Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier goes into this, among other things, in the context of 1930s England. I don't know how much the situation in China is similar:

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html

  The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures 
  of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work 
  at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should 
  descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one 
  working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will 
  leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on 
  ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the 
  notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely 
  contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who 
  ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in 
  a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just 
  fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a 
  man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way 
  of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on 
  his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly, 
  debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly 
  and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.