From Reuters, via China Daily:
Rural schools across China owe their teachers more than 10 billion yuan ($1.24 billion) in back pay, leading the central government to consider paying teachers itself, the China Daily said on Tuesday.
Failure to pay teachers’ already low salaries, in many cases because the money was lost to corruption, had resulted in a severe shortage of qualified teachers in schools in China’s vast, impoverished countryside, the newspaper said. “If the wages of the more than six million rural teachers was allocated from the budget of the central government, their income would be stable and their worries about their basic living conditions dispelled,” it said in a commentary.
