Rural vs. Urban China

The economic and educational gaps between eastern China where the cities are booming and western China where the area is very rural farmland are significant.  The farm communities are very poor and cannot offer wages comparable to jobs in the city.  Because of this, many parents choose to leave the farm and head east for better paying jobs so that they can support their families.  These people are referred to as migrant workers although they are in their home country.  The workers' children often stay behind with their grandparents.  Therefore, many children only get to see their parents once a month or once a year depending on how for west they live.  Some migrant workers take their children with them into the large cities.  This also presents many difficulties for the family because the public schools do not have room for the migrant worker's children.  These children may go uneducated, pay a high price for the public education, or look for special schools that are being developed for these migrant workers' children.  However, these schools are very poor and cannot offer an education with equal opportunities to the urban school districts.  The educational opportunities of the schools in rural China are also very different from the urban schools.  Besides having significantly less resources than the larger city schools in the east, they also lose many of their teachers to these schools because the salary in the city is much more than they can offer in the rural western village schools.  Because of the education and economic situation in China, the gap between the haves and the have nots is widening.