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This study investigates Beijing’s use of educational initiatives as a tool for soft power in Pakistan. It explores how these initiatives influence various stakeholders within Pakistan. The research employs a descriptive analysis approach. It examines the mechanisms China utilizes through its educational system to build relationships with Pakistan, promote Chinese culture, and shape Pakistani perceptions of China. Beijing leverages its educational system through four key mechanisms to exert soft power in Pakistan. Confucius Institutes offer Chinese language courses and cultural events, fostering direct engagement with Chinese culture. University partnerships facilitate knowledge exchange and joint research collaboration between Chinese and Pakistani universities. Scholarship programs attract Pakistani students to study in China, providing them with language skills, cultural understanding, and potential career opportunities. Finally, the internationalization of Chinese universities, offering English-taught programs, makes them more accessible to Pakistani students. The impact of these initiatives varies across stakeholder groups. Students and academics directly benefit by gaining language skills, cultural understanding, and potential career opportunities. However, concerns exist about ideological influence, academic freedom, and brain drain. Broader Pakistani society experiences indirect exposure through media, interactions with graduates, and changing perceptions of China.

This study analyses social inequality in education in China, focusing on parental class effects on children’s educational attainment. While there is a massive increase in the state provision of educational opportunities, class differences persist and are becoming even more pronounced for the younger cohort. The growing social disparity as found in China is at odds with findings of trendless fluctuation or weakening inequality in the Western societies. It is argued that it is the growing socio-economic disparity in China as compared with the relative stability in class-lined conditions in the Western countries that may account for the different findings between this study and those by other scholars.

After almost 500 children studying at a junior middle school in the city of Changzhou in Jiangsu province became sick with a range of illnesses. Investigations revealed the school had been built on polluted ground. The premises had been formerly occupied by three chemical pesticide factories, which left the ground toxic. After investigations, questions arose as to why the school was built there. This case presents the moral issues involved, including corruption, stakeholder rights, and corporate social responsibility.

In 2002, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced a goal of quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Starting at income levels of the year 2000, this would require a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in per capita income or close to 8.0 percent in GDP. Such unresolved and emerging problems as growing income disparities, increasing pollution, pressures on infrastructure, the inefficiency of stateowned enterprises, and political instability are often cited as reasons to doubt the attainability of the CCP's goal. However, China's progress in addressing fundamental constraints that might limit rapid economic growth augurs well for the success of its economic goals. Although there are disagreements about economic policy among top leaders, the continued transformation into a market economy and the promotion of increasing local autonomy in economic matters are not in doubt. In education, China has substantially increased the percentage of its workforce receiving a college education, and continuing growth in this investment in human capital could account for a large portion of the desired growth rate. In addition, the value of improvements in the quality of economic output unmeasured by GDP, such as advances in the quality of health care and education, could raise reported growth rates by as much as 60 percent. Finally, the government's increasing sensitivity to public opinion and issues of inequality and corruption, combined with improving living conditions, have resulted in a level of popular confidence in the government that makes political instability unlikely.

This paper assesses the effects of education and health on economic growth by partitioning the reasons for cross-country variation in income levels into three components: (i) persistent factors influencing the level of output; (ii) time-varying factors influencing the level of output (e.g., levels of health and education); and (iii) persistent factors influencing a country's rate of technical progress. Persistent factors are ones that remain unchanged (e.g., geographical location) or that change only slightly in the time period under study (e.g., potentially endogenous determinants of technical progress such as a country's orientation toward free trade). Multi-level modeling techniques using maximum likelihood methods were used for estimation. This paper draws on earlier work but extends it to use more recently available data including China. The initial analysis used data on 53 countries over the period 1965–1990 and estimated that education improvements accounted for about 14% of economic growth over this period and health improvements accounted for about 11%. The extended analysis, including China, that this paper reports included data from 86 countries over the period 1960–2000 at 10-year intervals. Findings were broadly similar to the initial analysis, although the magnitude of the estimated effects for education and for health were smaller. Taking our range of models and parameter estimates into account, we feel that education improvements probably accounted for 5%–8% of China's economic growth between 1970 and 2000 and that health improvements accounted for 1%–5%. Our small and imprecise China-specific estimate of health's effect probably results from the atypical pattern in China of successful early efforts to improve health followed by stagnation in health during the later period of rapid growth.

This paper offers an explanation of the quantitative changes in education spending by the framework of demand analysis, including the changes in the ratio of educational funding to GDP in the period 1991–2002. The income effect is estimated mainly by using cross-provincial data, while time series data are used to estimate the price effect. Changes in government and non-government spending through time can be satisfactorily explained by the income and price effects. Demand for education services in the three levels of primary school, secondary school and higher education, and aggregate demand for all education services are investigated. The relation between income inequality and inequality in education opportunities is briefly discussed. Ten important findings are stated.

This paper updates our knowledge of Chinese school enrollment and graduation patterns by analyzing the 2000 Chinese Census. Looking at the school enrollment and attainment snapshot in 2000 and comparing these rates with the enrollment rates in 1990 provides us with important insight into the effect of economic, social and institutional reforms of the 1990s on the generation of students coming through the system in the early post economic reform era. The findings show that substantial progress has been made in China's goal of universal education for all children through the 9th grade.

Recent research literature on migration in China has mainly focused on adult migrants. As more and more people participate in the migration process and as migrants expand the duration of their stays in cities, migrant children increasingly become part of the migration stream. The presence of large numbers of migrant children in cities, especially children without local hukou, creates major problems for their parents and challenges for education policy-makers. In this paper, we examine the school enrollment of migrant children who resided in cities of Guangdong province in 1995. Using data from the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey, we apply a research strategy that incorporates both migration origin as well as destination. This allows us to estimate school enrollment rates for temporary migrant children, permanent migrant children, and local children, in addition to non-migrant children at the place of origin. Two major findings emerge from multivariate analyses of school enrollment. First, temporary migrant children are much less likely to be enrolled in school compared to local children. Temporary migrants with less than one year of residence in cities suffer the most. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, permanent migrant children are more likely to be enrolled in school than local children due largely to the highly selective nature of their parents. Second, compared to non-migrant children at the place of origin, rural temporary migrant children from Guangdong also encounter a major disadvantage in terms of school enrollment. As education becomes more and more important for socio-economic mobility in the Chinese society, such disadvantages faced by temporary migrant children is likely to have detrimental and long-term consequences for migrant children and for urban society as a whole.

Since the 1980s health care reform in rural China, the coverage of public health insurance has considerably diminished and the price of medical service continues to increase. Using data from the 1991 and 1997 China Health and Nutrition Surveys, this paper examines the rural residents' demand for medical care and illustrates the impact of the reform. Our study reveals a positive relationship between education and health status, and a negative relationship between education and medical expenditure. Simultaneously, the income effect of medical care is inelastic (0.31), which means that individuals with lower income are burdened with higher medical expenditure. In addition, the income effect significantly influences the decision to seek care when ill, which implies a credit constraint in health care consumption. There has been a persistent increase of inequality in rural China. Our study suggests that the situation is much worse if we take into account the health inequality and higher medical expenditure of the poor people.