In 1962, Michael Harrington's The Other America described the challenges facing “invisible” American communities, helping inspire the war on poverty. Explicitly referencing Harrington's work in their title (7), Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's Invisible China presents a shocking picture of China's rural education crisis, a crisis that remains largely unknown and underappreciated even within China itself. In this eye-opening and important book, Rozelle and Hell describe how China's underinvestment in rural health and education will consign China to the “middle income trap,” given the human capital levels required to become a high-income country. With a Chinese translation (186), the authors aim to shock Chinese policy makers into addressing these human capital challenges in “invisible China,” six decades after Harrington's work did the same in the United States.
Invisible China is most compelling in three deeply researched empirical chapters documenting rural human capital challenges, focused respectively on vocational education, student health,...
