Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development

The education reforms associated with the Cultural Revolution in China produced marked changes in rural areas-among them, a massive increase in the number of schools and a reform of curriculum geared toward local needs. At the time, international development experts praised this rural program as a model for developing countries (Pepper, 1996: 32-35). Since the transformation of the regime in 1978, however, the Chinese government has denounced these very reforms as an unmitigated disaster. The ill-conceived school expansion and curriculum reforms, it is claimed, caused quality to decline, while the radical antielitist sentiments that they embodied actually harmed economic development during the Cultural Revolution decade (Shirk, 1979: 191). These claims have been widely accepted by scholars, often without empirical investigation into the actual impact of the policies. Jonathan Unger's (1982) book Education under Mao is typical. Based mostly on interviews with refugees in Hong Kong, his findings generally support the view that students lost interest in study during the Cultural Revolution and that as a result, education suffered. Kate Xiao Zhou's (1996) contribution, How the Farmers Changed China,