Right To Education: China Fails
To Make The GradeHuman Rights Features
08 October, 2003In November 2002, the Chinese government, under increasing pressure to accept scrutiny of its human rights situation, issued an invitation to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education to visit the country, the first rapporteur to be invited in nearly ten years.
Beijing evidently believed it was playing safe by allowing the investigation of a 'soft' issue like education. It also believed it would be spared any major criticism. After all, China has been a vociferous champion of the primacy of economic, social and cultural rights.
It had clearly picked the wrong investigator.
At the end of her two-week visit to the country, Special Rapporteur Katarina Tomasevski meticulously demolished every myth about China's upholding of the right to education. The country was spending only two percent of its gross domestic product on education, as against the six percent recommended by the United Nations, Ms Tomasevski said during a press conference called to report her findings. It was failing to provide education to children of migrant workers, barred children from receiving religious education, and covered only 53 percent of school funding, compelling parents to pay the rest.
Indignant rejoinders have already been put out by Chinese officials, claiming that the special rapporteur under-reported the budgetary spending figure. It is important to note, however, that no spokesperson has explicitly disputed the fact of the budgetary allocation for education being far less than that recommended by the UN.
Ms Tomasevski's findings are also a pointer to the broader areas of concern regarding human rights in China - issues that China does its best to conceal, and which the international community appears increasingly loath to address.
China's record of compliance with international law is abysmal, even in areas the Beijing supposedly holds dear. On the right to education for example, as Ms Tomasevski points out, Chinese law does not conform to international standards. For starters, China has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Provisions regarding parental freedom of choice for the education of their children are included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which China has ratified. Ratification of a convention requires the incorporation of the convention's provisions into domestic law. However, the special rapporteur found, the CRC provisions are not reflected in China's domestic law.
Chinese legislation defines education as an individual duty and also affirms the "right to receive education". However, the freedom to impart education is not recognised. China has entered a reservation to this crucial provision in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 87, concerning freedom of association, has not been ratified. The lack of freedom of association undoubtedly has an impact on all workers, including teachers. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) enjoys a legal monopoly of all trade union activities in the country and is not known to have taken up any significant cases of workers' rights violations. Independent trade unions are banned. However, in the great race to attract foreign investment, these issues are brushed under the carpet. And few, if any, multinational companies, or foreign governments, choose to look under the carpet.
Ms Tomasevski observed that during the two weeks she spent interviewing government officials, not one person she met appeared to have an understanding of the country's obligations under the international human rights treaties it had signed. The general view, she found, was that schooling, in itself, constituted the right to education even if it did not conform to international standards. Thus, the ban on of religious education is not considered a violation of the right to education. This is also a strong indicator of the freedoms - or the lack of them - enjoyed by China's religious minorities. A visit to areas where religious minorities are concentrated might have put the spotlight on these concerns. However, the special rapporteur was compelled to restrict her visit to Beijing on account of resource constraints, and, significantly, report-length constraints - UN rules limit reports to a maximum of 20 pages.
Not all violations are hard to discern, even by officials ignorant of international law. For example, the denial of education to the children of migrant workers falls foul of international law as well as Chinese law. The law provides for nine years of compulsory education. But large numbers of migrant children are bereft of this right. This deprivation is intrinsically linked to the freedom of movement, which is severely restricted in China. Freedom of movement is based on a system of registration at birth. Any change of residence requires authorisation. Thus undocumented or unauthorised migrants - who may have been unable to go through the long and costly permit process - are denied essential services, including education, when they migrate, chiefly to urban areas. Furthermore, according to the special rapporteur, migrant children who do manage to be allowed into school are required to pay a "temporary schooling fee" of 20,000 yuan, a sum, the special rapporteur points out, is beyond the reach of most migrants.
China is obligated to remove all financial obstacles to universalisation of compulsory
education. According to the special rapporteur, the history of the right to education has shown that education cannot be made compulsory unless it is free. However, budgetary funds for education in China have been inadequate, with the result that public schools charge fees to make up for the deficit. The World Bank has confirmed that the main reason for drop-outs or non-enrolment is known to be "the high out-of-pocket costs of education". The special rapporteur found that no statistics are available on the kinds of fees collected, but that these are known to range from exam-paper fees and reading room permit charges to homework-correcting fees. A tragic example of the impact of the lack of funding for education was the 42 deaths of schoolchildren and teachers in March 2001 when their school blew up. The children had been producing firecrackers to compensate for the shortage of funds for their schooling.Further, since education is considered more of an obligation than a right in China, local authorities, under pressure to show good enrolment figures, often resort to the law on compulsory education to force parents to enrol their children. The special rapporteur learnt of a man in Lin Yi (Shan Dong province) who committed a robbery in April 2001 because he was unable to pay school fees for his children. The 30 yuan he robbed, the special rapporteur found, got him three years in prison. His children were left without the schooling which should have been free to begin with.
As pointed out earlier, the right to education is more than mere enrolment in schools. Chinese authorities however provide statistics that only monitor enrolment, not attendance or completion of school. This is evident from Chinese government proclamations that purport to showcase achievements in the area of "human rights" (see for example, the website of the Chinese embassy in Australia - http://www.chinaembassy.org.au/eng/36534.html). Nor do the statistics monitor the quality of teaching and learning. Official figures place the number of illiterates at 85 million, which experts claim is the result of the rising costs of education. Girls are estimated to form the majority of the "new illiterates", being traditionally less valued than boys in Chinese society and therefore more vulnerable to any increase in education-related expenditure.
Problems such as these prove once again the impossibility of delinking economic, social and cultural rights such as inter alia food, education and health from civil and political rights such as freedom of association, right to information and the right against discrimination. They indicate the need to ensure respect for the entire array of rights and compliance with the laws that guarantee them. For example, development - another issue repeatedly flogged by Beijing to neutralise the pressure to respect 'Western-oriented' civil and political rights - cannot be brought about in the absence of public funding for key services and in the discriminatory provision of such services. Similarly, the right to health is greatly hampered in the absence of the right to information - this was proved eminently in the case of SARS, which led to an unprecedented official apology by Beijing for having under-reported the figures. Vice-Premier Wu Yi said in July 2003 that the fight against SARS had "exposed flaws in the country's public health system, lack of awareness about public health emergencies, inadequate disease control systems, laxity of supervision of the implementation of public health laws and weakness in rural public health work". Finally, universal education cannot be hoped to be achieved if rural and migrant children are discriminated against and if gender disparities are not addressed.
While Beijing repeatedly calls on developed countries to increased development assistance, it has failed to demonstrate a domestic commitment to providing public services. The rate of economic growth averaged 7-8 percent in the 1990s. This was not reflected in increased public spending for key public services. Budgetary allocations are skewed in favour of military expenditure rather than education.
The findings of the special rapporteur on education provide a snapshot of the overall human rights ambience in China. While a deeper scrutiny would be required to reveal the entire extent of China's actual compliance with international human rights norms, the current findings are a useful pointer. But the international community has shown a singular reluctance to confront Beijing with these issues. For the past two years, at annual sessions of the Commission of Human Rights (CHR), China has got away without censure. During the CHR's 58th session, the United States, which has traditionally brought resolutions condemning China's human rights record, was not a voting member. It managed to pull plenty of strings on other issues, using friendly countries that were members of the CHR, but claimed that none of its "friends and allies" had agreed to introduce a China resolution. Nor did the European Union take the initiative. In 2003, the United States was back in the CHR as a member. But no China resolution emerged. The EU, which brings the highest number of country resolutions at the CHR, evidently suffered not from resolution fatigue but the exigencies of realpolitik. It decided that it would not introduce a resolution, but if a draft resolution was tabled, it would "study its contents carefully" and if put to vote, the EU would "consider favourably voting for its adoption".
The signals however are unmistakable. The message to Beijing is that its status as an economic powerhouse status will effectively shield it from any penetrating human rights scrutiny. But China - and the international community - must realise that development and prosperity, which the country undoubtedly deserves, cannot be realised in the absence of basic human rights. If anything, the denial of these rights is more likely to impair China's economic project.