The Taipei Times had a story today about Tainan’s Wennan Township offering a program to help foreign spouses who cannot read Chinese. In this case, “foreign spouses” doesn’t mean Westerners like me but rather the modern equivalent of mail-order-brides. (Tainan is in Taiwan, for those who don’t know.)

In order to help foreign spouses who can’t read or write Chinese to pass their written test, during the week-long program, questions are read out loud in Chinese by instructors and the students simply answer yes or no, or pick the right answer on answer sheets….

Additionally, the program has been able to help spouses from China that are unable to take written tests — because of either illiteracy or an inability to read traditional Chinese characters.

This brought to mind the question of (il)literacy in China.

I’ve long been skeptical of the claims of high literacy for China, because “literacy” is seldom defined in any specific and useful manner and because most statistics from the PRC are none too reliable. One definition I saw for literacy in China was the ability to “recognize” 2,000 characters — or just 1,500 characters for people in the countryside. (Perhaps this could be a new ad campaign for relieving population pressures on China’s overcrowded cities. “Are you a city dweller having trouble reading? Move to the countryside and — shazam! — become literate!”) How is this recognition tested? What does this recognition consist of? What does any of this have to do with the ability to write as well as read? Who knows. And then there’s the question of literacy in what language.

I browsed around the Internet and came across some Unesco figures on literacy in China. According to a 1997 survey posted on that site, in Hubei, where I used to live, 22 percent of women are not literate — and that number is better than the national average for women.