I hate to rain on y'all's parade, but the US measure of literacy is much more stringent than China's. America is counting literacy as the ability to use print materials like brochures and manuals fluently, the rest of the world just bases literacy on the ability to read a handful of test sentences in a controlled testing context. That's the reason that America appears to have gone down as well, they switched literacy measures. The 79% measure is people who are "at or below level 1 literacy", meaning it counts people who met level 1, people who didn't meet level 1, and people who couldn't even take the test at all because of a language barrier or disability. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

I'm all for dunking on America but the apples to apples here would be comparing America's 96% (just excluding those below level 1) to China's 97%. Historical materialism requires a true material basis to work.

Now do homeownership, maternal mortality, hospital satisfaction, murder rates, suicide rates, reforestation efforts, wind/solar/water energy generation, and green technology development!

well the stats come from the chinese government, are you just going to trust their stats? they're probably lying about the numbers, don't be so gullible!1!!11

There is no way US literacy in the 1950s was anywhere near 90% unless you excluded marginalized and minority populations.

Do Cuba too!

Ok i thought for sure this is bullshit, but apparently not:

Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

Also, Chinese script, even simplified Chinese, is significantly harder to master than English. I for example can speak Mandarin fluently (as a Chinese person in Canada) but can barely read or write it, and no you don't just "pick it up" if you can speak it because there is zero correlation between the spoken language and written script, it's all memorization of every single character. I would have to actually take classes or something to learn to read and write Chinese, which I am definitely considering doing.

Actually, English is technically my second language since I was born in China (long story, left as a young child so wasn't my choice), and after having learned English and become fluent in both reading and writing it, I keep asking myself "how the hell can you be fluent in speaking English and not be fluent in writing it? If you know how to say a word you know 90% of how to write it unlike Chinese."

So, sorry anglophones, even if China had the same literacy rate as the US, it would still be more impressive (not of the intellect of Chinese people or any racial bullshit like that, but the effectiveness of their education system and socialist ideology, which English speakers are fully capable of implementing as well with no excuse not to.)

Clearly this means the evil see see pee is stealing our literacy.

For a couple of years now I have been working at a shop in a very, very impoverished and rough part of my city that is predominately occupied by low income minorities. I hope this doesn’t come off condescending but it took me a while to realize that a not insignificant number of our customers struggled to read the menu and price, info ect about products we had. I feel bad even for being a bit frustrated in the past by this, and we do our best to accommodate everyone and make them feel welcomed now I like to think anyway. But this is certainly a widespread issue that is rarely discussed or understood especially by those who reside only in wealthier areas or what not.

literacy rates in socialist countries be like

But at what cost?

Is the ministry of education in China a reliable source?

By linear extrapolation, one may conclude that China will reach its goal in 2025, while the US will only reach its goal in 2539