Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to examine the development of mass education and literacy training in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its inception in 1949 until the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1977. Due to the vast size of the nation and the widely dispersed and varied make-up of the Chinese population, a diversity of educational programs and tools would be implemented by the educational policy makers in order to offer both formal and non-formal schooling to the population. Education under the leadership of Mao Zedong (Mao) in the PRC would be driven by two different, and often conflicting, policy objectives: the first objective of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to equip the population with the academic skills necessary to create productive workers, and the second objective was to indoctrinate the population with correct political thought. While the PRC was able to effectively achieve universal primary school attendance by 1978, secondary and tertiary education was at that time generally only available in the urban and suburban areas. As over 80% of the population still lived in rural areas, access to secondary and tertiary education remained out of reach for the vast majority of Chinese people.