State Literacy Ideologies and the Transformation of Rural China

Did the spread of literacy in China's villages after 1949 bring economic, social and political empowerment to peasants or did it merely make possible the opposite, the historically unprecedented entrapment of rural production team members within bureaucratic webs of mass communication and social control? China's leaders expected it would do both. For them, the creation of a literate peasantry was inseparable from the goal of a strong state capable of mobilizing and marshalling the masses for political and economic tasks. Few features of the Chinese revolution can lay claim to a greater intrinsic importance than the vexed problem of literacy in the PRC and yet remain as iinderstiidiedi and rivien bv cnmnietinr claims and intmrnretqtinnz 1 A recent