Mainland China's Unified Textbook System of the Early 1950s: Historical Significance and Practical Lessons

Following liberation, regulating the confusing and decentralized textbook market, strictly controlling and unifying teacher’s books used in primary and secondary schools was a top priority for the new political regime. For this purpose, a step by step approach was taken which included issuing textbook catalogs, setting up publishers, and framing a national unified textbook policy. The fact that the highly unified textbooks were an important means to indoctrinating the populace with the national ideology helped ensure the fundamental quality of the textbooks, but the inevitable weakening of curriculum standards and the authority of the syllabus overemphasized the effects of textbooks, making them unsuitable for use with students and localities characterized by diversity. This created a problem with textbooks that the Ministry of Education was unable to resolve for half a century.