Huan Wang BOOK LAUNCH Virtual Event - Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise OCT 8, 2020 - 11:00 AM TO 12:00 PM EDT

1. THE RESEARCH BEHIND
“INVISIBLE CHINA”
Huan Wang
Research Scholar
Stanford University
Oct 8 2020

2.  Scott just finished telling you how rural China’s children are far
behind according to virtually every measure of health and
education.
 How do we know? How do you measure something that is
“invisible”?

3.  Lots of organizations study China. But, sources of data for evidence-
based research are scarce.
 There is NBS data and other second hand data maintained by China’s
national government.
o Reliability problems
 There is propriety data collected by large banks and consultancies.
o Inaccessible to the public
 In between, there is NOTHING. Often, if you want data on China you
have to collect it yourself.
 That is the comparative advantage of REAP. Data collected by REAP is
the foundation of every conclusion we draw in the book.

4.  What is REAP?
 Rural Education Action Program (REAP) is a research and policy
advocacy organization based at Stanford University and multiple
partner universities in China.
 REAP seeks to help China prepare its labor force for a prosperous
economic future by improving education outcomes for students.
o Discover the causes of poverty in rural China.
o Evaluate simple effective solutions to help rural children.
 REAP maintains what may be the largest collection of data on rural
China in the world.
 What do we do with it?

5. REAP conduct large scale field research with
universities in China

6. REAP employs rigorous methods to clearly
demonstrate the effectiveness of a program.
Baseline survey
POLICY
EXPERIMENT
RCT’s
Evaluation survey
treated
control
• Randomized methodology
• Control group

7. What research areas?
 Rural Teaching Quality
o Incentives and job satisfaction of rural
teachers
o China’s national teacher training program
o Extracurricular reading and schooling
outcomes
• Technology and Education
o Computer assisted learning
o Adaptive learning technology
o Distance education
 Health and Education in Rural and Migrant
Schools
o Student mental health
o Nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies
 Access and quality of rural healthcare
 Early childhood education
 Infant cognition and parenting
 Pre and post natal maternal health
 Vocational education and training
 Higher education quality
 Returns to education
 Rural economic recovery following COVID-19
The data and analysis from these projects form the basis of every conclusion in the book

8. Let’s look at one example: vision care and education

9. Fieldwork pilot trip

10. Half of the world’s cases of uncorrected myopia
occur in China. Tens of millions of rural children do
not have glasses. Does this matter for their education?

11. Large scale survey : enumerators

12. Large scale survey: randomly selected samples

13. Gathering data is not an easy task…

14. Baseline survey:
collect student academic performance data

15. Vision screening for 20,000 students

16. Random assign schools to
treatment or control groups

17. Students in treatment group received glasses for free

18. Endline survey:
Collect student academic performance data

19. Eyeglasses cut the achievement gap between rural
and urban students in half within one academic year.
68
72
68
86
60
70
80
90
100
Sept 2012 June 2013 Sept 2012 June 2013
No glasses Glasses
Impact caused by
glasses wear!

20. Evidence based policy change
 Between 30 and 85 percent of school aged children are nearsighted.
Only 1 in 6 of these have glasses.
 Nearsighted children without glasses learn only half as well as their
peers that can see clearly with glasses.
 This comprises one of the invisible barriers holding back China’s rural
children.
 Our findings were first published in 2014. After years of steady
advocacy, Xi Jinping declared myopia a national emergency in 2018.
 This is evidence based policy change!

21. Thank you!