The illiteracy rate has continued its decline in China, though
challenges remain for women, farmers and ethnic minorities, a
senior official said yesterday.
"Since 2000, the number of illiterate people has declined by an
average of 2 million per year," State Councillor Chen Zhili told a
two-day Asia-Pacific regional conference in support of literacy,
which opened in Beijing yesterday.
In the decade following 1990, China lifted 46.5 million people
out of illiteracy.
The country has fought illiteracy by promoting the nine-year
compulsory education policy, particularly in rural areas, where 90
percent of the country's illiterate people live, Chen said.
She added that in 2005, the government spent more than 356
billion yuan ($46.1 billion) on the nine-year compulsory education
system, up 106 percent from the previous year.
The efforts of the private sector and non-governmental
organizations in the fight to eliminate illiteracy and to provide
training to farmers have also improved the situation.
With its strong commitment and innovative measures, China has
championed the fight against illiteracy, Mark Richmond, director
for UNESCO's coordination of United Nations priorities in
education, told China Daily at the conference.
"The government has made literacy a national priority," Richmond
said.
He praised China's efforts to enroll and keep school-aged
children at school.
"Once you can stop the flow of young people who are not able to
go to school, you can improve literacy," he said.
China's willingness to offer financial assistance and share good
practices with other developing countries is encouraging, he
added.
"China's models that emphasize government efforts are very
interesting to regions where most of the literacy improvement work
has been carried at the grassroots level," he said.
Illiteracy is a world issue - 774 million adults, two-thirds of
them women - cannot read and write.
More than 72 million school-age children are not in school,
according to the latest figures from UNESCO.
In China, illiteracy is still a problem.
There are more than 80 million illiterates at or above 15 years
old. And 72.7 percent of the total are women, according to
statistics from the Fifth National Census in 2000, the latest
figures available.
The adult illiteracy rate in China is 9.08 percent, according to
the census.
By comparison, the world level is 20.3 percent, and the figure
for the Asia-Pacific region is 8.3 percent.
"China's illiterate population sounds like it's quite large,"
said Richmond.
"But it is very difficult to completely solve problems like
this, even for developed countries. I have confidence in
China."
To achieve the target of reducing the adult illiteracy rate to
less than 40 million people by 2015, the county is taking further
actions to educate women, ethnic minorities and migrant workers,
Yang Jin, deputy director-general of the Department of Basic
Education at the Ministry of Education, said at the press
conference yesterday.
(China Daily August 1, 2007)