There are currently 85 million illiterate people in China, of whom 20 million are young or middle-aged.

Over the past 10 years, more than 48 million illiterate Chinese adults have learned to read and write. The proportion of illiterate adults in the population had declined to 8.7 percent by 2000 and illiteracy among the young and middle-aged had dropped from 10 percent to 4.8 percent, said Vice Minister of Education Wang Zhan.

However it is a complicated task to eliminate illiteracy altogether as the majority remaining are female, elderly or people living in remote areas, Wang said.

Wang called for dedicated efforts to prevent and to reduce the number of existing illiterate people.

An efficient method of eliminating illiteracy in rural areas is to combine the anti-illiteracy campaign with production by teaching farmers practical production skills, he said.

(China Daily February 21, 2002)