Education and health provison

Why were changes made to education and health provision?

Mao thought learning should come from experience, and he rejected traditional Chinese education as being too elitist and being too influenced by the West.

Economic purpose for a focus on education

• economic progress depended on China producing its own technical specialists, and communist ideas could be spread more quickly among literate people

• a healthy workforce would be more productive, and a successful health policy would provide major propaganda opportunities for the Communists

The growth of literacy: when the communists came to power

the majority of peasants were illiterate

The growth of literacy: statistics 1940s- 70s

• By the mid-1950s, a national system of primary education had been set up, with successful results: the national literacy rate rose from 20 percent in 1949 to 50 percent in 1960, and stood at 64 percent in 1964

• Progress thereafter was slower because of the Cultural Revolution, and by 1976, the figure had risen only to 70 percent.

The growth of literacy: lack of budget on education in the 1950s

• early progress would have been faster if the government had spent more on primary education

• only 6.4 percent of the total budget went on culture and education in 1952) and less on war in Korea, and by 1956, fewer than half the children aged 7-16 were in full-time education

The growth of literacy: elitist elements that still lived on: key schools

‘key schools' attracted the best teachers, where students had to pass strict entrance examinations and places were reserved for the children of high-ranking Party and government officials

The growth of literacy: elitist elements that still lived on: focus on technical experts

The expansion of higher education, and the greater concentration on science and technology in universities reflected the need for more technical experts

The growth of literacy: elitist elements that still lived on: Russian schooling

Large numbers of students also went to study at Russian universities before the split in 1959, but there were no longer the opportunities to study in the West that had been there before 1949

Pinyin: What is it?

a modernised form of phonetic Mandarin, the language of most of China.

Pinyin: Why was it adopted and when?

in 1956, to assist the spread of literacy, which was being handicapped by the lack of a standardised form of language that everyone could understand.

Pinyin: Why Mandarin was a problem

• its pronunciation varied widely from region to region and it had no alphabet, which meant each word (they were pictures known as ideograms) had to be learned separately

• Schemes to introduce a standardised system had been under discussion for several years, but became reality when Zhou Yougang was asked to oversee its introduction by the Education Ministry

Pinyin: Zhou Yougang

• He was an economics professor at Shanghai University who had returned from New York because he wanted to contribute his expertise to the creation of a new China

• In Pinyin, all of the sounds of Mandarin were given a particular symbol, which made it much more straightforward to learn and write

• It gradually replaced the various other forms of written Chinese and so enabled literacy to spread faster

• It also facilitated communication with other countries once this became acceptable

The collapse of education after 1966: Stats of how many people were out of education

The closure of schools and universities for much of the period between 1966 and 1970 meant that the education of some 130 million young people simply stopped

The collapse of education after 1966: the red guards

Even when the Red Guards stopped attacking the education system, they were still not receiving schooling, because they were away in the mountains and country villages after 1968

The collapse of education after 1966: the reopening of schools

• The damage was felt not just in the short-term

• When the schools did reopen, it was difficult to restore belief in the system: teachers had been attacked and ridiculed, the curriculum dismissed as a waste of time and the whole purpose of education undermined

• A key part of Zhou's Four Modernisations was to rebuild confidence in the education system, but it was a task that took time

The collapse of education after 1966: during and after the cultural revolution

• During the Cultural Revolution, the only purpose of education had been to serve the revolution- learning was not regarded as having any intrinsic use

• After the Cultural Revolution, the clock was not simply turned back - there was greater emphasis on practical work and vocational training, with fewer exams to be taken

Health: the barefoot doctors: the cultural revolution

During the Cultural Revolution, in a similar way to that in which former Red Guards were dispersed into the countryside, one million medical trainees, known as barefoot doctors, were sent to provide rudimentary medical help to the rural peasantry

Health: the barefoot doctors: training

Typically, the trainees undertook six months of intensive study, with the emphasis on practical skills, before being dispatched to provide free basic health care. Barefoot doctors promoted simple hygiene, preventative health care and family planning, and treated common diseases

Health: the barefoot doctors: medical purpose

endemic diseases (notably cholera, typhoid, dysentery, malaria and scarlet fever) and high mortality rates were a chronic feature of rural China.

Health: the barefoot doctors: ideological purpose: bourgeois factors

it was hoped that exposure to peasant conditions would prevent young medical intellectuals from slipping into the bourgeois mindsets that had made doctors the targets of the earlier 'anti campaigns

Health: the barefoot doctors: ideological purpose: training

• They spent half their time working in agriculture, alongside the people they were looking after, which helped them to win local confidence more readily

• because their training was based around practical skills, their education was directly serving the revolutionary cause rather than being seen as learning for its own sake, which was regarded as being of no value

Health: the barefoot doctors: economic purpose

• it was cheap

• Training generally lasted only six months and the doctors' wages (which were roughly half those of a traditionally trained urban doctor were paid for by the local village government

Health: the barefoot doctors: outcome of the scheme: success on health grounds

The basic medical treatment was welcomed by the long-suffering peasantry, and 90 percent of villages were involved in the scheme by 1976

Health: the barefoot doctors: outcome of the scheme: success in propaganda

• the regime could claim to be fulfilling its promise to make basic health care a universal right

• It received significant international attention and served as an inspiration to the World Health Organization, which endorsed similar schemes elsewhere

Successes and failures of health care reform: previous experience

• Based on their previous experiences in Jiangxi and Vanan, from 1952 they introduced a series of 'patriotic health movements, propaganda drives led by teams of Party workers who explained to the peasantry the importance of hygiene, and the link between dirt and disease

• These can be seen as further examples of mass mobilization, in this case conducted through street and neighborhood committees, and supported by copious quantities of colorful propaganda posters, leaflets and film shows

Successes and failures of health care reform: why there was an emphasis on prevention over the cure

The emphasis was on prevention rather than cure, as there was such a serious shortage of hospital facilities and of trained doctors and nurses

Successes and failures of health care reform: germ welfare scare

The germ warfare scare during the Korean War was exaggerated partly in order to get the first of these campaigns off the ground

Successes and failures of health care reform: waterborne diseases

There was some success in reducing the death rate from waterborne diseases, by encouraging the digging of deeper wells for obtaining drinking water and promoting more careful disposal of human waste in pits away from homes

Successes and failures of health care reform: move away from ‘night soil’

The practice of using human waste (also called 'night soil') as a source of fertiliser in the fields was discouraged, since it was a major cause of disease

Successes and failures of health care reform: controlling snails

There was a concerted campaign to educate the peasantry about the need to control the snails that spread schistosomiasis, a serious abdominal infection responsible for many deaths in the period.

Successes and failures of health care reform: ‘four pests’

• Invoking a spirit of competition proved a useful ploy in stimulating participation in the campaign to eradicate the 'four pests' of flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows during the Great Leap Forward Children especially took up the challenge, although the eventual substitution of bed bugs for sparrows met with less enthusiasm

• However, the damage caused to the ecological balance by the sparrowcide outweighed any other benefits of the campaign

Successes and failures of health care reform: hospital treatments

• In terms of hospital treatment for the sick, facilities were limited. Urban workers in large industrial enterprises or SOEs had the best access to treatment

• In rural areas, county hospitals were staffed by trained doctors, but most care was administered at a lower level through out-patient care provided by village health centres

Successes and failures of health care reform: stats of life expectancy and infant mortality rates

Even though government spending on health was never sufficient to fulfil the hopes of the Party, overall there were significant improvements in health over the period, with life expectancy rising from 41 years in 1950 to 62 by 1970, and infant mortality rates falling.