Why China did it (and we didn’t)

Hua Lijun owns a most decidedly unfashionable pair of thick black reading glasses, and when she puts them on she has no trouble at all threading a needle. Still, she mutters constantly about her poor eyesight.

Whether she’s choosing merchandise on grocery store shelves or scanning the signs at a city bus stop, the 68-year-old Beijing housekeeper squints, mutters, and squints some more. Then, invariably, she asks someone else to help her make out the Chinese characters which are, she says, just a bit too small for her to see.

After anything more than a passing encounter with Ms Hua (not her real name), it becomes clear that her eyesight is not really the problem. Instead, she is illiterate. Born and raised in Hebei Province at a time when most girls in rural China received little or no education, she can crudely scrawl her name and address, but little else. She recognises only a relative handful of Chinese characters, far too few to make sense of anything in a newspaper. ‘‘I never had a chance to go to school when I was young, and now I’m too old to learn how to read,’’ she says. ‘‘There’s nothing to be done about it. I manage to get by, but I’m afraid people must think I’m just a stupid old lady.’’ Although illiteracy is fairly common among her cohorts, Hua is sufficiently ashamed of her condition that she tries to hide it from strangers.

Her sheepishness is not only touching, but is also a good indication of how far China has come in its massive, half-century-old campaign to teach its people to read. Across China, armies of teachers have drastically reduced illiteracy in the countryside and made it a relative rarity among city dwellers.

When it took control of China in 1949, the Communist government made literacy one of its top priorities, a choice that made sense for a variety of reasons. On the practical level, the nation’s new leaders knew they needed a better-educated workforce to carry out the rapid and massive economic modernisation campaign it was about to begin.

And, as a party that rode to power on a platform of egalitarianism, the Communists were ideologically and politically committed to the notion of breaking what had been, throughout Chinese history, the elite classes’ monopoly on culture, education, and opportunity....

Excerpted from ‘China’s Long but Uneven March to Literacy’, by Ted Plafker, ‘International Herald Tribune’, February 12

Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.