Is Chinese Education Underfunded

Scholarship on education in China has correctly emphasized the massive inequalities in reform era educational funding. In describing these inequalities, however, scholars have made dubious claims about the supposedly low level of funding for education in China in relation to other countries. In this article, we examine the statistics on which this claim is based and detail the ways in which education is funded in China that do not get counted in the statistics. We conclude that though funding for education in China is unequal, the total level of such funding may not be low. Moreover, the official statistics are not a reliable guide to comparative discussions of educational funding.