Since the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the development of the education system in China has been geared particularly to the advancement of economic modernization. Among the famous official efforts to improve the system were a 1984 decision to formulate major laws on education in the next several years and a 1985 plan to reform the education system. In unveiling the education reform plan in May 1985, the authorities called for nine years of compulsory education and the establishment of the State Education Commission. Official commitment to improved education was nowhere more noticeable than in the substantial increase in funds for education in the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986-90), which amounted to 72 % more than funds allotted to education in the previous plan time (1981-85). In 1986 some 16.7 % of the state budget was hallmark for education, compared with 10.5 % in 1984. Since 1949, education has been a focus of controversy in China. As a result of continual intraparty realignments, official policy alternated between ideological imperatives and practical efforts to further national development. But ideology and pragmatism often have been incompatible. The Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and the Socialist Education Movement (1962-65) sought to end deeply rooted academic elitism, to narrow social and cultural gaps between workers and peasants and between urban and rural populations, and to "rectify" the tendency of scholars and intellectuals disdain manual labor. During the Cultural Revolution, universal education in the interest of fostering social equality was an overriding priority.

Education has played a major role in China’s long and valuable cultural tradition. Throughout much of the imperial time, only educated people held positions of social and political leadership. In 124 bc the first state academy was accomplished for training prospective bureaucrats in Confucian learning and the Chinese classics. Historically, comparatively few Chinese have been able to take the time to learn the complex Chinese writing system and its associated literature. It is around that as late as 1949 only 20 % of China’s population was literate. To the Chinese Communists, this widespread illiteracy was a stumbling block in the promotion of their political programs.