Evaluating the effects of a massive rural school expansion in pre-reform China

On the eve of its economic reforms, China achieved a much higher secondary school enrollment rate than other countries with a similar per capita income at the time. This study investigates the source of this high enrollment rate by examining a massive expansion of rural schools during the Cultural Revolution that increased the number of secondary schools more than tenfold. We estimate the impact of the expansion by compiling a new county-level dataset from local gazetteers and exploiting the county-level variation in the speed of expansion for identification purposes. We provide strong evidence that the program significantly increased rural children’s years of schooling and suggestive evidence that teachers contributed more to this improvement than schools. By building a pool of middle-skilled labor years later, the expansion program boosted local agricultural yields and increased the productivity of the township and village enterprises that emerged after the reform. Finally, we find some evidence that this rapid expansion was associated with a deterioration in the quality of schooling.