One example illustrates the centrality of this desire to social change in rural China.  During my 2005 survey, I was surprised to find a number of rural families living in houses that seemed well below their means. During earlier research in villages in this area, I had found that families considered their houses to be an important aspect of the public ‘face’ of their family. Consequently, they built houses that were as spectacular as they could afford.  Households that were not able to build a new house for a son of marriageable age generally could not find a woman who was willing to marry into their family. Consequently, most households devoted their economic efforts to saving enough money to build such a house.

During the 2000s, however, this strategy of household reproduction began to change. Most village parents no longer saved in order to build the new house that would enable their son to get married within the village.  Instead they saved in order to be able to send their sons and daughters to university (which, in China, requires an equally imposing sum of money). They hoped that after university their sons and daughters would be able to marry and find their own housing in an urban setting.

The demand for education has broader political causes and consequences. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has rested the legitimacy of its rule on education in several ways. It claims that it can fight corruption and nepotism without instituting liberal measures like a free press, an independent judiciary and elections in part through improving the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of the country’s leaders. It also claims that it will build a strong China by increasing the ‘quality’ of the population in general. In concrete terms, raising quality refers to raising education levels, and the average education levels of both cadres and the population has been rising rapidly.

The CCP has also increasingly relied on exams as an anti-corruption measure. Exams are used when selecting state employees for both employment and promotion and in many other settings as well. Without exams, it is often assumed that those with the power to make selection decisions will act corruptly. Requiring degrees to apply for certain posts is another way of emphasising exams, as degree programs all have entrance examinations.

These measures, however, are not without problems. In Shandong, state-owned enterprises have often lost skilled workers (who generally don’t have higher degrees) because of regulations that prevent those without university degrees from being promoted above a certain salary grade. Scandals have erupted when officials are accused of obtaining false degrees (these have extended as far as the Politburo, where the PhD of Xi Jinping was called into question). People also protest vigorously when they feel that the educational chances of their children are being shortchanged. Many people feel that an over-reliance on examinations in China has negative consequences for the society as a whole and youth in particular.

Since the late 1990s, the CCP has been aggressively expanding university enrolments. One consequence of this expansion is that a larger and larger proportion of the population will be able to fulfill its university dreams. In 2011, in Shandong province, there will be enough university places for 50 per cent of 18-year-olds to enter university. But as a greater and greater proportion of young people attend university, the value of a university degree on the job market is certain to decrease, and many will find their investments in university tuition providing questionable economic returns. Finally, social unrest among university graduates with few employment prospects outside of factory work is certainly one future possibility.

Andrew Kipnis is a Senior fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and is the author of Governing Educational Desire, to be published by Chicago University Press this year.