Huangchenggen Primary School in Xicheng district, due in part to the sheer number of applicants, now sorts children by their housing situation. If the applicant child has a hukou registered in the school's neighborhood and the child's parents or guardian have a house in the area, they are given priority in admissions. Next in line are children that have a local hukou but their grandparents own a house. These children are then ranked by how long they've had their hukou.
Third in line are children with hukou from other parts of Beijing, but with a local property-owning parent. Fourth in line are children with local hukou but no property. This clearly illustrates that housing is considered more important than local hukou.
If a child is a non-Beijing resident, owning a house matters even more. For non-Beijing residents kids to enter Beijing schools, their parents must have five certificates ready: proof of employment, certificate of residence, the hukou of the entire family, their temporary Beijing residential permit and proof showing the children don't have any other registered guardians in their hometown.
These children are then divided into two categories: those going to city schools and those going to township schools. In each group, priority is given to families which own property.
Wang Peng, vice director of the Beijing Qinghua Tongheng Planning and Design Research Institute Technology and Innovation Center, told Southern Weekly that neighborhoods near top schools have the most resilient housing markets in Beijing. No matter how housing prices rise or fall, these neighborhoods have "steadily gone up" for several years.
The average house price in Beijing was about 8,000 yuan ($1,204) per square meter 10 years ago, and had reached around 31,000 yuan by 2013. Homes in inner-city, good school-rich Dongcheng sold for 30,000 yuan per square meter on average in 2012, and this number had risen by over 50 percent by 2013 and reached 52,000 yuan.
According to a report from the center, homes in Xicheng now sell for an average of 60,560 yuan per square meter. Similar homes in Dongcheng cost on average 58,964 yuan per square meter.
According to the same report, property near the famous Elementary School Affiliated to Renmin University of China could go for as much as 85, 257 yuan per square meter, and houses near Beijing No. 1 Experimental Elementary School are valued at as much as 180,012 yuan ($27,000) per square meter.
And what does one get for this huge pricetag? Some of the city's oldest, worst maintained and smallest houses. The reports said that 53 percent of homes in Xicheng were built before 1990.
Efforts and solutions
The local government has introduced measures that aim to cool down a property market overheated by these demands, and to provide greater equality in the distribution of educational resources.
For example, Beijing has ordered top high schools to reserve some vacancies for children who do not live in the schools' neighborhood that went to lower-ranked middle schools.
The government has also encouraged top-notch primary schools to merge with more average primary schools.
And the government is expanding the number of classrooms by renovating currently unused sites, in an effort to adjust the imbalance between supply and demand.
And according to planner Cheng Qingning from the Beijing Qinghua Tongheng Planning and Design Research Institute, these measures seem to have been effective as the growth of Dongcheng and Xicheng house prices has slowed.
But former principal of The Affiliated High School of Peking University Zhao Yulin observed that, the critical factor lies in the imbalance of the teaching staff.
"Most teachers at good schools do not wish to be sent to ordinary schools," said Zhao. "Being a teacher at an excellent school gives them status."
After studying the country, Zhao says that there are three ways that China can learn from Japan's experience. First, public schools should standardize their hardware and software to address imbalances between schools.
Second, Japan has many non-government funded schools which have increased the number of high-quality school places, which China lacks. And lastly, Japan invests much more in education than China, 6 percent of GDP compared to 4 percent.
