Mao Zedong’s Domestic Policies
Education
From the start of the PRC, there were
aims to vastly improve education
levels.
Mao vowed that under Communism,
China would see a large spread in
education amongst the people, and a
serious decrease in illiteracy.
1949
Most peasants were barely literate or
completely illiterate, able to read little
and write nothing.
The literacy rate (people with basic
reading and writing skills) stood at only
20% of a county populated by over 541
million people.
By the middle of the 1950s a national
system of primary education had been
set up and led to the great increase in
literacy that Mao had promised.
By 1976 literacy now stood at 70%, a
huge rise and a victory for Mao.
Language Reform
The PRC adopted a new reform of the Chinese
language in 1955. They introduced a new form
of written Mandarin (pinyin) to overcome the
problem of differing pronunciation across China
that meant that sometimes people couldn’t
understand each other from region to region.
This also helped the people of the PRC because
previously their language had no alphabet.
Despite these great victories for Mao, he did not
have a completely positive effect on education in the
PRC.
In the last decade of his life all of the past
achievements in education were worthless. A
census compiled after his death showed these
shocking statistics:
• <1% of people had a university degree
• 11% had received schooling after the age of 16
• 26% had received schooling between the ages of 1216
• And only 35% had received schooling after the age
of 12!
Embarrassingly for the Communist officials
who succeeded Mao, they found that whilst
Mao was in power only 6% of those
responsible for running the government and
the party had been educated beyond the age
of 16.
This may explain why the party’s ideas for
modernising China were so unrealistic.
The main reason for the decline
in educated young people in
China was, of course, the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76)
130 million of China’s young
people stopped attending school
or university between 1966-70,
and education was totally
undermined during this period;
pupils and students were
encouraged to ridicule and beat
their teachers, and reject all
forms of traditional learning.
Nothing was regarded as being of any real
necessity any longer. Learning and study were
dismissed as worthless unless they served the
revolution, and it was seen as more important to
train loyal party workers than to prepare China’s
young people to take their place in a modern
state.
THEN Mao sent these rebellious young people
“up to the mountains and down to the villages” in
1967-72 instead of insisting that they went back
to school.