Learning to Read in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese

This chapter is about how one quarter of the world’s population learns to read and write. There are about 1.2 billion people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 8% belong to non-Han ethnic minorities), 21 million in Taiwan (Republic of China), and 34 million more ethnic Chinese elsewhere. There are 70 million Koreans, one third in North Korea and two thirds in South Korea, with 5 million more outside Korea. And there are 125 million Japanese (0.7 million are ethnic Koreans), plus perhaps a quarter million more Japanese overseas.