Where There Is a Policy, There Is a Countermeasure

With the rapid social change in Chinese society, the Chinese government launched a series of educational policies for supporting national development. Policies on public school admission in compulsory education (Grades 1–9) have been amended at both the central and local levels to accommodate national needs. Meanwhile, local governments (at the city and district levels) also released their regulations on public school admission in compulsory education to meet requests from the central government and demands from local interest groups. This chapter interprets how gaps of policies on public school admission to junior high schools at central and local levels came out and shaped inequalities in admission to public lower secondary education at the school level. It reviews policy changes from the 1980s to 2011 in public school admission to uncover the diversity of public school admission policy at different administration levels. Moreover, it analyzes the interaction between the central and local governments to visualize how the power relationship between governments at different levels shaped the implementation of public school admission policy at the lower secondary education level. Analysis of interviews with stakeholders, such as school principals, local education officials, scholars, and managers of private tutoring institutes, is utilized to explain further how policy making and implementation affect the practice of student placement to public junior high schools in Beijing.