CityUHK economist and Nobel Laureate co-lead global early childhood research, benefiting over 80,000 rural children in China

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) economist Professor Zhou Jin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Finance, together with Professor James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, are jointly leading the early childhood research programme China REACH: The Rural Education and Child Health Project (China REACH). Professor Heckman is the Distinguished Visiting Professor at CityUHK and the Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago. Focusing on the critical developmental stage from birth to three years of age, the research has found that enhancing the quality of interaction between caregivers and children can significantly improve children’s cognitive, language and socio-emotional skills. The programme provides a practical, evidence-based framework for reducing educational disparities among rural children. To date, more than 80,000 rural children across diverse regions of China have benefited from the initiative. China REACH is now the largest early childhood intervention research programme in the country. It highlights the importance of parental and caregiver involvement in children’s growth during the first three years of life. Home visits serve as the core intervention mechanism of the programme. Trained home visitors—whose educational backgrounds are similar to those of local parents—make weekly household visits, offering about an hour of one-to-one guidance. The sessions include interactive activities, such as games, singing, reading, storytelling and making simple toys, all designed to strengthen caregiver–child interaction. The study employs a randomised controlled design, comparing households that receive regular home-visiting training based on the China REACH curriculum with those that do not. Using a series of assessment tasks of increasing difficulty, the research team measures children’s cognitive and language ability. The findings revealed that children in the home-visiting intervention group achieved markedly stronger cognitive and language development, with improvements of more than 0.7 standard deviations—equivalent to about three to six months of advanced development progress compared with children in the control group. These improvements reflect clear progress in children’s abilities to understand objects, use language, express ideas, and comprehend pictures and stories, representing a level of improvement substantial enough to have a meaningful impact on long-term learning and life trajectories. The results demonstrate that early, sustained and structured home-visiting interventions can have stable and substantial positive effects on child development. The research has been widely recognised by the international academic community. The study has been published in leading economics and child development journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Econometrics and Pediatrics, providing important theoretical and empirical references for early childhood development policies worldwide. Since 2015, China REACH has been implemented in multiple provinces and autonomous regions across China, including Gansu, Guizhou, Hunan, Sichuan, Qinghai, Chongqing, Shaanxi, Hebei, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region. The programme has contributed to ongoing policy refinement and has encouraged greater public and governmental investment in early childhood development in rural areas. For example, the Guizhou Provincial People’s Government has committed matching funds to support the large-scale expansion of the programme in Bijie. In addition, the State Council incorporated the research findings into its official China Children Development Report (2023), marking them as an important reference for national policy-making. Professor Zhou noted: “The China REACH model is now recognised as a proven strategy for promoting high-quality development for rural children. Through rigorous empirical research, we aim to identify early childhood interventions that truly support children’s development and implement them at the community level, so that children in both rural villages and urban settings have equitable opportunities to develop their potential and capabilities, laying the foundation for a more inclusive and sustainable society.” Looking ahead, the research team is exploring how the China REACH framework can be adapted to urban settings. The first pilot programme will be launched in Hangzhou, where the team will further refine early childhood education interventions to meet the needs of families in developed urban environments.