# Chinese higher ed during Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution


**From the Great Leap Forward to 1977**

The Great Leap Forward began in 1958, and aimed to make China much more
self-reliant and able to rapidly catch up to the developed world. During
this period, there was wide-spread experimentation in the Chinese
education sector, with more focus on grassroots education and indigenous
knowledge (for example schools of traditional Chinese medicine). There
was also more focus on applied research – universities were encouraged
to set up small factories, and linkages between higher education
institutions and the research organizations were strengthened (Hayhoe
1996).

In this period, there was a strong movement to develop more local
curricular content, with students contributing to writing new textbooks,
and introducing regional differences. This happened together with a
strong growth in non-formal and adult education, with evening classes at
regular universities, and spare-time universities attached to
state-owned enterprises and rural communes. The result was a mushrooming
in the number of institutions of higher education (from 229 to 1289),
and the number of students enrolled – although questions were raised
about the quality of education provided through these non-formal
institutions (Hayhoe 1996).

In 1963, however, there was a retrenchment, following the losses that
had been experienced through over-ambitious efforts at expansion in the
Great Leap Forward, and the famine that had happened. The Ministry of
Education issued the “Decision on Unifying Management in the Higher
Education System”, which stated that the central ministry had the full
responsibility for preparing teaching plans (jiaoyu jihua, 教育计划) for
each specialization, teaching outlines (jiaoyu dagang, 教育大纲) for
each course, and textbooks that were nationally standardized (Hayhoe
1987). The preparation of these materials was led by the Ministry, in
consultation with academic subject committees, whose members were often
professors at the most prestigious universities. Each specialization had
several teaching and research groups (jiaoyanzu, 教研组), responsible
for researching methods to transmit knowledge as efficiently as possible
(Hayhoe 1989).

The teaching plans for each specialization contained four points: the
purpose of formation in that specialization, the organization of time,
the structuring of all the required courses and the arrangement of the
teaching environment. The teaching outlines for each course included a
statement of aims and requirements for the course, list of important
content areas in appropriate order, list of basic reference texts, and
teaching guidelines (Hayhoe 1989).

**Cultural revolution**During the Cultural Revolution, there was a
strong growth in the informal track of education and in basic level
education. This had begun to emerge during the Great Leap Forward, and
now grew strongly, as a more radical political faction took control of
the government. The educational ideas of the Cultural Revolution were
based around the idea of giving workers and peasants broad access to
education. There was a also a phenomenal growth in secondary education,
and a strong push for full integration between the educational system
and all aspects of social life – the very opposite of the Soviet
specialization and departmentalization that had reigned before (Hayhoe
1996).

Formal universities were mostly shut down between 1967 and 1971, with
students travelling throughout the country making revolution and
learning from the experiences of workers and peasants (Hayhoe 1987).
When they reopened, they mostly taught shorter and more general programs
(Hayhoe 1989). However, the system became very politicized, for example
abolishing merit-based exams in favour of recommendations based on
class-background and political objectives. Age limits were eliminated,
together with the merit-based entrance exams and the examination-based
grading system, and the number of school years needed for graduation was
reduced (Yang 2004).

There was great discontent with the centralized Soviet-inspired
curriculum that had prevailed, and the People’s University, which had
been one of the beachheads for Soviet influence in China, remained
closed over the entire period from 1967 to 1977. Similarly, the national
bureaus responsible for planning and disseminating the standard teaching
plans, outlines and textbooks were abolished, and old textbooks were
criticized for being too theoretical, and narrowly specialized (Hayhoe
1987). Committees of students, teachers, and worker-peasant-soldier
representatives were set up to take responsibility both for
administering higher education, and for creating new teaching materials
that would reflect local needs. The ideal was both to give control over
the knowledge that would be transmitted to teachers and students, and to
ensure strong links between academic and real-life knowledge (Hayhoe
1987).

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

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