A baby boom in China after 2005 means that young parents are now locked in fierce competition for sought-after kindergarten slots.
　　When a reputed kindergarten opens for new student registration it is now common for parents with children of eligible age, 3 years old, to queue for hours and even days outside the front gate. Armed with food, tents and quilts, parents are willing to sleep rough in order to land a spot for their children. In one extreme case, the parents of more than 100 children camped out all night in front of a kindergarten in May in Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong Province, despite torrential rains.
　　This childcare shortage is a nationwide problem. According to a statistical bulletin on educational institutions published by the Ministry of Education, the gross enrollment rate in preschool education in 2010 was 56.6 percent. That year, the country had 150,400 kindergartens with 29.77 million students, of which public kindergartens numbered less than 50,000.
　　The Central Government launched a three-year action plan for preschool educa-tion in 2010 to boost the overall kindergarten enrollment rate. Between 2011 and 2015, the Central Government has pledged to invest 50 billion yuan ($7.86 billion) to finance the preschool education, mainly in the country’s economically backward central and western areas.
　　The lack of quality childcare facilities is particularly acute in China’s large cities. An ever-growing influx of young migrant workers means that childcare facilities in these cities are quickly rendered inadequate. Take Beijing for example, the supply-demand disparity is the most severe in newly developed suburban residential areas like Huilongguan, Wangjing and Tiantongyuan, where young people choose to live due to the relatively cheap housing and rental prices.
　　The recent baby boom is partly driven by people’s belief in having children in the lucky years in Chinese astrology. The huge number of “dog babies,” children who were born in the Year of the Dog in 2006, “pig babies,” those born in 2007, and “Olympic babies,” those born in 2008, have resulted in an enormous pressure on the capacity of kindergartens in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.
　　According to government statistics, a total of 460,000 children were born in Beijing between 2007 and 2009, while the cities’licensed kindergartens’ capacity was only 220,000 in 2010.
　　The kindergarten shortage prompted the Beijing Municipal Government to increase investment in preschool education. As part of the effort, it will invest a total of 5 billion yuan ($786 million) from 2011 to 2013 to build new facilities and expand existing facilities. As a result, the total kindergarten slots in Beijing will increase from the current 278,000 to 353,000 in the next three years. According to government statistics, more than 600 million yuan ($94.28 million) was invested by the government in 2011, resulting in an increase of 33,000 slots. Another 900 million yuan ($142.86 million) will be injected this year.
　　Hardly affordable
　　Now in China, urban parents who start looking for a kindergarten for their young ones are often startled to discover that kindergartens with decent facilities, whether public or private, charge even more than universities.
　　Most public kindergartens divide their fees into two parts: a monthly tuition and a one-off surcharge, commonly known as“sponsorship fee,” that parents are “encouraged” to pay to guarantee their child’s enrollment. According to a report on People’s Daily, one public kindergarten in Beijing asks parents of prospective students to fill in how much they would like to “sponsor” on the application form. It has been rumored by parents of current students that the minimum sponsorship fee of that kindergarten has risen to 100,000 yuan ($15,719).
　　A man surnamed He, whose son recently graduated from the Beihai Kindergarten, a star public kindergarten in Beijing, told People’s Daily that he spent nearly 200,000 yuan ($31,436) on his son’s preschool education over the last three years.
　　Despite the phenomenal price tags of public kindergartens, well-off families covets a spot in these establishments, which enjoy a much longer history, better facilities and welltrained teachers compared to their private counterparts.
　　A woman surnamed Zhang, a mother of a 4-year-old, told People’s Daily that the first stop of her hunt for an ideal kindergarten was a public one next to her community, where the student recruiter talked to her arrogantly and only promised to put her son on a waiting list. The expenses for this kindergarten were 4,000 yuan ($629) per month, roughly equaling the average percapita monthly salary in Beijing, which was 4,672 yuan ($734) in 2011. After waiting for half a year and using connections to get ahead unsuccessfully, Zhang decided to send her son to an equally expensive private facility. “At least my son can start kindergarten right away,” said Zhang.
　　The Beijing Bokai Intelligence and Inclusive Kindergarten, a private facility with a history of more than 10 years, charges each student a monthly tuition of more than 4,000 yuan. Yin Hongbo, principal of the kindergarten, said that the high charge is used to pay a higher-than-average salary for the teachers, upgrade teaching equipment regularly and maintain the facilities.
　　According to Yin, the rent and property management fee accounts for a large proportion of its overall operational expenses.“Without any external subsidies, we have to shoulder all the expenses by ourselves,” Yin said.
　　Bokai is far from the most expensive private kindergartens in Beijing. Some private kindergartens with foreign teachers that promise a bilingual environment easily charge a student between 80,000 yuan ($12,574) and 100,000 yuan ($15,717) a year.
　　


　　Unfair care
　　Nearly 80 percent of Beijing’s prestigious public kindergartens are located in city center districts and a small number of star kindergartens enjoy far better facilities and teachers than other ordinary public kindergartens.
　　A woman surnamed Cao is a 36-year-old mother living in Tiantongyuan, which has a population of around 900,000 and only one public kindergarten. Her two-and-half-yearold daughter is about to start kindergarten at a private facility this September. The number one concern during Cao’s selection of a kindergarten was enough outdoor space, which most private kindergartens in Tiantongyuan lack.
　　The principal of the private Little Golden Horse Kindergarten, who asked not to be named, told Beijing Review that her kindergarten was not licensed by local authorities due to the lack of a playground.
　　Located in a four-story residential building, the kindergarten has a tiny fenced-off front yard that is really just an enclosed section of walkway. The more than 100 children have to take turns to engage in outdoor activities one class at a time.
　　“Among private kindergartens in Tiantongyuan, we are not alone in failing to find proper premises. The number of buildings designed for kindergarten use is very small and they have long been rented out,”said the principal of the four-year-old facility.
　　She said that officials visited her kindergarten after it filed a licensing application to local education authorities.
　　“Although our facilities do not meet the government requirements for private kindergartens, the inspectors did not require us to close down. But without a license from education authorities, we are not qualified for any government subsidies though actually we are helping the government by providing more kindergarten slots,” she said. There are dozens of unlicensed private kindergartens in Tiantongyuan alone.
　　After paying visits to three kindergartens not far from her home, Cao said she chose the one with the largest outdoor space. “I would not say it has a decent playground, but at least it is larger than the other two,” she said.
　　Ways out
　　Under the planned economy that was practiced in China until the early 1990s, urban residents in China used to heavily rely on childcare services provided by the government or their employers. During the economic reforms initiated in the 1990s the number of kindergartens run by enterprises shrank sharply as they were either closed down or rented out to individuals running private kindergartens.
　　According to a survey conducted by the China Democratic League, the number of kin- dergartens in Beijing fell from 3,056 in 1990 to 1,266 in 2009, down 58.57 percent.
　　Only 40 percent of Beijing’s kindergartens are directly funded by the government, around 30 percent are classified by the Beijing Municipal Education Commission as first-rate public kindergartens and only 70 kindergartens are city-level model kindergartens.
　　Liu Yan, a professor of early childhood education at Beijing Normal University, told China Education News in March that the government has long directed limited resources for preschool education only toward public kindergartens, a practice that has caused enormous complaints from the public. According to him, without radical change to their allocation approaches, more and more children would be deprived of the opportunity to benefit from public resources.
　　In Guangzhou, there are a total of 1,548 kindergartens, of which only 396 are public ones. Qu Shaobing, director of the city’s education bureau, told the China National Radio in May that the city plans to draw lots to allocate slots in public kindergartens to ensure fair access to public education resources.
　　In April 2011, Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, started to distribute education vouchers of 2,000 yuan ($314) per year to every kindergarten-age child living in that city for three years and families can use the vouchers to pay fees at childcare facilities, whether they are private or public. Kindergartens will be offered government subsidies according to the number of vouchers they receive.
　　“I hope that the Beijing Municipal Government will adopt a similar policy, which would be fairer to taxpayers,” Wang Qinghong, Principal of the Beijing New Century Kindergarten.
　　Zhu Yongxin, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, said that the preschool education system should gradually become government-dominated to ensure fairness and quality and make sure that all children can have the opportunity to attend a public facility.
　　Zhu suggested that besides opening more public kindergartens, the government should also give tax breaks to enterprises running kindergartens for their employees, provide venues for kindergartens operated by charitable organizations free of charge and purchase services from private kindergartens.
　　Zhu said that there should not be major differences in facilities, teaching levels and budgets between different public kindergartens and people with professional training in preschool education should be encouraged to provide day care at their private residences.
　　In May 2011, the Beijing Municipal Government released a policy encouraging the opening of small-scale kindergartens with 40 to 100 students. Individuals who are interested in opening one are required to have a household registration record in Beijing and provide registered capital of 500,000 yuan($78,589).
　　“I don’t understand where such a registered capital requirement comes from,” Zhang Yan, a professor of early childhood education at Beijing Normal University, told China Times. Zhang said that even some unlicensed kindergartens with poor conditions are meeting demands of migrant worker families in Beijing. “The government should give these facilities more attention rather than exclude them from support.”