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Mao’s China, 1945–76

Education and health, 1949–76

  • 2 things to know
  • Paper 3

Overview

Schooling before 1949, why education was spread, literacy classes for adults, Pinyin and simplified characters, education after 1966, healthcare before communist rule, the patriotic health campaigns, the barefoot doctors and their work, and the successes and failures of health policy under Mao.

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Key term

What were the patriotic health campaigns?

Key term

What was schooling like in China before 1949?

Questions from this subtopic

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  1. 1

    What was schooling like in China before 1949?

    Model answer

    Only about a fifth of people could read, schools were mainly for the well-off in the cities, and most peasants never went at all.

  2. 2

    Why did the new government want to spread schooling quickly?

    Model answer

    A modern industrial economy needed workers who could read and count, and the classroom was the best place to teach communist ideas.

  3. 3

    How were adults taught to read?

    Model answer

    Through evening classes and winter schools run in villages and workplaces, often by anyone locally who was already literate.

  4. 4

    What is Pinyin, and why did it matter?

    Model answer

    A system introduced in 1958 for writing Chinese sounds in the Roman alphabet, which made it far easier to teach reading and a common spoken standard.

  5. 5

    What other change made written Chinese easier to learn?

    Model answer

    Characters were simplified so that they needed fewer strokes to write and were quicker to memorise.

  6. 6

    What happened to education after 1966?

    Model answer

    Schools and universities shut, teachers were attacked by their own pupils, and examinations were abolished, so a generation lost years of study.

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