Heidi A. ROSS
In the sixty years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China the national illiteracy rate has plummeted from 80 percent to below 10 percent. PHOTO BY JOAN LEBOLD COHEN.
China’s educational system, the largest in the world, achieved remarkable gains from 1949 to 2009, despite political upheaval and relatively low levels of funding—resulting in dramatically improved literacy rates, sky-rocketing enrollment in colleges, and the focus on developing internationally
