Background. Despite growing wealth and the growing commitment of China’s government to providing quality education, a significant share of children across rural China still have no access to regular sources of iron-rich foods, vitamins and other micronutrients. Such poor diets may not only result in high incidences of nutritional problems, including anemia, good nutrition has been shown to be an effective input into the creation of human capital.

Objective. To increase our understanding of the extent of anemia in poor Shaanxi Province’s primary schools, and identify structural correlates of anemia in this region. Methods. A cross-section survey was conducted. Data were collected from 4000 grade fourth grand students (ages 9 to 11) in 70 primary schools in poor rural areas of Shaanxi province. Structured questionnaires and standard test were used to gather data. Trained nurses carried out the hemoglobin tests (using Hemocue finger prick kits) and anthropomorphic measurements using high quality equipment.

Results. The paper shows that the overall anemia rate is 21.5% (39%) when using a blood hemoglobin cutoff of 115 g/L (120 g/L). We find that those students that are boarding at school and those students that eat lunch away from home are more likely to be anemic. Children with anemia are found to have lower height for age (HAZ) scores and have higher incidences of stunting.

Conclusions. If this part of Shaanxi province is representative of the rest of Shaanxi’s poor rural areas (or all national designed poor counties in China), this means that tens of thousands (or millions) of children in rural Shaanxi (all national designed poor counties in China) may be anemic. Although we were not able to pinpoint the exact determinates and causal effects of anemia, the main implication of this work is that anemia remains a serious health problem for educators and health officials in rural China.

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in Shaanxi Province, a representative province in western rural China, this paper finds that dormitory and student canteen facilities in boarding schools are under-equipped and services are poor quality and far below that needed for student development. Poor services in boarding schools and inadequate nutrition intake may be an important cause of low student height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), as students eating at school have a much lower HAZ on average than that of non-boarding students. Furthermore, girls and students with more siblings have relatively lower HAZ, while the higher the number of parents a student has and the more educated they are exert a positive influence on child nutritional status in terms of HAZ. Finally, our analysis implies that the effective way to decrease the inequality of health, malnutrition and human capital between urban and rural in the long run is to improve the facilities and services of boarding schools in rural China.