Highways, Hunger, Home (Epilogue: Ride-Hailing Industry and Rural Education)

February 17, 2025:

Ms. Li (Li Mei) driving me toward Huizhou

Epilogue

Ride-Hailing in Shenzhen

In Guangdong, particularly in Shenzhen, the sprawling ride-hailing has been saturated. Shenzhen's 2024 Online Car-Hailing Market Monitoring Information Release Report documented over 340,000 licensed drivers by the end of 2024, a figure that surged by 20,856 in just six months, reflecting both the sector’s appeal and its intensifying competition. As explained in Supreme People’s Court’s Press Conference on December 23rd, 2024, most drivers are not directly employed by platforms like DiDi or CaoCao Mobility but as independent contractors through agreements with third-party agencies or by registering as self-employed individuals—a strategy platforms use to circumvent traditional labor obligations such as social security contributions, paid leave, or workplace injury protections. This legal ambiguity leaves drivers vulnerable, as they lack the safeguards of formal employment, despite being subject to platform algorithms that dictate their workloads, earnings, and penalties for underperformance, effectively blurring the line between autonomy and control.

With heightening competition amid inadequate labor protection, drivers face socioeconomic challenges. The 2024 Car-Hailing Market Report showed that only 55,000 vehicles completed 10 or more daily orders, which translates into an average daily revenue of 438 RMB. Within these 438 yuan of earnings, the costs of vehicle maintenance, fuel, and platform commissions can consume up to 30% of income. Moreover, nearly 40% of drivers fall short of 10 daily orders, struggling to break even in a market where supply vastly outstrips demand. Shenzhen’s authorities have repeatedly warned of market saturation, citing the city’s 400,000 private vehicles and extensive public transit network, which reduces reliance on ride-hailing services. Notwithstanding deteriorating pay, the sector continues to attract new entrants lured by low barriers to entry and promises of flexibility, only to face grueling 12-hour shifts. Other cities saw worse conditions. In the city of Haikou, for example, full-time drivers work 13-hour days for net earnings as low as 200–280 RMB, according to the municipality’s 2024 Q4 Online Car-Hailing Market Monitoring Information Release Report.

Efforts to address these issues have emerged at the national level, with policies like the 2024 Supreme Court guidelines emphasizing the need to recognize labor relations based on “actual management control,” even if drivers are technically independent. Meanwhile, Shenzhen’s regulators have intensified scrutiny of platform practices, penalizing firms like DiDi for operational violations and urging transparency in earnings and contract terms. Yet, systemic reforms remain inadequate, leaving drivers in a precarious position—caught between the gig economy’s promises of autonomy and the stark realities of financial instability and inadequate protections. As Shenzhen’s market epitomizes the broader challenges facing China’s platform economy, the plight of its ride-hailing drivers highlights the urgent need for legal and structural reforms to reconcile flexibility with fairness in the digital age.

Rural Education in Guangxi

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, historically an agricultural hinterland, has struggled with rural school access and quality. It was known for its large and ethnically diverse population, relatively undisrupted rainforest environment, low level of urbanization, and slow rate of economic growth.

In recent decades, gaps between urban and rural education systems broadened. China’s rapidly expanding cities boast well-funded schools, advanced facilities, and qualified teachers, whereas rural areas—particularly remote regions like Guangxi’s mountainous zones—struggle with improving educational quality and accessibility.

The 2011 China Rural Education Development Report documents how rural students consistently underperform compared to their urban peers across all subjects and grade levels. The gap is most pronounced in English, where rural schools lack qualified teachers and modern pedagogical tools.

High dropout rates exacerbate these challenges. By junior high school, over 40% of rural students leave the education system, driven by economic pressures, disengagement from an urban-centric curriculum, and limited prospects for academic success. Standardized tests are often designed at urban centers by professionals, most of whom are born and/or educated in cities. The result is urban-centric exams that fail to resonate with students whose lived experiences differ vastly from city contexts, thereby favoring urban students in secondary and higher education. This underrepresentation of rural students perpetuates the curriculum’s ingrained bias, as less rural students receive higher education and work at the Ministry of Education. In Guangxi’s mountainous areas, geographic isolation compounds these barriers. Schools in remote villages often lack access to updated textbooks, extracurricular resources, or language labs, leaving students ill-prepared to compete in national exams like the Gaokao (college-entrance exam). The “one-size-fits-all” exam-centered approach alienates rural learners, fostering vicious cycles of underachievement and disillusionment.

While massive infrastructural development over the past few decades enhanced mobility in Guangxi’s mountains, the unprecedented urbanization drive enabled by new highways and high-speed rails has triggered a mass exodus of exceptional rural students and teachers to urban centers, creating a paradoxical scenario of 城挤、乡弱、村空, meaning “city full, towns weak, and village empty.” As families migrate to cities for educational and economic opportunities, rural schools shrink or close, while urban schools become overcrowded. The result is the consolidation of schools. In county towns, “mega-schools” with enrollments exceeding 10,000 students are increasingly common, leading to oversized classes that strain resources and diminish learning outcomes. The 21st Century Education Research Institute found in its 2011 survey that 42.6% of county-level schools in western China had “large” (56–65 students) or “oversized” (66+ students) classes, compared to 25.5% in cities. In extreme cases, such as Shangcai County’s No. 2 Middle School in Henan, average class sizes reached 120 students, with some classrooms cramming 160 pupils. These conditions hinder personalized instruction, reduce student-teacher interaction, and widen the urban-rural achievement gap. In Guangxi, mountainous terrain aggravates the situation as consolidation feeds into closure. Remote village schools, already underfunded and understaffed, are abandoned as students relocate to distant county towns. This forces remaining students to endure long commutes or boarding arrangements, disrupting family life and increasing dropout risks.

Rural teachers, who constitute 80% of China’s K–12 educators, face daunting challenges. Underpaid, overworked, and inadequately trained, they expressed “strong career burnout” in a 2012 national report. Schools face the challenges of an aging faculty, severe shortages in specialized subjects (e.g., English, science, music), and high turnover rates as talented teachers migrate to urban schools.

Government initiatives like the Special Post Teacher Program and National Teacher Training Plan have made strides in recruiting and upskilling rural educators. The “bottom-up reinforcement” strategy went so far as to prioritize staffing village schools and teaching points in remote areas. Nonetheless, implementation gaps persist. In Guangxi’s mountainous regions, teachers often lack training in multilingual education—a critical need in ethnically diverse areas where students speak minority languages like Zhuang at home but are taught in Mandarin. Moreover, rural teachers’ salaries and benefits lag behind urban averages. Many lack access to housing, healthcare, or pensions, and face poor prospects of promotion. As a result, rural schools rely heavily on aging teachers nearing retirement, further eroding educational quality.

Underlying all the aforementioned problems is a chronic underinvestment in rural education. In terms of funding, rural teacher stipends and student aid allocations, like that for extracurricular activities, are disproportionately low. When it comes to facilities, many rural schools lack basic amenities like science labs, libraries, or sports fields. A 2011 survey found that rural schools’ per-student book collections and multimedia equipment fell below national standards, while even available resources are severely underutilized due to teacher unfamiliarity with technology, a reflection of rural-urban digital divides. While cities integrate smart classrooms and online learning, rural schools—especially in Guangxi’s mountains—rely on outdated tools like blackboards and chalk. Less than 30% of rural schools have functional internet access, crippling their ability to leverage digital resources. In Guangxi specifically, digital transition is further hindered by unreliable electricity and humidity damage. Consequently, rural students miss out on the digital literacy skills essential for modern economies.