Attracting talent

The good news for village teachers like Hou and Yang is that authorities have taken various measures to improve rural education.

In September, the Ministry of Education and five other departments released a guideline to improve the number and quality of rural teachers over the next three to five years.

This will be achieved through more favorable policies such as improving salaries and offering better career prospects.

It reiterates that the salary for rural teachers should not be less than that of local government officials and extra subsidies will also be given.

China plans to train more high-quality teachers for less-developed regions to improve education in central and western parts of the country, according to a notice issued by nine central government departments last month.

According to the notice, about 10,000 students will be trained each year to become teachers in underdeveloped counties starting from this year.

It says that six institutions－normal universities administered by the ministry and high-level normal universities under provincial government administration－will be responsible for enrolling the students.

Without needing to pay tuition or accommodation fees and receiving subsidies for living expenses, these trained students from top-level normal universities will need to sign a contract in which they commit to teach at schools in underdeveloped areas for at least six years, and any breach of that contract will be included in their social credit record.

More than half of the 2.9 million rural teachers across the country have a bachelor's degree or higher and 43.4 percent of them are less than 35 years old, according to official data.

Although rural education has improved over time, rural students are far less likely to enter college than their urban counterparts. This year, among the 4,402 freshmen entering Peking University, 442 are from the countryside, according to the school's statistics.

"There is still a long way to go to enhance the quality of rural education," Hou concludes.