BEIJING - CHINA'S illiteracy rate is going down, not up, a top Education Ministry official said yesterday, dismissing an earlier news report claiming it had risen.
The published statistics were not accurate, Dr Yang Jin, a deputy director-general at the ministry, told reporters at a conference on literacy.
The reported increase despite China's 50-year battle to wipe out illiteracy had taken some sheen off the country's success story of economic boom and social progress.
Unsurprisingly, the news report was picked up by the international press and stirred much interest among China watchers.
In the official books, China had 87 million illiterate adults in 2000, or 9 per cent of the population, down from 182 million in 1990.
In China, a person is considered literate if he can read and write at least 1,500 Chinese characters, or if he has at least four years of schooling.
Unesco statistics say 91.7 per cent of China's adults were literate in 2005.
But more important than a rise or drop in the illiteracy rate is how it is measured in the first place, said Dr Sheldon Shaeffer, director of Unesco's Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education.
The traditional approach of looking at how many years of schooling a person has, or asking him if he can read, is not good enough, he said.
China National Institute for Educational Research scholar Guo Hongxia told Canton Fair that the number of illiterates in China is likely to be higher than previously recorded if 'functional literacy' is considered instead.
In April, the official China Daily ran a front-page article quoting another top Education Ministry official as saying that the number of illiterates had grown by almost 30 million between 2000 and 2005.
That meant 116 million Chinese were illiterate in 2005, with many of them losing their literacy skills from lack of use, Mr Gao Xuegui, director of the ministry's illiteracy eradication office, was reported to have said at a forum.
China accounted for 11.3 per cent of the world's illiterates in 2000.
Yesterday, Dr Yang rubbished the April report, saying the numbers had been 'inappropriately' extrapolated by 'some experts' from a 2005 survey that sampled just 1 per cent of the population, and then compared against the 2000 official figure from a once-a-decade population census.
'In reality, the increase in the number of illiterates does not exist,' he said in answer to a reporter's question on the sidelines of a conference organised by his ministry and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
'The real situation should be that China's illiteracy rates are continually falling,' said Dr Yang.
He did not offer alternative numbers, saying an accurate picture would emerge only when the next full census is done in 2010.
'In reality, you may know 1,500 characters but still not be able to read a bus signboard and may face many problems in daily life,' she said.
(Source: Canton Fair News)
