Policy & Planning
National laws, regulations and policies on literacy
"The government shall develop various education facilities and eliminate illiteracy."
—— The Constitution for the People's Republic of China, revised in March, 2004
People's governments at various levels, autonomous organizations at grassroots for the general public, public corporations and enterprises shall adopt various measures and carry out literacy to eliminate illiteracy. According to the national regulations, citizens with the capability to receive literacy shall accept the literacy.
—— Law of Education for the People's Republic of China, March, 1995
Illiterate and semi-illiterate citizens at 15 years old and above and of any gender, ethnic group and race, except for the ones without learning capability, shall have the obligation and right to accept the literacy.
—— Work Rules on Literacy, August, 1993
Enhancing policy measures for literacy
In 2007, the Ministry of Education and other 11 government departments jointly issued the Guidance Opinion on Further Enhancing Literacy, making a comprehensive arrangement for literacy by 2015, which propose main literacy tasks and political measures as follows:
- Improve understanding of the importance of literacy
- Strengthening the planning of and the resource investment into literacy
- Establishing feasible objectives and implementation plans.
- Universalizing and consolidating the nine-year compulsory education and curbing resolutely the increasing of new illiterates.
- Increasing the inputs into literacy
- Deepening the reform in literacy and improving the quality of literacy
- Enhancing the effectiveness of illiteracy elimination
- Improving the evaluation, test and certificate issuing on literacy
- Innovating teaching methods and perfecting the teaching materials on literacy
- Enhancing the continuing education after literacy training and consolidating the achievement in literacy
- Enhancing capacity building and innovating literacy mechanism
- Strengthening the organization and leadership of the work to eliminate illiteracy.
- Implementing the teaching tasks and duties on illiteracy
- Optimizing and integrating all kinds of resources for literacy.
- Encouraging volunteer service on literacy
- Enhancing the registration of illiterates and literates
- Intensifying the study on literacy
- Strengthen organizational leadership, overall coordination and social participation
- Strengthen coordination between different departments
- Put in place the job responsibilities of local government departments in illiteracy elimination work
- Reinforce the supervision & inspection, direction & evaluation
- Giving more support to the illiteracy eliminating work on target groups
- Literacy project for the nationalities with a small population
- Literacy project for women
- Follow-up project of literacy
Source:Country Paper: Status and Major Challenges of Literacy in China Prepared by the National Center for Education Development Research (June2010) Download pdf