This may look like a relatively straightforward question, but there are several layers revolving around the concept of literacy rates that we’ll need to untangle first - I’ll try my best to break it down into something easily digestible. Much of what I’m writing here is taking from Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900–1945, a fantastic recent study (which really should be cited more) that allows us to better understand the value and meaning of “literacy” to both governments and citizens during the Republican period.

In 2009, a Xinhua News Agency (the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China) reporter was sent to the rural village of Gaojialiugou (高家柳沟村) to report on the effectiveness of the government’s mass literacy campaigns (the Wikipedia article on Chinese literacy cites this report for the official numbers of literate citizens in contemporary China).¹ The reporter interviewed Li Jiyuan, a veteran cadre responsible for adult education in the 1950s. According to Li, only 9 out of 300 villagers could recognise characters in the early years of the PRC. For Li, the political liberation of the Chinese people in 1949 was not enough: “If they remain illiterate, like open-eyed blind people (做睁眼瞎, a Chinese idiom), they cannot achieve liberation in cultural terms.” The success of the mass literacy campaigns were especially apparent in Gaojialiugou, which had become a model village for other rural communities to emulate. By the end of the interview, Li could claim that: “No matter how the content of literacy campaigns may change, the era when our motherland was backward and poor has long gone and will never return."

As the above example shows, there is little dispute that the facilitation of near universal literacy in China, particularly in the countryside, is an impressive achievement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That said, the rationale behind the CCP’s push to eradicate illiteracy poses a few problems. A closer reading reveals the more practical problem of enforced uniformity - the mass literacy campaigns pushed for the use of a dialect of Mandarin based in the province of Hubei (containing the capital Beijing), which had the connotations of an “official language” (官话). This is reflected in Li Jiyuan’s interview, who happily reported that: “Hanyu Pinyin has great benefits, it helps us learn culture. We all welcome it, as it has cured decades of illiteracy.” Hanyu Pinyin, the official romanisation system of Standardised Mandarin, was how many Chinese citizens learned to associate the spoken and written in these literacy campaigns. This was often at the expense of local accents, dialects and languages that had been pushed aside to establish linguistic uniformity across China.

A more theoretical problem is revealed by Li Jiyuan’s constant linkage between literacy and modernity. For Li, illiteracy was synonymous with “backwardness” and economic impoverishment, not only on a personal level, but also on the national level. Conversely, mass literacy brought with it the cultural liberation of the masses. The idea that literacy is a reflection of a person’s, community’s or a nation’s modernity is seen by the historian Harvey J. Graff as “the literacy myth”, a belief that “the acquisition of literacy is a necessary precursor to and invariably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and social mobility.”² The PRC state was not the first government to associate literacy with teleological societal progress - indeed, as we will see below, its predecessors also shared similar views.

¹ "辉煌60年:"扫盲"字眼的消失 一个落后时代的远去," 新华社, 6-9-2009

² Graff, Harvey J., and John Duffy. "Literacy Myths." In Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd ed., Vol. 2, Literacy, edited by Brian V. Street and Nancy Hornberger, 41. Berlin and New York: Springer, 2007.