ABSTRACT
China contains a quarter of mankind; China is also conspicuously a country of youth, since at least half the population is under the age of 25. In the world at large, ‘youth’ has little meaning, since most of mankind proceeds immediately from childhood through various forms of traumatic initiation into the adult world of work and responsibility about the age of puberty. The backlog of underdevelopment was tremendous, and for decades before the Revolution it was severely aggravated by foreign exploitation, the Japanese invasion, and civil war between the Chinese themselves. China is a world workshop for new ideas and relationships, or for old ideas and problems in a fresh guise. Socialist/communist countries are generally conspicuous by the amount of attention and investment given to formal education. To speed up the increase of enrolments, the Ministry of Education was superseded in 1985 by a State Education Commission with increased powers and more overarching responsibilities.
