China marshals an army of some 14 million teachers in its colossal education drive. On top of trained teachers, China also employs around 3 million untrained teachers to educate the nation’s 230 plus million schoolchildren.

The republican period of the 1920s and 1930s sought to modernize education, but the civil war and Japanese invasion thwarted progress. The ensuing Mao ere can be blamed for the wholesale deterioration of China’s educational system.

Schooling in China still hasn’t recovered from the beating it took during the Cultural Revolution, when teachers the land over were beaten and killed, many being replaced with untrained peasants. Education became geared to the great proletarian experiment, becoming a tool of indoctrination.

The Confucian respect afforded to teachers before Mao’s anti-intellectualism has been largely restored, but schools are still hugely under-funded and teachers are paid little.

An explosion at local school in Jiangxi province in March 2001 killed 42 teachers and children. The government blamed a rogue bomber, but local parents accused the school of using the children of manufacture firework for the hard-up school.

Rote learning and an absence of open debate on certain issues in the classroom make for an inadequate educational model, a situation that is not helped by a poor record on per capita education spending.

Some academics argue that the difficulties of learning the Chinese script create a huge drag on the educational system. Learning characters certainly takes more time than learning an alphabet, but the issue is probably more one of funding and the quality of teaching; Taiwan and Hong Kong wrestle with an even more complicated script, but manage to educate their citizens. China records an official literacy rate of 80%, which is above for a third world country, but still far short of developed country standards. Many minority people cannot read Chinese characters, but may be literate in their own native scripts.