Due to financial difficulties, some county-level governments can not ensure sufficient investment in local education. And the situation has gotten worse after tax-for-fee reform. In rural areas of provinces like Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, and Yunnan, the input into education is far from the actual demand.

Due to lack of resources from commercial tax, low income, high financial deficits and swelling official personnel, many counties cannot fulfil the financial responsibility and still depend on their townships to provide financial support.

In poverty-stricken counties, many teachers are not paid on time or their remuneration is not in line with the standard set in 1999.

Schools find it difficult to maintain regular service with insufficient funding. And after students are only required to make a single payment of school fees, the fee collected by schools has shrunk and even less from poor rural students.

Another problem in light of the central government's call for universal nine-year compulsory education is that many locals even asked for usurious loans to upgrade educational facility without consideration of their capability of repayment.

Poor educational conditions also include having ramshackle schools and no money to renovate them.

Statistics indicate the total financial income of the country's top 100 richest counties is 17 times of that of the 100 poorest counties.

And the per capita GDP of the richest three cities is 31 times that of the poorest three. Given such an imbalance of incomes, it is not practical to require all counties to live up to the financial responsibility of education.