ABSTRACT
For the past five decades, government and party officials in the People’s Republic of China have made ‘work to eradicate illiteracy’ (saochu wemnang gongzuo) a national priority. To achieve this goal, a series of mass literacy campaigns have been organised with the purpose of extending basic education and literacy to all of China’s diverse communities and peoples. In the 1990s, the principal target populations for anti-illiteracy work have been rural women and inhabitants of China’s most remote areas and underdeveloped regions, many of whom are members of non-Han minority groups. Adult literacy work in rural China can be seen as part of the broader effort to diffuse central ideology and control into peripheral communities and in so doing to reduce the marginality of these communities. This is the dominant rationale for the central government’s promotion of ‘mass literacy’. Yet, even at the level of central policy, recognition of the variety and complexity of the forms and functions of literacy (multiple literacies in Street’s sense, see Introduction, this volume) is built into China’s mass literacy curriculum. That curriculum is conceptualised as a balanced mixture of ‘cultural’, ‘ideological’ and ‘technical’ content roughly corresponding to the application of reading, writing, and quantitative knowledge and skills in the contexts, respectively, of formal schooling, politics and work. This tripartite conception of literacy also corresponds to the Chinese state’s goals for social, political and economic development (see Stites and Semali 1991). Schooling rural Chinese women in cultural, ideological and technical literacies is seen as vital to the achievement of the complex aims summed up by the phrase ‘socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics’ (Stites 1995). However, central goals for mass literacy are poorly matched to the diversity of local literacy practices. This chapter presents a case study of literacy environments in two areas within
a rural Chinese township, Dahu: an outlying farming village and the township market centre. The study compares and contrasts the material and social contexts for reading and writing in the two areas. Drawing primarily from data collected during visits to a hundred households and eight focus group interviews, it examines the literacy environment of the rural household as a context for the changes in literacy practices envisioned in state educational policy. My general conclusion is that adult literacy work in Dahu has had very little effect in transforming the literacy environment of the home in ways that would create a social space for young women to engage actively in reading and writing.
