Evaluating Chinese Government Investment on Early Childhood Education from 2010-2020: Effective or not?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of government investment in early childhood education (ECE) services in China over the past decade. It draws on works by Heckman (2004), Cunha and Heckman (2007), and program evaluation studies (Rao et al., 2012) that emphasize the long-term benefits of early childhood investment. This paper evaluates Chinese government's achievement of objectives outlined in "The Plan" and "The Guidelines", which focus on improving kindergarten gross enrollment rates and addressing the "3A" issues (Accessibility, Affordability, and Accountability) as specified in China's 13th Five-Year Plan launched in 2010.The study evaluates the two ECE policy efforts ("The Plan" and "The Guidelines") through matching keywords from these documents and using data from three different sources: official kindergarten enrollment data, CFPS longitudinal survey (The China Family Panel Studies) data initiated in 2010 by Peking University, and news article keyword data from Baidu.com. The study provides an evaluation of government investment in ECE in China, gauging its alignment with objectives outlined in policy documents, and considering the perspectives of both official data as well as media perception through surveys and media sentiment analysis. Findings indicate that even though the official data met the government target objectives on enrollment rate for all provinces, the survey data demonstrates discrepancy that some provinces did not meet the target goal in 2020. This provides insights into the consistency between official data and the perceptions reported by surveyed individuals and households. Furthermore, sentiment analysis of news headlines show a positive trend in media perception of ECE, which helps to investigate the correspondence between media sentiment and official data.