Chinese Economic Development

The Chinese educational system in the early 1960sThe revolution in education 175The transformation of Chinese education after 1966 was prompted by Mao’s viewthat superstructural change was the crux of the problem of economic development,and that Chinese education had failed between 1949 and the early 1960s.The system of Chinese education during the early 1950s was based on theAmerican-style approach which had been introduced into China during the early1920s. Primary education was meant to begin at the age of seven and last for sixyears. Junior middle school (JMS) was designed to last for three years, seniormiddle school (SMS) for three years, and university education for four or fiveyears (depending on the subject studied). In practice, the pre-1949 system wasvery far from comprehensive; the majority of children received little more thana few years of teaching in sishu, which were small private schools funded byparents or lineage associations, and typically run by a single teacher. From these,boys (only perhaps 5 per cent of girls attended some form of school) emergedimbued with an understanding of ‘Confucian’ values such as respect, deferenceand contempt for the peasantry, and an acquaintance with a modest number ofcharacters, or what might be described as subsistence rather than functionalliteracy (Pepper 1996: 53).By the late 1940s, a parallel system of education had developed in CCP baseareas, based on the model pioneered in Yan’an, the capital of the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia border region (Seybolt 1971). Initially the Yan’an system followed thatof regular schools in other parts of China: those entering secondary school had tobe aged between thirteen and nineteen, standard examinations had to be taken andpassed and teachers were expected to keep their non-teaching work to an absoluteminimum. This system was abandoned in the early 1940s as unsuitable; it was tooexpensive, full-time study was not very popular with parents and the creation of asmall number of regular schools meant that children had to travel long distances toget there. Its replacement, as adumbrated in the directive for elementary schoolingof April 1944, altered both the form and the content of education. The standardizationwhich was the hallmark of the regular school system was abandoned,and instead minban (literally ‘run by the people’) schools were promoted. Thesediffered from the regular schools in being run and financed by village communitiesthemselves.The new Yan’an system was a decentralized and low-cost system of educationwhich in many ways was well suited to conditions in a backward base area inwhich the literacy rate was barely 1 per cent and where a state-funded system ofeducation was hard to finance via taxation. Instead, the villages funded the schools,and had great freedom over whom to select as teachers, the length of schoolingand the type of assessment. 2 In some ways, it was simply a development of thesishu system. However, minban schools appealed to the CCP because they shortenedthe length of education and reduced the financial burden on the state, whichonly had to provide a subsidy rather than paying for the full cost of schooling. Inthis way, it was hoped that the number of those receiving elementary educationcould be increased. The Yan’an system also changed the content of schooling by