CHINA is a land of miracles, but it is also a land of contrasts.

A series of pictures taken on August 31 in Huanggang, Hubei Province, shows children, parents or grandparents plodding to school, carrying standard desks and chairs.

The caption explains these classroom essentials have been purchased by the parents, at the behest of the school authority.

I once attended a school housed in a dilapidated granary; my desk was a wood plank resting on clay.

I also attended a village school that required the students to bring along stools and makeshift desks. That was a while back.

But the winds of change, the decades of miraculous growth seem to have bypassed this school in Hubei.

What's the brand of the car assigned to local education chief?

Recently it was revealed that in Shanghai alone there are 132,000 individuals each with more than 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) in personal assets. Such figures as a rule do not include the net worth of our pampered civil servants.

For many years a number of factors have put village children to considerable disadvantage when compared with their urban cousins.

While every conceivable kind of blandishment is used to induce urban children to eat some food, some village pupils are battling malnutrition.

Xinhua news agency reported that since this September, children in Sanzhiyang Elementary School in Hechi, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, are entitled to a free lunch as a part of a national campaign to supply decent food to local children.

Prior to this, those students, mostly boarders, had to make do with two meals of steamed rice sprinkled with some soybeans every day. As a consequence, most of the children are suffering retarded growth.

Ostensibly these children are all in the nine-year "compulsory education" stage, when the state is supposed to provide free education.

But on average the education expenses allocated to a rural child are only around a third allocated to their urban counterpart, and are very unreliable.

Ideally, given these contrasts, college admission procedures should be adjusted in a way that compensates for rural disadvantages and favors rural students.

The opposite is true.

The proportions of university students of rustic origins have been declining steadily in recent years.

According to a report, this year the proportion of students of rural origins in the China Agricultural University in Beijing has fallen below 30 percent, a record low.

Traditionally in China, education has never been strictly restricted to the wealthy.

One of the eminent Confucian principles is youjiao wulei, or "in education there should be no class distinctions."

As a matter of fact, successful candidates of humble origins were generally sources of pride for their families and were generally respected for their hard work and excellence.

There had been powerful families in the past, but they were not perpetuated by any system of "aristocracy," as in the West.

The sad truth today is that education is perpetuating the great rural-urban divide.

The hordes of peasants fleeing their villages in search of their fortune in cities are contributing to the rural decay.

In recent years there have been many a scholarly panegyric on the "unique Chinese mode of growth."

If those academics who praise this "mode" adopted a more honest and down-to-earth attitude, they would not fail to identify two advantages peculiar to China: the availability of peasants-turned-cheap labor, and laxity of environmental protection standards.

The costs of the growth are enormous.

Left behind

Last Friday's Xinmin Evening News carries a picture featuring one small girl in Shaanxi Province posing with her grandparents in their village home, surrounded by more than a dozen empty stools, each representing a family member working outside the village as migrants to cities.

The caption explains that since prime-age migrants work in cities, they have to leave their wives, children and aged parents behind to fend for themselves in their village homes.

When both parents are working as migrants, the memory of parents can only kept alive by phone talk.

It was reported before the Spring Festival this year that one migrant mother could no longer recognize her grown-up son when he arrived in Shanghai for a reunion.

Long separation has also led to numerous cases of family disintegration and betrayals, but the biggest victims are children.

A recent survey by the All-China Women's Federation suggests that today the "left-behind children" number 58 million, 40 million of them under the age of 14. Thirty percent of the left-behind children's parents have been away for more than five years.

A number of factors prevent them from taking their family along: lack of urban hukou, household registration that makes them ineligible for a host of urban benefits, including education.

Although there have been frequent public stunts aimed at dramatizing government goodwill towards migrants, the real solutions to their problems are elusive.

The greatest asset of the migrant workers is their sweat and toil, and when they have outlived their usefulness, they have to be particularly resourceful to survive in cities.

Even when they are productive, their sweat and grime can be best appreciated only at a distance.

One of my colleagues described a scene he witnessed on the Metro.

There was a group of migrants traveling after a day's work. A seat was vacant and a young migrant moved to take it, but was prevented in time by an elderly migrant who gave him a useful hint: Don't take the seat, it might make other passengers uncomfortable.

Brought along

In view of limited urban amenities, leaving the family behind in the countryside seems like a sensible approach. But some younger migrants are beginning to wake up to the costs of long separations from their young children and are starting to take their children to their adopted cities.

In areas where migrants live, there have sprung up a host of kindergartens or schools exclusively designed for migrant children. Since they are substandard, unauthorized and usually lacking qualified teachers, they are frequently the targets of crackdowns, often for stated reasons of safety.

Recently Beijing has initiated several crackdowns on such illegal, "black" schools.

In a town in Beijing's Daxing District, for instance, 31 "black" kindergartens were ordered to close before September 1, or face forced closures.

Local governments typically promise to provide full schooling arrangements for every affected migrants' child, which sounds very ambitious. For many years, nearly every public school in every city has been operating at full capacity, just to meet the needs of legal residents.

For instance, in the town in Daxing where the Beijing campaign was launched, there are two registered kindergartens. One refuses to take migrant children, and another requires 10,000 yuan in "sponsorship fees," in addition to the 1,500 yuan monthly tuition. That's way beyond the means of local residents, not to say migrants.

Many schools refuse to take migrant children because it would be harder for them to enroll local children. Even if a migrant family could afford public school, their children would be socially stigmatized in an increasingly stratified society.

I have known colleagues and friends who cite the presence of migrants' children as a decisive factor in not sending their own children to a particular school.

Thus, there are speculations that the real motivation of Beijing's crackdowns on black schools is to curb the exploding migrant population. Very clever - and realistic.

It is obvious that most of China's overcrowded and sprawling cities are unable to help migrants settle down, since they are challenged to meet local residents' needs for education, housing, medical care and care for the elderly.

Cut from roots

But reconnecting migrants to their rustic roots is no easier.

Hooked on modern amenities and fashion, the younger generation of migrants is unequal to the hardships of working the soil, and has no inclination to do so.

According to a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the number of landless farmers has reached 40 to 50 million, and is growing at 3 million a year. By 2030 the number will jump to 110 million.

The report also finds that 81 percent of landless peasants are concerned about their future.

The peasants once contributed to the country's growth with their labor, and now some local governments are trying to grab farmlands to sustain that growth.

The real solution calls for a fundamental rethinking of the costs of China's unique mode of growth, rather than clamoring about sustaining that growth.