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Despite rapid economic growth in China since 1978, rural-urban inequality has widened. High levels of socioeconomic inequality can have profound implications for child development and lifelong educational equity. Using a dataset containing early childhood development (ECD) outcomes of 0- to 3-year-olds (N = 9,053) from study sites in Eastern, Central, and Western China, the study finds that the risks of cognitive, language, and motor delay are, respectively, 43.2, 18.3, and 20.7 percentage points higher in rural study sites than in urban Shanghai (ps <.01). Impact evaluation of cluster-randomized experiments shows that parental training (focusing on child psychosocial stimulation and caregiver-child interaction) can improve parenting beliefs and practices (or investments) and ECD outcomes of disadvantaged rural children (p<.01). Such programs can play an important role in advancing progress toward more social equality and economic equity, the stated goals of China's "Common Prosperity" policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including China's social inequality, intergenerational mobility and social mobility.

This study investigates gender attitudes in the public sphere in China from 1995 to 2018 using World Values Survey data. Although overall support for gender equality in the public sphere has been stable, gender attitudes in the constituent domains of work, politics, and education differ from one another and over time. Egalitarianism is highest in education, while attitudes in the domain of work are on a trajectory to become more egalitarian than in politics. To identify what factors contribute to attitudinal change the Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort (HAPC) model is used. Age effects are always significant, and there is a U-shaped relationship between age and egalitarianism. Period effects are moderately significant and cohort effects are less statistically significant. Higher education levels are associated with higher levels of gender egalitarianism for women than for men. While rural residency is associated with less egalitarian gender attitudes, rural residency for women is associated with more egalitarian attitudes than for men. These results suggest that an age-, domain- and gender-specific approach is helpful to understand gender attitudes in the public sphere in modern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of a rapid increase in inequality following China’s historical economic boom, the Chinese government in the past decade has drastically expanded its social welfare programs aimed in part to reduce inequality. How effective has the benevolent state been and what does it inform us about the nature of the new welfare system in China? Utilizing the National Transfer Accounts approach, we examine inequalities in public transfers in three areas: education, health care, and pension. Public transfers in China as a whole are unevenly distributed across generations, with spending on the elderly almost twice of the young on a per person basis. Public transfers in education, health care, and pension combined are even more tilted, with those in the top income quartile receiving nearly four times of those in the bottom group. Such inequalities are in part conditioned by past legacies of social inequalities in China, but they also show the limits of the emerging Chinese welfare regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extent to which the impact of family background and gender on one's access to college education changed after the 1999 college expansion policy in China. The analysis is based on data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) collected between 2005 and 2008. The results show that, although the expansion has been an equalizing force in that it allows more youths of different characteristics to attain college education than in prereform regime, intergenerational inequality persisted. Youth from more socioeconomically advantaged families maintain their edge by obtaining more and higher quality education than others. The influence of family background, as indicated by fathers' education, becomes stronger on youths' access to academic colleges after the college expansion policy. The gender gap in college attendance disappears and even reverses itself. However, the female advantage is greater in attending the short-cycle program colleges than in academic colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]