Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development; The Case of Jimo County  

Oleh:

Han, Dongping

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Modern China vol. 27 no. 1 (Jan. 2001), page 59-90.
Topik: Cultural Revolution; Rural Education; Economic Development
Fulltext: 59MC271.pdf (103.92KB)

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The education reforms associated with the Cultural Revolution in China produced marked changes in rural areas—among them, a massive increase in the number of schools and a reform of curriculum geared toward local needs. At the time, international development experts praised this rural program as amodel for developing countries (Pepper, 1996: 32-35). Since the transformation of the regime in 1978, however, the Chinese government has denounced these very reforms as an unmitigated disaster. The ill conceived school expansion and curriculum reforms, it is claimed, caused quality to decline, while the radical antielitist sentiments that they embodied actually harmed economic development during the Cultural Revolution decade (Shirk, 1979: 191). These claims have been widely accepted by scholars, often without empirical investigation into the actual impact of the policies. Jonathan Unger’s (1982) book Education under Mao is typical. Based mostly on interviews with refugees in Hong Kong, his findings generally support the view that students lost interest in study during the Cultural Revolution and that as a result, education suffered. Kate Xiao Zhou’s (1996) contribution, How the Farmers Changed China, supports the argument that Chinese rural economy stagnated under Mao (see also Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden, 1991; Harding, 1987). The government’s uniformly bleak assessment has been contested by other scholars. Suzanne Pepper’s (1996) Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China, for example, points to the educational achievements of the Cultural Revolution decade, as well as to its problems, and Philip Huang’s (1990) The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 demonstrates that therewas actually significant economic growth in rural China during the period.

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