Yasheng Huang: commitment

Transcript context

…Why did Chinese literacy appear to stagnate in the 19th century? Yes. This is a deeply puzzling development. Let me make the argument why there was a potential for China to raise its literacy. They implemented the examination system back in the 6th century, and the state began to provide not universal education, but something closer to universal education. It was more like a preparatory education for boys and men to be able to take the civil service examination. The costs were subsidized by the state, and the apparatus, the infrastructure was quite widespread and developed. There was a cultural premium placed on being able to read and write. They have all the conditions for further literacy and even universal literacy. A number of factors hindered the further development of literacy. One of the bigger factors was that this entire system was designed for half of the population only, for the male half of the population. The females didn’t have access to the preparatory schools, and they couldn’t take the civil service examination. Also, there was some spillover from the male to the female in terms of basic literacy, but the scale was not that big. The other was that the entire education was organized around memorization rather than teaching people how to think. One problem with that was that there was never any liberalizing value that came from rote memorization, memorization of the Confucian texts, and those texts were usually extremely conservative and backward looking. So, not only the female half of the population didn’t benefit from that, but there was no liberal value that came from this apparatus of education that would, over time, advocate for universal education beyond the male half of the population. There was almost a self-contained restriction on the scale of the literacy to the male sector of the population. I think the third reason is economics. Chinese economy didn’t develop, commercialization didn’t develop at a scale that we saw in Europe. And that didn’t really increase the demand for human capital, for basic skills. If you run a bureaucracy for a country the size of China, you may need 10,000 people, 20,000 people, 40,000 people, 100,000 people, but if you run a commercial economy, you need millions. You need tens of millions of people working in factories and doing this and that and producing this and that. The demand for human capital when you don’t really have a commercial economy is always going to be limited if all you need is the human capital to run the bureaucracy. I will say that all these factors combined together restricted what could have been an earlier literacy revolution that failed to occur in China. If you look at, for example, going back to the 16th century, China had a decent literacy compared with some European countries. But the difference is that in Europe, you had this explosion of literacy, whereas in China, it stayed at the same level. The initial level didn’t translate into a higher level, whereas in Europe it did. Now, you argue in your new book that the imperial exam system weakened the horizontal structure of Chinese society, prevented China from developing civil society. What’s the mechanism for how that works? I can see that the exams might pull away some smart people, but there are still plenty of people left in China. Why don’t the remaining people develop some kind of civil society?…

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