The Struggle for Literacy in Post-Revolutionary Rural Guangdong

Abstract

In a recent article, Paul Cohen described the “academic Great Wall” that separates the study of pre-1949 and post-1949 China, suggesting a need for greater efforts to break through the “1949 barrier.” In addition to lack of historical perspective, Western scholarship on the PRC has tended toward a statist approach that overestimates the state's autonomy from social forces – as Jean Oi has recently put it, “almost to the point of denying the ‘autonomy’ of society.” As the work of Cohen, Oi and others makes clear, recent years have witnessed an increasing effort to “bring history back in” to the study of post-1949 China, as well as to “bring society back in, or at least the state-society relationship.” This article is intended to contribute to that effort, by bringing historical and societal perspectives to bear on a subject that has so far nearly eluded Western scholarship: state efforts to spread literacy in the Chinese countryside after 1949.