Recent Trends in Literacy Studies and Their Application to China

Established views about literacy's role in the making of the modem world have come under increasing attack in recent years by a new scholarship which seeks to relate the literacy "myth" to the actual uses of literacy within a wide array of social and historical settings. In this paper I contribute to the revisionism in literacy studies by applying its main theoretical premises to the greatly neglected subject of literacy in the People's Republic of China. I examine the social construction of literacy in China after the communist revolution in 1949, showing how official literacy ideologies contributed to the formation and reproduction of rural-urban differences in Chinese society.