‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 57
“The Chinese definition of literacy is the ability to read and write at least 1500 Chinese characters. In 1949, when ‘New China’ was founded, the illiteracy rate was more than 80%. By 1992, 22.3% of adults in China were illiterate. Ten years later, that proportion had dropped to 8.72%.
While 8.72% seems relatively small, that translates into a total of 85 million illiterate people in China at the beginning of this century. Twenty million of them were between the age of 15 and 50, with 70% of the total number of illiterate people being women.
Despite China’s huge recent economic expansion and the country’s trillion-dollar plus foreign reserves, the total amount of money allocated per year since 2000 to fight and eliminate illiteracy among 85 million people was just eight million yuan (US$1.03 million). Education was worth a paltry 0.07 yuan per person, an amount that would certainly not buy a book of lessons, nor even a pencil or one single sheet of paper to write on.
Small wonder then that by 2007 the number of illiterate people had not dropped -- it had risen. Since official figures were released after China’s last census in 2000, giving a base of 85 million illiterate people, China has experienced an increase in illiteracy equal to the entire population of Canada -- 30 million people – becoming unable to read or write. Today, 116 million people are unable to meet China’s definition of literacy.”
Think about that statistic carefully. Since 2000, there has been an increase in illiteracy in China of thirty million people. China, with its vast wealth and its billions to waste on Olympics and armies and men in space. Can’t even fix the most basic, fundamental problems.
What does that say about the ‘progress’ of China?
What does that say about the ‘progress’ of China?
‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 58
“Although not all would do so, each and every citizen of these 116 million people is denied the opportunity to unleash their potential, both for self and country, simply through the malaise of illiteracy. In order to put the size of these figures into perspective, in the year 2000, 11.3% of all illiterate people on the planet lived in China. Incredibly, by 2005, that total had risen to 15%.
A full 40% of Chinese people cannot speak Mandarin and, once again, it is the countryside population rather than the city elite who suffer. The isolating factor of speaking only your own dialect in a country of 1.3 billion people fractures the very nationhood of China. This mosaic of language prevents the government from giving a clear message of unity to all citizens. In addition, the inability to speak a common language, combined with the inability to read and write, dooms China’s poor citizens to a life of very few opportunities.”
4 comments:
Well, to be fair, Vietnam has a literacy rate comparable that of Guangxi, across the border. Given the common Confucian culture and similar wealth in Guangxi, this is probably a decent comparison. That's not to say that the hours of class spent memorizing all those characters couldn't be spent more productively.
The Chinese writing system was designed to be hard, so that only the court officials and bureaucrats could understand it, thus separating them from the common herd.
Vietnam began to make enormous strides when it abandoned the Chinese-style chu nom for the Latin-based quoc ngu between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Making it so much easier to learn to read and write meant that everyone in Vietnam, high or low, had their own voice in society, an achievement which proved to be as unsettling as it was liberating.
cut the crap damnit, i only want to know how you dealt with cops hehe
Durandal:
Take a look at Reason 28, regarding TCM. I hope you are still following that article.
Leo
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