-old pupil, however, confided in us: “The ducks are for you. When you are gone, we shall eat them.” This was China, I had thought. Very practical. And this was China, I thought now, clearly the end of the road for my search for private schools for the poor.

  But, as Liu Binwen began to relax over beers, and I told him about what we had found in other countries, he became intrigued. And, conspiratorially, he leaned over and whispered that, in fact, 15 years previously, while working for the Ministry of Education, he had done a somewhat similar project. The ministry had been worried by the phenomenon of Si Shu, “private schools operating in intellectuals’ houses,” he translated, even though private education was illegal then. So he was asked to do a secret study in his home province of Hubei. Just like we were doing in other countries in Africa and in India, he and his team explored every village, and gaining the confidence of the villagers, found, just as we were finding, in every village, at least one of these private schools! They found that children attended these schools because they couldn’t afford to attend the government schools, which were much more expensive then. His confidential report went to the highest officials, who were apparently indignant. We laughed about their reaction. And he wondered what had happened to that report . . . he would see if he could get me a copy. Literally hundreds of those small private schools, he laughed, even though they were illegal, with thousands of children enrolled.

  So, I asked, surely such schools existed today? Now he was not so adamant. He doubted it, but to be honest, he’d never asked, never looked for them. State schools were less expensive now, in any case (although they weren’t free), so that major reason was gone. But wait. He picked up his cell phone and called several contacts in Gansu. The response was always the same. There were many private kindergartens, but no private schools. “Sorry, James,” he said, “there aren’t any.” I still had some hope, however. For elsewhere in the world, I’d found that this was precisely how many private schools got started. An entrepreneur, usually a woman, opens a kindergarten, but then the pressure from parents arises: “Where can I send my child now that she is older? She is happy in your school, you have taught her well. Please will you open a grade 1 for my child?” Later, “Why not a grade 2?” And a primary school is born, without anyone intending it. I told him this experience from Africa and India. No, he said, that won’t happen here, because it was easy to open a kindergarten but very difficult to open a primary school. Even the government acknowledged that there were thousands of private kindergartens. But the government was equally as adamant: there were no private primary schools in these areas; the few that existed there were in the cities, only for the rich. I told him that was where we would find our private schools, hidden behind the façade of a kindergarten! He said it wouldn’t be true.

  Anyway, he proposed to help me in my quest. He was genuinely intrigued: if I could provide a few funds, which I readily agreed to, he could explore some the next time he was in Gansu—which was the following week. He wouldn’t promise that he would find anything, but he could certainly look for me. We arranged to meet the following day to finalize the financial arrangements.

  The next day, Liu phoned me at my hotel. Grinning still, I imagined, he told me that his boss, an Englishman working for DfID, told him that he shouldn’t help me with my project, as “this would confuse the DfID.” Those were his exact words. In any case, Liu reassured me, there really were no private schools in Gansu province. Not one, he had asked everybody, and everybody agreed. DfID, he repeated, was working to help improve the public schools; there weren’t any private schools. Could we meet to discuss this again? I asked, hoping to persuade him to change his mind. Unfortunately, no, his trip to Gansu had been moved up, and he had to leave that very afternoon, so sadly there was no opportunity. I put the phone down, and took a deep breath.

  The way Liu mentioned DfID was a red flag to this bull. A few weeks earlier, while I was in Hyderabad, India, the secretary of education in the Andhra Pradesh government, with whom I was working very closely, had confided in me that the DfID office in Delhi had written to him. The gist of the letter, he said, was that they had heard he was working with me, and that he should “be careful.” What? I had been astounded: what on earth did they mean? He had laughed it off. “I don’t take orders from anyone!” he had said, “and I’m always careful.” The battle lines were drawn. If DfID didn’t want me “confusing things” in Gansu, then very definitely I would go to Gansu.

  Gansu

  I had to rush back to England after the conference, so I couldn’t go immediately. But on my return, serendipity played its role. I gave a lecture about private education to international graduate students at Newcastle University, many of whom were from China. I briefly touched on the recent work on private schools for the poor. Lu Xiang, one of the students, came to see me afterward, saying he would like me to be his PhD supervisor. Great, I said. “I want to study private schools for the poor in China.” Really? Did he think they existed? Yes, he was sure. He had heard of one, and there must be others. Where was he from? Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu!

  I did my homework on Gansu. One of China’s five northwestern provinces, Gansu was also one of the country’s least developed. Its 25.6 million people lived in an area about the size of Texas. Gansu ranked 30th among China’s 31 provinces and autonomous regions in terms of gross domestic product per capita. The average rural per capita income was only 1,500 yuan ($186.57), making it the 28th poorest of the 31 provinces and autonomous regions. About half of Gansu’s rural population lived below the poverty line of 1,000 yuan ($124.38) per year, compared with only 3 percent nationwide, while nearly 2 million people lived under the absolute poverty line of 637 yuan ($79.23) per year.1 It sounded like a great place to do my research.

  I flew to Lanzhou via Beijing on September 18, 2004. Lu Xiang had flown ahead to prepare the groundwork—including getting a team ready to conduct the research. Our first meeting was with a Mr. Wang, a senior education official from Linxia, the county town where DfID was working, who had made the long journey into the city especially. T
he meeting was disappointing. Mr. Wang said that there were only three private schools in his entire region, and, of course, none were for the poor. He told me something I’d heard so many times from education officials the world over: “our minorities”—his region had 18 minority groups, Xiang told me—“don’t value education, so they will not invest in schools, they don’t care about their children.” But this time, I braced myself that it might be true; perhaps Lu Xiang had become rather carried away with wanting to please his professor; that would be very Chinese, I thought. And who was I to say that there really were private schools for the poor in rural China, against all the advice to the contrary?

  Anyway, afterward we had a sumptuous banquet lunch together in a private room in a nice enough restaurant, with a large group of people interested in this foreigner, the sine qua non of doing any work in China, it turned out. On the meticulous agenda that Xiang prepared for me, this meal was listed as “Eating Lamb with Hands in Nan Chang Road”—the novelty of eating Gansu lamb being that you ate it with your fingers, not chopsticks. The only dish that might not be welcomed back home was “vegetables cooked in lamb’s blood.” Around the circular table, Mr. Wang initiated the toasts, with strong Chinese liquor in tiny glasses—and because I was the guest, everyone took a turn to toast me. We both stood up, said gang bei, literally “bottoms up,” knocked back the spirit, and ritually displayed our empty glasses to all around the table to prove that we had really done the required. I found that if I drank copious amounts of the hot tea liberally provided with the meal, I could just about get through the toasting without getting too drunk. The toasts were full of affection and mutual flattery. Mr. Wang then sang a wonderful song of the minority people in Linxia region, in a weird falsetto voice, about how the rivers and the trees welcome you, Professor Tooley, from Newcastle (you put in your own words of greeting, Xiang explained) to Gansu, and hope that you will prosper here. No doubt affected by the alcohol, I sang them a song I had heard played on the accordion while in Beijing: “Doe, a Deer.” Then we had our pictures taken. Mr. Wang told me that in China they said qie zi, pronounced “chee-zee,” the Chinese word for “eggplant,” because it made your mouth smile widely. I told him them that we said “cheese,” to the same effect.

  The next morning, Xiang arrived with a brand-new four-wheel-drive vehicle and a driver, another Mr. Wang, both procured with the influence of Xiang’s mother. We set off for one of the poorest regions in Gansu, Zhang County, where Xiang told me he had heard of a village private school. The fine new toll road from Lanzhou to Xi’an had road signs in English as well as Chinese and impressive mile-long tunnels bored through the arid brown, terraced mountains. After two hours, we exited at Ding Xi, “potato town of China,” as the English rendition read on its welcoming sign; then the road deteriorated. Through the utilitarian town center, the street was still wide and was lined with endless rows of potato vendors huddled under tarpaulins. Immediately outside the town, it narrowed to a potholed and incredibly dusty track, which left the wonderfully fertile and verdant valleys of the tributaries of the Yellow River, climbing through hairpin bends into the dry mountains that were terraced right up to the summits, sculpted by man to support the potato, bean, cabbage, and broccoli crops. By the roadside were many small tent encampments surrounded by beehives, housing itinerant farmers collecting honey to sell in the towns.

  After driving three hours, we arrived in a village just outside the county town of Zhang County, one of the poorest districts of this poor region, the district that Xiang had heard had a private school for the poor. We stopped to ask people by the roadside if they knew of any private school. They told us of a private kindergarten, but when we found it, it was just that, only a preschool, not also a primary school as I had assumed it might be. The proprietor told us there were no private schools as such, neither here nor in any of the other villages, nor in the town of Zhang County itself. And the same story greeted us as we arrived in town—we were directed to several private kindergartens by helpful onlookers, but all told the same story. Perhaps Liu Binwen was right after all, I mused. Why don’t the kindergartens become primary schools? I asked Xiang to ask the women who were running them: “The government runs primary schools, we’re not allowed to,” they told him. Or “People here don’t have much money; they are too poor for private schools.” By the time I went to bed in the Spartan government hotel on the main street by the local government offices, I felt very down. I had extended myself too far. Why did I assume that there would be private schools here, in one of the poorest districts of one of the poorest regions of China? I slept only fitfully.

  In the morning, though, I met Xiang for breakfast, and he was the bearer of good news. He had risen well before dawn and had gone to the market just opposite our hotel where villagers from even the remotest parts of the district came to sell their produce. He had asked around and had finally located the names of four private schools in the villages! The quest was on again.

  We drove out of the county town, into the bright autumn sunshine, to try to find Xu Wan Jia, the first of the villages that Xiang had been told contained a private school. Although we had rough directions, we traveled backward and forward along the now well-kept paved road, asking anyone—farmers tilling the soil with donkey plows, women walking along carrying water—where this private school might be. Because of our altitude, at 10,000 feet or more, the air was very thin, and I ran out of breath very quickly; Xiang got a headache. But the dialect was hard for Xiang to understand—and I began to fear that this might have been a problem in the market too. Perhaps we had come all this way because of a linguistic misunderstanding? (Thoughts of what Dennis Okoro had said in Nigeria obviously echoed in my mind.) We tried asking in the public schools that were present in every major village along the paved road, but no one seemed to know where Xu Wan Jia was—not even the village, let alone any private school therein. Many of the public schools had plaques besides their entrance gates, proudly announcing that they were recipients of foreign aid. I saw the gold stars and blue background of the European Union flag everywhere. The Japanese government was also well represented. The public school teachers, while being extremely friendly and welcoming, said that no private schools were out here—wouldn’t it be better to try in Lanzhou, the capital? Eventually, thinking that we might have to give up, we asked a woman bent double in the fields, weeding her crops, and she seemed to know the village (although again, Xiang laughed in frustration as she was difficult to understand, and I wondered again whether she had really understood the nature of our quest). Anyway, she would lead us to where the road to the village left the main road.

  The red-cheeked lady went to fetch her baby boy, and we drove off in the car together. She guided us off the main road, and Driver Wang maneuvered us skillfully down a narrow dirt track and onto the wide riverbed below that doubled as a road, because at that time of year, the river was a feeble brook. But he was adamant; our vehicle couldn’t take us any farther, although I protested irrationally that I couldn’t see why. Anyway, the woman went off to see if she could find someone to take us farther. We waited. After an hour, she returned with her husband in one of the three-wheel trucks, appearing to be adapted from motorcycles, which were ubiquitous in rural China.

  I was offered a share of the seat in the enclosed cab with the driver, but fearing that this would be too noisy, opted to travel in the truck’s open back with Xiang. As soon as we left the riverbed and began ascending into the mountains on a track only wide enough for the three-wheeler, we found we couldn’t sit down, the vehicle rattled so much with the deep staccato throb of the two-stroke engine. The views were superb, as we wound our way through hairpin bends, alongside terraced potato fields, bumping about in the back, exhilarated, higher and higher into the mountains. At times, we stopped precariously on tiny raised lay-bys, to let other similar vehicles pass. After 90 minutes, we finally arrived at the village, Xu Wan Jia, nestled into the mountains, with its neat brick and red-tile buildings. Th
e village existed. And then, finally, down narrow dirt streets, barely wide enough for the three-wheeler, we arrived at the private school, nestled deep inside the village. I felt an extraordinary sense of elation.

  Xu Wan Jia Private Primary School inhabited the proprietor’s courtyard home, with his office doubling as his residence and the classrooms taken over from his family. The proprietor and principal, Mr. Xing Ming Xin, was absolutely thrilled to have visitors; he couldn’t quite believe that anyone had come that far to see him. As was the custom here (we’d already experienced this in the public schools in the valley the day before), he searched crazily in drawers and cupboards, and had others searching too, until he found a brand-new unopened packet of Lanzhou cigarettes, reserved for any such occasion—clearly rare—which he opened and offered to me (although he didn’t smoke himself, until I offered him one of mine that I had bought that morning in Zhang County, realizing the custom from the previous day). He insisted we take off our shoes and sit comfortably on the raised earthen area that, I was told, was the shared family bed. I settled comfortably on blankets and pillows, feeling very warm and cozy. It turned out a fire was lit underneath. It was incredibly comfortable, quite unlike interviewing in tropical countries, where the heat was normally overwhelming.