Caixin Magazine reports on REAP's ongoing Perfecting Parenting project.  This article was translated and reprinted with permission from Caixin Magazine.  Read the original article (in Chinese) here.

Transition of Family Planning Officials in China Bears Complicated and Multi-faceted Expectations
Caixin Magazine, 2015, Volume 9
by Heqian Xu

As the year comes to a close, the snow still has not completely melted in the city of Shangluo, 167 kilometers southeast of Xi’an.  On Wednesday, February 11th, 33-year-old Bo Li and 31-year-old Shuxia Yan climb the steep, snow-covered sloping road to the village of Heigouhe in Shangzhen, Danfeng county.  On this day, the two officials, who work for Shangzhen Family Planning Services, are paying a visit to the eight newborn to three-year-old children in this nationally designated poverty county.

On the same day in Weijiatai, Shangnan county, also near Shangluo, grassroots-level family planning official Haichun Yan similarly walked three kilometers along a rugged village road.  She was on her way to visit a two-and-a-half-year-old girl named Zitong Huang, whose family lives in the village of Yangbo, seven or eight kilometers outside of town.

In the past, if family planning officials arrived in a village, they would not receive such a warm welcome as they do today.  Up until the present day, the average quality, expertise, and attitude toward law enforcement among a portion of China’s grassroots-level family planning officials are still poor.  In some places, fines imposed on ordinary citizens for exceeding the One Child Policy were even taken as bonuses to family planning officials’ salaries.  In many areas, control over family planning still functioned as a strict “single veto” standard to assess village leaders.

To this day, the one-month abortion, forcibly induced labor, and the imaginary cries of aborted fetuses--now banned by the state--cast shadows over the hearts of family planning officials who worked in the 1990s.

But today, Bo Li and others look like Father Christmas with a sack of toys on their backs.  The big, gray-checked burlap sack that Haichun Yan carries is filled with toys, teaching materials, picture books, and parenting manuals.

Including Bo Li and Haichun Yan, altogether in Shangluo there are 69 grassroots family planning officials.  In a departure from their former services providing ligations and imposing fines, since November 2014 they have been assigned to a new mission. They have been trained to become early child development “parenting trainers.”  In contrast to family planning officials of the 1980s and ‘90s who carried megaphones, moved as a large group, and arrived in villages to throw open buildings, pull people out and give them ligations; in the eyes of villagers these “parenting trainers”--who carry toys and arrive to help children--are completely different.

This is the “Perfecting Parenting” early child development project, and Bo Li and the other 69 grassroots-level family planning officials in Shangluo are the first batch of “parenting trainers” to be trained.  They and 227 randomly selected newborn to three-year-old babies are in the process of carrying out an early child development intervention as part of an experiment conducted together by the National Health and Family Planning Commission and the Rural Education Action Program (a joint establishment between Shaanxi Normal University’s Center for Experimental Economics in Education, the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Stanford University in the United States).

The project’s principal investigator is Scott Rozelle, an American with a head full of curly gray hair who speaks fluent Chinese.  Rozelle was born in the United States and is a professor of development economics at Stanford University.  He first set foot in China in 1984, and has been researching problems in China’s rural areas for as long as some of the newly-trained family planning officials have been alive.

While searching for reasons behind the lagging development of China’s rural children, Rozelle stopped and interviewed villagers.  He told Caixin reporters he couldn’t count the number of times he had heard grandmothers--carrying children around rural villages--ask him, “Why should I talk to a baby?  Why should I play with him?  He is still so young, and he can’t speak.  I’ll wait until he can speak and then talk to him.”  Rozelle discovered that rural families’ severe lack of accurate information on how to raise babies was not only a weak link that the entire country would not be able to skip over, but was also a fundamental reason explaining the gap that develops very early between rural and urban children.

With respect to this problem, “Perfecting Parenting” has arisen at an opportune time.  According to the program’s plan, each week the family planning officials designated as “parenting trainers” will visit and coach a baby--playing games with them, doing art, singing songs, and together with the child completing the specially designed curriculum.  They will also record whether or not the child can jump, count, stand on one leg, and perform other development indicators.  Each meeting lasts one hour.

On March 20th, 2015 the Christian Science Monitor reported from the field on REAP's Perfecting Parenting project.  

The Perfecting Parenting project was designed in response to REAP research showing that a startling 40 percent of China's rural babies were significantly delayed in cognitive or motor development, or both.  The REAP team collected qualitative evidence during their Baby Nutrition project suggesting that these developmental delays may be excacerbated by a lack of interaction with their caregivers.

Therefore, REAP developed the Perfecting Parenting project, a randomized controlled trial to examine the impact of a parenting training program on child development.  Since November 2014, a group of "parenting trainers" has travelled to rural villages each week to visit the families of newborn to three-year-old children and teach interactive activities to the children and their caregivers.  

The Christian Science Monitor documents anecdotal evidence that the program is already having a positive impact, not only on the children, but also on their parents, grandparents, and even the "parenting trainers"—officials from the National Health and Family Planning Commission who were once responsible for enforcing China's One Child Policy.

"Until six months ago, nobody played much with Li Mengyue, an apple-cheeked two-year-old growing up with her grandma in this remote, hardscrabble village in central China.

"Now, as part of a project to make Chinese village kids smarter, Mengyue's granny is getting weekly classes in how to use toys and books to exercise the little girl's mind.  And in an unexpected twist, the parenting lessons are coming in weekly visits by a woman from the family planning task force — long the most reviled of government agencies.

"Behind the experiment, say Chinese officials involved in it, is a new approach to population that worries less about how many babies are born, and more about what they will be able to do when they grow up."

Read the full article here.

Caixin Magazine features REAP co-director Scott Rozelle, who has been researching and supporting policy change in China for the last 30 years.  This article was translated and reprinted with permission from Caixin Magazine.  Read the original article here.

January 15, 2015

By spending time not only in the ivory towers of academia but also experiencing life in the field, he has been able to create more real change in Chinese society than the vast majority of researchers.

"He’s more Chinese than Chinese people," say those who know him well.

He is development economist Scott Rozelle. 2014 marks the 30th year since he first came to China’s mainland. In the last 30 years, he went from being a graduate student to a faculty member at the University of California, Davis and then Stanford University, and was awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ International Science and Technology Collaboration Award and the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs’ China Friendship Award.

He has spent approximately a third of the last 30 years in China. The affinity he shares with China began in 1966.

Lasting Bonds With China

Born in 1955, Rozelle was only 12 years old at the time. The junior high school he attended happened to be one of only a few in the United States to offer Chinese language courses. At that time, Sino-US relations still had not normalized, but the US government saw the opportunity to build a relationship of mutual understanding with China.  The US government therefore sought to prepare for the re-opening of Sino-US relations by improving education in Chinese.  This Chinese language program was the starting point at which Rozelle was first exposed to the Chinese world.

In 1974, Rozelle, an undergraduate at Cornell University, took part in a student exchange program to Taiwan to learn Chinese. "At first I had planned to stay for three months, but I ultimately ended up staying for three years,” he told Caixin reporters.

On January 1, 1979, the People's Republic of China formally established diplomatic relations with the United States. That year, Rozelle, now pursuing his Master’s Degree at Cornell, applied for funding from the US National Science Foundation to go to Shandong, China in 1982 to research the system of contract labor in rural areas. However, these plans did not come to fruition, and he temporarily left school to work for several years instead.

A new opportunity appeared for Rozelle in 1984, when Nanjing Agricultural University invited Cornell University to send an instructor to China to teach Western economics. Rozelle’s advisor immediately thought of him. "Can’t Scott speak Chinese? He can go!"

Thus, Rozelle came to China and became the first foreign exchange student accepted into the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Agricultural Development, to study and to gather data. Since the 1980s, he has maintained friendships with many Chinese economists.

At the same time, he was also pursuing his PhD at Cornell. He was deeply interested in poverty alleviation in rural areas, but he believed that because the dividends of institutional reforms and the free market manufacturing were only temporary, long-term development had to rely on new technology. Therefore, he chose hybrid rice production as his doctoral dissertation topic, "I just wanted to figure out why some farmers are willing to use hybrid rice while others did not? How do they decide?"

To answer this question, he visited various rural villages throughout northern Jiangsu and Hubei to conduct interviews and research,  conducted interviews throughout various rural villages in northern Jiangsu and Hubei, yet was unable to find an answer.  Finally, while in Hubei, a young official in the local education bureau who had just graduated from university told him, "There is no relationship between the farmer and the decision to grow hybrid rice or not. The decision lies with the head of the village or the other leaders who fall under his jurisdiction. They are the ones who decide.”

Struck by this sudden realization, Rozelle used this perspective to understand the logic behind individual choice, economic production and power dynamics among leaders in China, and ultimately completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Economic Behavior of China’s Village Leaders.”

Between the Ivory Tower and the Field

In 1990, Rozelle travelled to the Philippines to attend a meeting organized by the International Rice Research Institute, he got to know a young agricultural economist named Jikun Huang, who was a visiting scholar in Manila at the time. This marked the beginning of nearly twenty-five years of collaboration between the two. After Huang returned home, he and Rozelle both searched eagerly for funds that would eventually allow them to jointly open and run the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy.

Since the mid-1990s, together they have observed the repeated reforms in China’s agricultural market, and witnessed the changes as farmers have left their land to invest in village businesses or move to cities to work.  The research center also investigates agricultural expansion, rural development, agricultural technology and other related topics. The center’s policy recommendations have garnered increased attention from leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture and the State Council.

In 2000, the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy became part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was therefore able to directly submit policy recommendations to upper-level decision makers.  According to the Rural Education Action Program (REAP), a research team affiliated with the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, between 2009 and 2012, the center submitted 34 policy briefs to the State Council.  Of these policy briefs, 31 have been adopted and 25 have received comment from deputy- and higher-level government officials.

To Rozelle, engaging in academic research, influencing policy change, and improving the real situation in poverty-stricken areas are not mutually exclusive, but in fact function together simultaneously. By spending time not only in the ivory towers of academia but also experiencing life in the field, he has been able to create more real change in Chinese society than the vast majority of China researchers from the West.

"My role in this has changed, from a scholar to now a kind of advocate," the nearly 60-year-old Rozelle--with a head of silver hair and a weathered yet joyful face--jokes,  "I’m too old to publish more papers anyway."

The Goal is to Solve Practical Problems

That being said, in his academic career Rozelle has published more than 300 articles on Chinese development problems, all of which have relied on rigorous experimentation, comparison, and statistical analysis. Rozelle recalls when he first threw himself into development economics in the 1980s it was still a relatively new discipline on the international scene, and was therefore an almost exclusively theoretical construct.  Empirical study was not introduced into the discipline until the 1990s.  For Rozelle, the purpose of experimentation is not simply to meets the standards of academic research, but to find the most efficient and cost-effective solutions to real-world problems.

While Rozelle’s team gathered research in Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and other areas, they found that nearly 40 percent of fourth and fifth grade students in northwest regions of the Northwest were suffering from iron deficiency anemia. Iron deficiency anemia has led to unhealthy development among rural children, causing them to be in poor health and weakening cognition, and preventing them from competing on an even academic playing field with children from rural areas.  Through his visits to many rural villages, Rozelle discovered that the meals of rural children were composed primarily of rice, noodles, and steamed buns, and severely lacked meat and fresh fruit and vegetables.  “Almost 70% of parents understand that to raise a piglet into a healthy, plump pig, a certain amount of micronutrients are needed, but not even a third of parents believe that babies also need them.”

Now that the central government is aware of this problem, it has decided to grant 3 to 4 yuan per day for each child living in poor areas to begin eating healthy lunches.  However, Rozelle and his team estimate that for each child to consume the necessary amount of iron, they need to eat two servings of meat and fresh vegetables everyday, which would cost at least 8 to 9 yuan.  Schools would also have to add cafeterias, hire more cooks, and take on additional expenses.  Taking into account the budgets, facilities, and feasibility of implementation in poor areas, Rozelle proposed a different plan: the most cost-effective method to combat iron deficiency anemia is to provide vitamin tablets to rural children.  Each tablet costs only 20 to 30 cents and provides the same amount of iron as meat and vegetables.

Rozelle recognized that children should not have to rely on vitamin tablets everyday to survive, but this is nevertheless the safest, most effective, and inexpensive way to provide iron and other micronutrients. Not only would special subsidies for these vitamins be easy to regulate, there would also be low wastage during the implementation process, and no additional facilities are required.  “If this plan is successfully implemented, malnutrition among children in rural China will soon become a thing of the past."

Rozelle and his team have often seen that in the course of solving one problem they discover yet another.

For example, while working to improve nutrition and educational efficiency, Rozelle realized that in Guizhou province and other southern regions with similar climates, several million school-aged children may be suffering from intestinal parasites.  In his initial investigation, Rozelle found that 50 percent of school children were infected with one or more parasites, including roundworm, hookworm, and whipworm.  As early as 2010, Rozelle and his team reported on this problem, pointing out the depth of the issue to relevant government leaders.  Three years later, when Rozelle again travelled to Guizhou, he found that situation had in no way improved.  He continued to draw attention to the importance and simplicity of preventing and curing intestinal worm infection, “Children only need to take two deworming tablets every six months, each tablet costs only 2 yuan, and within one or two days you can see results.  In one year, for only 8 yuan a child can be freed from suffering from intestinal parasites.

Another way to improve the learning efficiency of rural children--that, in Rozelle’s mind, is critical--is to protect their eyesight.  According to his data, on average, 30 percent of China’s 10- to 12-year-old students suffer from myopia, or nearsightedness.  However, in the thousands of primary schools that Rozelle visited in villages throughout China, he had very rarely seen students wearing glasses; in middle schools of 100 or more students, only one or two would be wearing glasses.  He eventually concluded that in China, 57 percent of middle school students and 24 percent of primary school students failed to receive timely treatment for their vision problems.  Furthermore, among rural children and the children of migrant workers, only one in seven had glasses.  Whether or not students were appropriately wearing glasses had a huge impact on their learning outcomes.  After putting on glasses, some weak students jumped to medium academic standing.  On average, student scores increased 10 percent when given glasses.

Rozelle approached lens manufacturers and managed to receive more than 8,000 pairs of free glasses to distribute.  However, his research also showed that even when given free, high-quality glasses, only 35 percent of students would regularly wear them.  Finally, he found a “best practice” to ensure that students wore their glasses--giving teachers incentives.  In an experiment he designed, Rozelle found that by simply offering teachers an iPad if their students wore glasses appropriately, the teachers would continuously supervise and exhort their students to wear their glasses, and uptake increased to 80 percent.  In contrast, in classes in which teachers were not offered incentives, only 9 percent of students wore their glasses.

From nutrition to vision and anemia to parasites, Rozelle realized that many small details were affecting the effectiveness of education policies for the poor. In Rozelle’s words, while the Chinese government has already invested several billion yuan in improving facilities, raising teacher salaries, and other programs, if students are not healthy enough to study, “then the huge amount that has already been invested is likely to go to waste.”  

Turning Toward Health and Education

In recent years, Rozelle has extended his interest in poverty in rural China beyond his initial focus on agricultural policy to two other key areas: health and education.  The structure of China’s educational system and prospects for mobility in the system are causes of concern.  “75 percent of the five-year-olds in China live in rural areas.  But in rural areas, only 37 percent of students graduate high school.”  As a result, will there be an adequate supply of skilled workers to fuel China’s economic transformation and industrial upgrade?

Rozelle uses the example of European garment industry workers to illustrate his point: European workers must have a grasp of mathematics, language, computer skills, and other fundamental knowledge in order to do their jobs, and their salaries can reach 11 euros per hour.  But when he tested young Chinese factory workers using a fifth grade exam, “60 percent of workers couldn’t pass math, 70 percent failed Chinese, and English is not even worth mentioning.”  Rozelle worries that in the future young workers such as these will be unable to enter the ranks of the high-income labor force after China’s economic transformation. “This is not ten or twenty million people, its three or four hundred million people.  This is the future of China’s population.”

He also cautions that China's current education system is very similar to Mexico’s in the 1980s.  From the mid-1970s to 1980, Mexico’s and South Korea’s economic growth rates and industrial composition were almost identical.  However, throughout the 1980s to the late 1990s the development trajectories of the two countries changed.  In South Korea--where almost everyone received a high school education--the economy smoothly continued to improve.  In contrast, following the exodus of the low-level manufacturing industry, a large portion of the labor force was insufficiently educated to turn to high productivity positions in the service sector or innovative industries, causing Mexico to sink into the “middle-income trap.”

Rozelle also compared vocational training in China and Germany.  He believes that German vocational training emphasizes building foundational knowledge and cultivating learning ability as the best way to prepare individuals for future technology and skills.  “Chinese vocational training focuses excessively on training for a single occupation, training workers in only in skills that currently in demand but can be outdated in the blink of an eye.”

In December 2014, the Ministry of Education finally issued a document setting forth strict rules declaring that in addition to teaching technical skills, vocational schools also have to teach language, mathematics, English, computer skills, physical education, history, and other common fundamental courses.  In vocational middle schools these basic classes should take up one third of total instruction time, and in vocational high schools these courses must make up no less than one quarter of total instruction.

After having worked with people on the ground in China for the last three decades, Rozelle does not begrudge praise for Chinese officials, especially basic-level cadres; “many of them are hard-working, intelligent, and eager to do good.”  However, Rozelle is occasionally dismayed by the excessive misgivings of officials in some areas.  In Qinghai province, while carrying out an experiment to test the effectiveness of computer-assisted learning software in helping Tibetan students to learn Mandarin.  Although “the local governor liked it very much,” due to his American citizenship and the foreign background of those in the Rural Education Action Program team, his research was temporarily halted. “Let’s take a break for a semester, then see if we can start again.”  In the next two days, Rozelle rushed to Shangluo, in Shaanxi province.  There, he and the National Health and Family Planning Commission started a new experiment.  This experiment prepares for the future transformation and training of rural cadres responsible for enforcing the One Child Policy, and enable them to become trainers in charge of educating village families--especially grandparents raising migrant children--in accurate information about child development and skills for raising babies.

Rozelle said, "I have heard too many grandparents in rural China ask me in surprise, ‘why should we talk to an infant? Why should we sing to them? Why should we give them toys to play with?’” He found that by the age of four, a significant IQ gap had already appeared between rural children--who in the first four months after birth lack sufficient stimuli--and urban children--whose parents interacted with them from a young age.

"We all say that we cannot let children lose before they get to the starting line. This starting line begins much earlier than we thought," Rozelle said.