Today, China prioritizes technology and innovation while simultaneously facing slowing growth, deepening inequality, and significant demographic shifts as you have emphasized in your research. In 2026, what kind of role do you think education and the development of human capital play in China’s future economic trajectory?

One of the challenges China faces today is the human capital of its rural labor force, which is probably 60 to 70 percent of the 700 million people in the labor force. Over the past 20 to 30 years, China has actually done an incredible amount of investment and focus on its rural labor force. Rural schools used to be mud brick buildings in the village, and there would be three kids at a desk, with no textbooks and no teacher. Teachers were paid by the local government, who did not have money to pay the teachers. The teachers did not have any incentive to show up, so this was a big issue. And as the country started to rise, China realized the need to address these problems. Over the past 20 years, China has built big, beautiful schools. The infrastructure is good, the salaries of teachers are now paid by upper-level government, and there are more and better teachers in the rural schools. On average, they are not quite as good as the urban teachers, but they still are still much better than they were a few decades ago. And everybody now has books, more books than they possibly need (which is a good thing, in fact). Hence, China has mostly solved this particular challenge.

However, there is still more to do. Let me explain. We carried out a survey in 2005 before all this infrastructure development and investment into schools and found a huge gap between the math scores of urban and rural kids in terms of a standardized math test. Five or six years later (after the investment), we did the same survey, and there was almost no difference. It was at this time that we stepped back and thought maybe it was not the infrastructure or the absence of (or quality of) teacher but it might have something to do with children themselves. That's when we started looking at the health and nutrition of the students. The first thing we looked at was the issue of anemia. Do the rural students have nutrition problems? We also looked at other issues. Do they have intestinal worms? Do they have myopia but do not have access to glasses? So what did we find and what did we do? From 2006 all the way to 2013 and 2014, we were finding that in fact 40% of the students did have nutritious problems. But if we give them a vitamin or a nutritious school lunch, the share of the students with anemia fell and their math scores went up. If we gave them an intestinal worm tablets and/or glasses, the students did better in school. And the government saw that there was a solution to a real problem and they took action. Today 39 million kids get a free nutritious school lunch every day. That's more than the whole rest of the world put together. The rate of anemia in China fell to under 5% from where it was ten years before (around 40%).

China is now investing a lot in rural students. However, in 2015, we did another survey of rural-urban students using a standardized math test and gap only narrowed slightly (really not much). And the fact is, after many rural students get through junior high and try to start high school, they just cannot manage to do it. They cannot do the math. They cannot do the science. But we cannot forget: they're nourished, they have glasses on, and they have been going to school. This was the pivotal moment in our research. It was in 2012 or 2013. I went to China with one of my colleagues, a public health professor from Emory University. After spending some time checking the students for anemia and finding that most of them were okay, he started to speculate that the problem was not nutrition anymore. China had done everything right. Except for one thing. And that was they had not addressed issues of early childhood development, especially for children ages zero to three. In Chinese, there is a saying called sansui kanlao, which translates to “at age three, you can see a child’s whole future.” That's neurology. Your cognition and your language and the social emotional foundation are all set when a child is three years old. It cannot fully improve after that. So, China’s leaders have invested an enormous amount in education and health and other social issues. But the fact is, they have not invested in the whole package. An important part of the package was missing—and that is the 0- to 3-year-old early childhood development part of the package. It was not that important 20 years ago. In the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, when people graduated from junior high and went to work in a factory or on a construction site, a person’s cognition and language skills were not what made them useful
inside a labor-intensive, low-wage, low-skill factory. But now in the 2020s, wages are up. To get a job today, people need to have computer, science and math skills. The students from rural areas that did not get support for their early childhood development when they were 0 to 3 years old are in many cases just not able learn. So, China has invested a lot, but there is still more to do.

By 2015 and 2016, we were working on this issue of early childhood development in China along with other colleagues in other groups in China. We conducted systematic, randomized control trials where we took one thousand babies and trained the parents, not the infant, in childhood development skills (and there were 1000 caregivers and babies in the control group that did not get training). The results were stunning. The control group children had high levels of delay after the intervention while the treatment group got much better. These challenges and ways of addressing the challenges worked its way up to China’s leadership. In the late 2010s, to government officials finally began to realize that this was not the education system's problem but it was a health problem. We have to train the mother, the grandparents, and other caregivers on how to raise their children—stimulate them to keep their brains healthy and active. That was a big breakthrough. China’s leaders needed to figure out how to deliver a package that could train the parents and caregivers on how to interact and stimulate their babies. And, it became apparent that this was not a nutrition or a genetic problem. Instead, it was finally realized to be a psycho-stimulation problem in early childhood.

Reflecting on when you first published Invisible China six years ago, where you drew attention to China’s development challenges and rural children’s education, is there anything that you have seen since then which is surprising or has caused you to think differently?

My book came out in 2019, and a new focus on early childhood wellbeing within the Ministry of Health also followed. It became a new priority of the Ministry of Health, which has many priorities as every government does. But what happened in 2020? COVID-19 hit. So, for three years, China’s entire health system was focused on the pandemic. As China moved out of COVID-19, it began to shuffle things around and move forward. And while children’s early development is a priority of the Ministry of Health, my team was often working with local governments. Every single time, the local bureau of health recognized the importance but said it had 25 other things that were also important and very little funding to prioritize everything. This is a really big issue right now. Hence, what we have been doing over the few years since COVID is trying to figure out alternative methods to improve early childhood development.

Before the pandemic, the intervention method we used was to provide opportunities for parents when their baby was 6 to 24 months old to learn how to stimulate and interact with their kid. We would go into the household, or the parents would come to a center, and there would be a one-hour one-on-one training program once a week with two toys and a book for each family. It was a fantastic program, and we have done it more than 5 times, and it worked every time in improving children’s cognitive and academic abilities. The problem is, according to the Ministry of Health and especially their local associates, that it is too expensive, especially in this post-COVID time period. We have been trying to work with our partners to make this more cost-effective, and so we are basically implementing two programs now. One is pairing a trainer with five families and their babies at the same time. The other method we are experimenting with is a digital app, which is more cost-efficient and provides parents with the same training content. These apps work great for educated parents, but the problem is for the grandparents. As a result, we are still maintaining some in-person groups and hybrid training programs. There are still big practical problems out there, like how to get rural moms willing to come to the health center all at the same time for group training. But if these programs are done right, they could still have a great impact while reducing costs for communities and the government.

As you said, more of the visible parts of the rural-urban inequality have been resolved now, and you argue in your book that this problem has become more and more invisible. Today, do you think there is enough visibility for this issue in China? Is there a greater political willingness to tackle this issue?

Not nearly enough. I am a development economist that works on rural human capital. What I see now is an enormous amount of funding being used for high tech, automating factories and, more recently, AI. With that, much less is being put into health and education, especially for rural children. One of the big challenges for China’s leaders is that education is a long-term investment. We can start investing in support for infants and children at risk for cognitive delay today, but they will be going to college in 2045 and will not be joining the job market until 2050. This is 25 years away. The question is whether there is enough willingness to make that investment in these children now. That’s a huge issue. Today, meanwhile, China is also fighting an AI battle against the world. While all these issues need to be addressed, China’s children are not getting nearly enough support.

Looking forward, how does the future of China depend on what path it chooses now with addressing rural-urban education? What are the consequences of Beijing either doing more to tackle this issue or merely maintaining the status quo. What barriers still remain?

In my book, the most important graph I show is the one that displays the income of a nation 50 years ago versus the income of that nation today. It shows the countries that were quite poor both 50 years ago and today, like the Congo or Cambodia. It shows the countries that were rich 50 years ago and rich today, like Canada, Germany, France, and the United States. What we focus on with our program are the “graduates,” countries that were middle- or low-income 50 years ago but high-income today: South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Ireland, and Taiwan. There have only been around 11 countries in total that have risen from middle-income to high- income over the past 60 years. The rest of the countries are stuck in what economists call the “middle-income trap.” While economies start to grow when they are lower-middle income, as wages rise, however, income stagnates and growth falls or stalls or collapses. The nations in the middle-income trap include Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Thailand and scores of more countries.

As for all the countries that have gone from middle-income to high-income (the graduates), an average of 70% of their labor force already had high school education or above (so they know math and science and computers and language) when they were middle-income. The countries in the middle-income trap have only 30 to 40 percent of their labor force with high school educations. China is nowhere near the number that the graduates have had. When countries have a higher income, jobs need more advanced training in math, science, computers, and language skills which are taught in high school and at university. When countries are low and middle- income, if you're healthy enough, then you have a job. But those jobs go away as incomes rise. When we compare China to other upper countries that have been trapped in middle-income for 50 or more years, like Turkey, Brazil, Argentina or South Africa, China has the lowest share of the labor force with a high school education or above. And, that obviously is a huge problem. This is why I say that China must slow down on its growth to one to two percent per year. If it grows at two percent a year for the next 30 years, China can double its income by 2055 and, in the meantime, invest much more in education, health, and early childhood development.

We are now in a post-industrial world. The question then becomes: do we need our whole labor force to be educated at this high of a level to continue growing? Let's say China's labor force has shrunk to about 500 million in 2055, and all we need is 200 million people to run the economy because we now have AI and automation. Then there are 300 million people who are of working age, with families to provide for, but are not needed to run the economy. They will have to be given a universal income grant from the government to keep them functioning. The question I always have is whether these recipients of universal income should be highly educated or uneducated. Is junior high enough, or do we want them to attend to a vocational college, high school, or college? Some people I surveyed said, “Let's not waste our money on them. They are fine and we can give them universal income, and they can play cards all day.” Others say, “No, we want them to have an education, so they can read and travel and have a good quality life…and not cause trouble or create social unrest.” So, AI is definitely a more relevant topic now than before. Even if we have better technology, there are still tasks where essential human skills are needed, and China is nowhere near educating all its population in that capacity.