China's government to the issue of rural poverty has been both lauded and criticized. China has been criticized for its high rate of rural poverty and the policies that the government has put in place to ameliorate the poverty. In Transformation of Rural China, Jonathan Unger points out that the lack of taxation at the village level restricts the villages from dealing with the problems they face. This means problems such as food instability and lack of education are not able to be addressed by local officials. Supporters of government policy point out that over the time period of 1978 to 2014, China has reduced rural poverty from 250 million people to just over 70 million people. China's Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development Outline from 2001 to 2010 led to certain government policy directly dealing with the issue of poverty with the removal of agriculture tax in 2006 and a program which the government paid rural families to plant trees on degraded land. More fundamental and radical measures such as directly redistributive taxation and social security systems or land tenure and agricultural produce price reforms are not mentioned here, however: presumably because they are not considered prudent. Unequal educational opportunity Education is a prerequisite for the development of human capital which in turn is an important factor in a country's overall development. Apart from the increasing income inequality, the education sector has long suffered from problems such as funding shortages and unequal allocation of education resources, adding to the disparity between China's urban and rural life; this was exacerbated by the two track system of government's approach to education. The first track is government -supported primary education in urban areas and the second is family -supported primary education in the rural areas. Rural education has been marginalized by the focus on immediate economic development and the fact that urban education enjoys more attention and investment by the central government. This lack of public funding meant that children of rural families were forced to drop out of school, thus losing the opportunity to further their studies and following the paths of their parents to become low skilled workers with few chances of advancements. This leads to a vicious cycle of poverty. Because of limited educational resources, urban schools were supported by the government while village schools were provided for by the local communities where educational opportunities were possibly constrained depending on