Supply and demand

A passer-by peeps through the closed gate of Zhuxinsuan, one of the 200 illegal kindergartens closed by the Daxing district government in Beijing in May.

District government statistics show that in 2007, the year for which the most recent data are available, Daxing contained 41,700 children 6 and younger without Beijing household registration. They accounted for 64.5 percent of all the district children 6 and under. The kindergartens the majority of these migrant kids attended were illegal.

Data released by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference of Daxing show that the district's permanent population last year topped 1 million and 60,000 of the residents were between ages of 1 and 6.

To serve those children, there were 21 registered kindergartens in the district - 13 public and eight private - and 272 illegal kindergartens.

There are only two public kindergartens in Yizhuang town and neither recruits new children, according to a Daxing education department employee who declined to be named. The department planned to add three classes to expand enrollment in September, he said, but it would give priority to Beijing kids.

"Migrant kids who cannot be recruited needed to solve the problem by themselves," he said.

Calls to the Daxing district education bureau were not answered, or someone picked up the phone and said she was a newcomer and did not know anything.

Some suggestions

Liu Qinglong, a professor in the public management school at Tsinghua University, said closing the illegal kindergartens was not a solution to potential safety hazards. Instead, he called it a dodge by Daxing education authorities to "transfer the responsibility from the government's shoulders to migrant parents and society. . . . The government told parents that the kindergartens they went to are not safe, but it failed to find safe places for the kids."

Besides, he said, demand for kindergartens is so high that "still more illegal kindergartens will open."

"The methods of social management need to be creative," Liu said. "Government needs to play more roles in supervising, but not micro-managing." He also said that criteria for kindergartens should be set by professional institutes and staff, not the government.

Liu thinks private parties should be involved, and he called for the establishment of an industry association. With its help, he said, the government could move from being a manager to being a supervisor, and preschool education could have sustainable development.

Yuan Chongfa, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission's research center for small towns and cities, has no quarrel with "stopping and dealing with illegal business operations by kindergartens". However, Yuan said, "The local government should notice that innocent kids are the biggest victims of the frequent changes in policies and measures taken by the education department."

The Committee of Education, Science, Culture, Health and Sports of Beijing Municipal People's Congress suggested that before it closes an illegal kindergarten, an education department should make detailed and exhaustive plans to ensure that the children affected can receive preschool education normally.

Priority to locals

Illegal kindergartens in Beijing are not restricted to Daxing and to Fengtai, which conducted its own crackdown. The capital has more than 1,000 of them, according to data from the Beijing Municipal People's Congress Preschool Education Research and Study Group. The schools are becoming increasingly prevalent in the rural-urban fringe.

National census figures released in May put the capital's population at 19.6 million, including 7 million from other provinces and towns. The test of preprimary education is daunting.

"Beijing's current preschool education resources cannot even meet the demand of the increasing numbers of kids with Beijing household registrations," Vice-Mayor Hong Feng said in late May. "We plan to add 75,000 enrollments for kids within three years. If the goals can be achieved, basically we could cover the nursery service of 90 percent of the kids in the permanent population of the city.

"To the rest of the kids . . . we will provide various kinds of other preschool education services, which are still under discussion.

"In the future three years, the government will permit 147 residential areas to build new kindergartens. But as to small-scale private kindergartens," Hong said, "since the detailed regulations have not launched yet, up to now no one has successfully applied."