ABSTRACT
As Alexander Woodside has pointed out, China did not have the religious rivalries encased in national competitions that motivated the growths of literacy rates in Europe; there was no competitive need to make the flock literate to mobilize the people before the twentieth century. In order to understand how specific literacies were related and how they were taught, we must pause to look at the nature of the Chinese writing system. Many of some people were members of the well-established Strengthen Education Society of which Mao Zedong, as a primary school principal, was a member. Attacks on "feudal" orthography have as much to do with the psychology of the Chinese New Culture intellectual as with practical pedagogy. Mao trumpeted was especially proud of mobilizing village women, who were only gradually becoming recognized as an object of mobilization and source of revolutionary energy.
