Zhang Guanxiang's first days as the village teacher in Yu Peng were spent fixing the roof, putting legs on the desk and making a simple door. Now his quiet devotion has stirred the official conscience, writes Fintan O'Toole in Shandong province
The school in the tiny village of Yu Peng may well be the most beautiful in China. The building itself is unremarkable: a single-storey breeze-block construction with one classroom, an office and two small store rooms. It nestles inside a yellow-walled compound that also contains a yard and a toilet whose two latrines are little more than holes in the ground. But it is perched high on the shoulder of a mountain in the famously scenic Taishan area south of the bustling commercial city of Jinan in the province of Shandong. Sheer, stark cliffs of golden stone rise behind it and the valley below is cupped by volcanic folds that create a crazily wavering skyline.
The contrast between the lush forests and the austere rocks creates a beauty that has long attracted sages and mystics. Just over the cliffs is the stunning Lingyan Buddhist monastery, founded in the fourth century.
Confucius descended from these hills with the wisdom that still underpins Chinese culture and Daoism was founded nearby.
But the keeper of Yu Peng's little school is no sage on a mountain-top and he has no pretensions to mystical enlightenment. Zhang Guanxiang, an open, friendly man with the heavily tanned skin of a countryman and the twinkling eyes of an enthusiast is, it is true, an adept educator, who combines the role of headmaster with those of kindergarten and primary school teacher.
His is a one-teacher school, and his mission in life is as plain as the old-fashioned wooden desks in his classroom: to provide a basic education for the children of the village.
For all China's deeply-rooted reverence for education and for all its economic progress, that has been a rather heroic mission. The little school in Yu Peng is in its own way a symbol of one of China's great challenges.
Talk of the country's emergence as a 21st century superpower will remain premature so long as universal access to primary education remains a goal to be accomplished rather than a right to be taken for granted.
Zhang Guanxiang's school, with its clean floor, sturdy desks, big windows, electric lights and spacious yard, dates only to last September. He takes me up the path towards the cliffs to the school he taught in before then. It is a small, low, dark, virtually windowless shed with a sagging tiled roof and a rough floor - the kind of place you might imagine as home to a hedge school in Ireland 200 years ago.
BUT EVEN ITS current meanness is palatial compared to what it was like when Mr Zhang arrived as the village schoolmaster in the spring of 1988. The roof was made of straw, but the thatch was so dilapidated that the sun shone through it into the gloomy room. There would have been no other light were it not for the fact that the door was missing. The earth floor was filthy.
The teacher's desk had just two legs. There was no heat to moderate the cold mountain winds. The hovel was good for imparting lessons in only one respect: anyone who wanted to grasp the poor state of education in rural China would not have needed to look any further.
Lifting the rural masses out of ignorance and illiteracy had always been a key aim of the intellectuals who urged China to modernise. But the educational reforms of the first half of the 20th century, after the collapse of the empire, tended to concentrate on the establishment of institutes of higher education as conduits for western knowledge and technology. When the People's Republic was founded in 1949, just a quarter of Chinese children were receiving a primary education and fewer than one in 20 went to secondary school. In its early years, the communist regime put a great deal of effort into the expansion of basic education and the reduction of illiteracy. By the mid-1950s, the rate of primary school attendance had doubled.
But this progress stalled during the upheavals and famines of the "Great Leap Forward" and then the whole educational system was thrown into chaos by the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
Some of the stated aims of the Cultural Revolution were decent enough: to break down the walls that separated intellectual achievement from the lives of the masses, to make education more accessible to workers and peasants by combining work and study.
But in practice the effects were wildly destructive. Schools and colleges closed for years as students joined the Red Guards or were sent to work in the fields. The traditional Chinese respect for educators was turned on its head. Teachers were often targeted as "bourgeois intellectuals". Many were beaten, sometimes to death, by their pupils, and some, unable to stand the sudden transformation of reverence into humiliation, committed suicide. The attack on all forms of inherited knowledge became so extreme that Zhang Tiesheng, a student who handed in a blank answer paper in the 1973 college entrance exams, was hailed as a revolutionary hero.
Mao's death and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping changed official attitudes, but rural primary education remained problematic. The reforms themselves broke up the rural communes that had paid for primary schools and many farmers, given the freedom to make choices, preferred to keep their children as unpaid labourers rather than send them to school. The long closure of institutes of higher education, meanwhile, meant that many of those who were taking up teaching jobs were untrained and often poorly educated themselves: in the late 1980s, 70 per cent of teachers were unqualified. Partly for this reason, teaching was poorly paid and rural schools had difficulty attracting competent teachers.
This is why, as late as 1988, when Zhang Guanxiang arrived in Yu Peng, the school was such a hovel. Shandong, with rich soils watered by the Yellow River, and long-established industries, is a prosperous province, but even here village schools were neglected. China's per capita spending on education was then the second lowest in the world. The long uphill slog that Mr Zhang had to make to get to the village by a path of choking dust in the summer and clammy mud in the winter, was emblematic of a bigger struggle.
He himself had grown up as the son of peasant parents in Shao Zhuang village, 20km away. "They were simple, kind-hearted people who would not do any harm to anyone," he says. He got as far as middle school and graduated in 1971, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. He was sent to a rural work unit, working part of the time in the fields and the rest as an informal teacher. After Mao's death, as the government was attempting to reconstruct the education system, he was appointed as a middle-school teacher, specialising in accountancy, for which he had a particular talent.
IT WAS AS an accountant that he first came to Yu Peng, having been asked to help out with the village's books. Once there, he quickly learned that the village children had had no teacher for two months. There had been two previous teachers. One was completely untrained and left as part of the reforms. The other decided that he simply couldn't live on a low salary in such an isolated place. When Mr Zhang arrived, no one wanted the job of teaching peasant children in a broken-down barn on a mountainside. When I asked him why he decided to take on the job himself and leave his more comfortable middle-school post, he looked blank for a moment as if the question was unfathomable. Then he said simply: "The village had to have a school; the children had to have an education." The pay was, even by Chinese standards, abysmal: 10 yuan (€1) a month. The villagers gave him food and some land to plant his own vegetables and raise some chickens. But he was motivated by two factors. One of them is obvious to anyone who watches him in the classroom. He is a born teacher of young children: kind, affectionate, good humoured but obviously in charge.
The other factor is political. He is an old-fashioned communist idealist, imbued with a belief in making sacrifices for the common good. "At first, when I had to trudge home across the mountain every evening, I thought of complaining, but then I thought of the Long March [ the epic flight of Mao's supporters during the early stages of the civil war] and I thought 'This is really not so difficult'." His first days as the village teacher were spent fixing the roof, putting legs on the desk, making a simple door. Then he and a village leader rounded up the young children, some who were anxious to resume schooling and some who were deeply reluctant.
Gradually, he learned how to keep order and to teach different classes at the same time. One of his students went on to university and one became the head of a construction company, but mostly he is happy if his pupils are able to go on to middle school in the nearby town. "I can really only teach them until they are eight years old. We don't have facilities like computers here, so if they want to progress, they have to go to town."
EVEN AS CHINA'S reforms gathered pace and its economy started to grow at phenomenal rates, however, education was neglected. It is not accidental that the school in Yu Peng was until recently a converted barn. Basic education has been woefully underfunded. As long ago as 1985, the government set the target of providing at least nine years of free and compulsory education to every child. Yet, earlier this month the prime minister Wen Jiabao announced the same target, to be reached by 2007. There is a reasonable chance that the target will be reached this time. For the last 20 years China has been spending less than 3 per cent of GDP on education.
That figure crept up past 3 per cent last year and is planned to rise to 4 per cent. This will still leave China (like Ireland) well behind most developed countries but it should at least provide the basis for a universal system of primary education.
In the meantime, Zhang Guanxiang's quiet devotion to his isolated pupils has stirred the official conscience. The contrast between his personal sense of duty to provide a basic education and the state's failure to honour the same duty prompted the staff of Shandong communist party's school for cadres to take action in 2002. They undertook to raise €20,000 to refurbish his old school. A local company chipped in an extra €25,000 - making a fund large enough not just to refurbish the old school but to build the new one and to lay a good concrete track up the mountain as well.
The new school building thus functions as a tacit apology for years of neglect and a statement of intent for the future. If that intent is not fulfilled in the next few years, it will also stand as a rebuke.
Zhang Guanxiang himself is so inured to the hard struggle that he can't quite believe he has a decent place to work and a salary of €150 a month. "It's like dream," he says. Last month, during the Dragon Boat Festival, when Chinese people give each other gifts of specially-made cakes, his pupils, whose families can't afford such luxuries, each brought him two eggs to show their gratitude. He was touched but sent them back.
"They shouldn't be grateful for getting an education. It's something they need. I try to teach them to have good hearts, to be moral, to be cultured. After all, you can't have a rich country without these things. If people have bad morals, it's bad for the economy. If they don't have good hearts, they won't work well. If they're not cultured, they won't produce anything worthwhile."