ABSTRACT

Literacy training served as a crucial touchpoint that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) revolutionary agenda met with the peasant students’ understanding of the sociopolitical changes in their life. Based on local archives, this chapter goes beyond the policy level to explore the actual practice of literacy education at the Communist front-line base areas during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) in Northwest Shanxi. It highlights the effort made by Communist local cadres to reconcile the anti-Japanese nationalistic party directive with peasant students’ concerns about the practical value of literacy in their daily lives. It also draws attention to the agency of villagers that transformed literacy learning into a social realm, through which they exchanged and shared information among themselves and with government agents. Through the perspective of literacy, this chapter provides empirical evidence showing the revolution-making process as a result of the interactions between the CCP and villagers.