Building a Children's Graded-Reading Publishing System in the Context of the Regulation to Promote Public Reading: Principles and Content Optimization

Children's graded-reading publishing in China has made progress in policy support, public awareness, and product development, yet its practical implementation remains uneven. Existing problems include failure to follow relevant grading standards, the conflation of graded reading with graded literacy instruction, insufficient professional competence among practitioners, and incomplete supporting resources and services. These limitations weaken the coherence of product design and restrict the sector's capacity to respond to children's developmental needs. Together, they show that isolated improvements in individual products cannot substitute for a coordinated publishing system: standards, professional capacity, content design, and supporting services must be addressed at the same time. The Regulation to Promote Public Reading provides a new policy context for addressing these weaknesses and for moving graded-reading publishing toward more standardized and systematic development. Against this background, the study reviews the current foundations and practical problems of children's graded-reading publishing and identifies three principles for system development. First, policy orientation requires publishing institutions to incorporate the Regulation's institutional requirements and value commitments into planning, production, and promotion. Second, professionalism requires editorial and product decisions to follow research on children's cognitive development, language acquisition, and reading growth. Third, a systems perspective requires standards, content, professional support, and service resources to operate as mutually reinforcing components rather than as isolated publishing activities. These principles provide a shared basis for assessing whether individual products, professional practices, and supporting activities contribute to a coherent pathway of reading development. The article uses two author-supplied case translations—Children's Chinese Graded Reading Series: Little Sheep Ascends the Mountain and Face Xiaodou Graded Reading Tree—to examine how these principles can be implemented. Through review, comparison, and synthesis, it identifies four shared characteristics. The cases are grounded in graded-reading standards; they aim to strengthen children's reading competence rather than merely increase character recognition; they use professional assessment and certification as quality-control mechanisms; and they extend printed content through graded-reading services designed for multiple settings. The comparison therefore treats the cases not as isolated market successes, but as practical evidence for identifying reusable elements of system construction. Taken together, these characteristics connect theoretical research, market demand, and the operational logic of publishing. On this basis, the study proposes four content-optimization pathways: establishing and consistently applying graded-reading standards, improving children's reading competence, strengthening professional support, and developing a more complete publishing and service system. It further observes that policy and standards are increasingly advancing together, that graded-reading publishing is moving from dispersed private exploration toward a matter of public cultural provision, that digital technologies are enabling new product and service forms, and that publishing is becoming more closely connected with school and family education. Publishing institutions should therefore build a coherent graded-reading system that supports children's progression from learning how to read to reading willingly and independently, and ultimately from extensive reading to sustained lifelong reading.