Education in China
Education in the People's Republic of China is primarily managed by the state-run public education system, which falls under the Ministry of Education. All citizens must attend school for a minimum of nine years, known as nine-year compulsory education, which is funded by the government. This is included in the 6.46 trillion Yuan budget.
Compulsory education includes six years of elementary school, typically starting at the age of six and finishing at the age of twelve, followed by three years of middle school and three years of high school.
In 2020, the Ministry of Education reported an increase of new entrants of 34.4 million students entering compulsory education, bringing the total number of students who attend compulsory education to 156 million.
In 1985, the government abolished tax-funded higher education, requiring university applicants to compete for scholarships based on their academic capabilities. In the early 1980s, the government allowed the establishment of the first private institution of higher learning, thus increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees from 1995 to 2005.
Chinese investment in research and development has grown by 20 percent per year since 1999, exceeding $100 billion in 2011. As many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006. By 2008, China had published 184,080 papers in recognized international journals – a seven-fold increase from 1996. In 2017, China surpassed the U.S. with the highest number of scientific publications. In 2021, there were 3,012 universities and colleges in China, and 147 National Key Universities, which are considered to be part of an elite group Double First Class universities, accounted for approximately 4.6% of all higher education institutions in China.
China has also been a top destination for international students and as of 2013, China was the most popular country in Asia for international students and ranked third overall among countries. China is now the leading destination globally for Anglophone African students and is host of the second largest international students population in the world. As of 2025, there were 2 Chinese universities in the global top 20, 5 in the top 50, and 19 in the top 200, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of the overall representation in the Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities, a composite ranking system combining three of the world's most influential university rankings.
Chinese students in the country's most developed regions are among the best performing in the world in the Programme for International Student Assessment. Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang outperformed all other education systems in the PISA. China's educational system has been noted for its emphasis on rote memorization and test preparation. However, PISA spokesman Andreas Schleicher says that China has moved away from learning by rote in recent years. According to Schleicher, Russia performs well in rote-based assessments, but not in PISA, whereas China does well in both rote-based and broader assessments.
History
Improving population-wide literacy was the focus of education in the early years of the People's Republic of China. In 1949, the literacy rate was between 20 and 40 percent. The communist government focused on improving literacy through both formal schooling and literacy campaigns. In the first sixteen years of communist governance, elementary school enrollment tripled, secondary school enrollment increased by a factor of 8.5, and college enrollment more than quadrupled.Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the education system in China has been geared towards economic modernization. In 1985, the federal government ceded responsibility for basic education to local governments through the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party's "Decision on the Reform of the Educational Structure". With the education reform plan in May 1985, the authorities called for nine years of compulsory education and the establishment of the State Education Commission. Official commitment to improved education was nowhere more evident than in the substantial increase in funds for education in the Seventh Five-Year Plan, which amounted to 72 percent more than funds allotted to education in the previous plan period. In 1986, 23.9 percent of the state budget was earmarked for education, compared to 10.4 percent in 1984.
As a result of continual intra-party realignments, official policy has alternated between ideological imperatives and practical efforts to further national education. The Great Leap Forward and the Socialist Education Movement sought to end deeply rooted academic elitism, to narrow social and cultural gaps between workers and peasants and between urban and rural populations, and to eliminate the tendency of scholars and intellectuals to disdain manual labor. During the Cultural Revolution, universal fostering of social equality was an overriding priority.
Image:Beijing-Mean-Value-Theorem-3733.jpg|thumb|A mean value theorem equation is displayed on a bridge in Beijing
The post-Mao Zedong Chinese Communist Party leadership views education as the foundation of the Four Modernizations. In the early 1980s, science and technology education became an important focus of education policy. By 1986, training skilled personnel and expanding scientific and technical knowledge had been assigned the highest priority. Although the humanities were considered important, vocational and technical skills were considered paramount for meeting China's modernization goals.
The reorientation of educational priorities paralleled Deng Xiaoping's strategy for economic development. Emphasis also was placed on the further training of the already-educated elite, who would carry on the modernization program in the coming decades. A renewed emphasis on modern science and technology led to the adoption of an outward-looking policy that encouraged learning and borrowing from abroad for advanced training in a wide range of scientific fields, beginning in 1976.
Beginning at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978, intellectuals were encouraged to pursue research in support of the Four Modernizations and, as long as they complied with the party's "Four Cardinal Principles" they were given relatively free rein. When the party and the government determined that the structures of the four cardinal principles had been stretched beyond tolerable limits, they might restrict intellectual expression.
Literature and the arts also experienced a great revival in the late 1970s and 1980s. Traditional forms flourished once again, and many new kinds of literature and cultural expression were introduced from abroad.
In 2003, China's Ministry of Education called for adding environmental education content throughout the public school curriculum from the first year of primary school through the second year of high school.
Development
Since the 1950s, China has been providing a nine-year compulsory education to what amounts to a fifth of the world's population. By 1999, primary school education had become generalized in 90% of China, and mandatory nine-year compulsory education now effectively covered 85% of the population, but some rural areas in China still can not reach the goal of the nine-year compulsory education, because of the lack of teachers and hard to access. The education funding provided by the central and provincial governments varies across regions, and those in the rural areas are notably lower than those in major urban areas. Families supplement money provided to the school by the government with tuition fees.For non-compulsory education, China adopts a shared-cost mechanism, charging tuition at a certain percentage of the cost. Meanwhile, to ensure that students from low-income families have access to higher education, the government has initiated ways of assistance, with policies and measures for scholarships, work-study programs and subsidies for students with special economic difficulties, tuition reduction or exemption and state stipends.
Illiteracy in the young and mid-aged population has fallen from over 80 percent down to five percent. The system trained some 60 million mid-or high-level professionals and almost 400 million laborers to the junior or senior high school level. Today, 250 million Chinese get three levels of school education, doubling the rate of increase in the rest of the world during the same period. Net elementary school enrollment has reached 98.9 percent, and the gross enrollment rate in junior high schools 94.1 percent. , the government-operated primary and lower secondary schools in China have 28.8 million students.
Chinese high school students won multiple gold medals every year consistently at many International Science Olympiad Competitions like the International Biology Olympiad, the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, the International Olympiad in Informatics, the International Earth Science Olympiad, the International Mathematical Olympiad, the International Physics Olympiad and the International Chemistry Olympiad. As of 2022, China ranks first in the all-time medal count at the International Mathematical Olympiad with highest goal medals since its first participation in 1985. China also ranks first in the all-time medal count at the International Physics Olympiad, the International Chemistry Olympiad, and the International Olympiad in Informatics.
In a 2009 survey from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance by the OECD, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the best results in mathematics, science and reading. The OECD also found that even in some of the very poor rural areas the performance is close to the OECD average. While averages across the breadth of other countries are reported, China's rankings are taken from only a few select districts. The PISA 2018 results showed that students of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang topped the rankings in reading, mathematics and science and China's school children are now the smartest in the world based on academic performance. OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria said the students from the four Chinese provinces had "outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating countries" and the 10% most socio-economically disadvantaged students in these four areas "also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10% most advantaged students in some of OECD countries". He cautioned that these four provinces and municipalities "are far from representing China as a whole." Yet their combined populations amount to over 180 million people, and the size of each region is equivalent to a typical OECD country even if their income is well below the OECD average. "What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average".
In the 1980s, the MBA was virtually unknown but by 2004 there were 47,000 MBAs, trained at 62 MBA schools. Many people also apply for international professional qualifications, such as EMBA and MPA; close to 10,000 MPA students are enrolled in 47 schools of higher learning, including Peking University and Tsinghua University. The education market has rocketed, with training and testing for professional qualifications, such as computer and foreign languages, thriving. Continuing education is the trend, once in one's life schooling has become lifelong learning.
Investment in education has increased in recent years; the proportion of the overall budget allocated to education has been increased by one percentage point every year since 1998. According to a Ministry of Education program, the government will set up an educational finance system in line with the public finance system, strengthen the responsibility of governments at all levels in educational investment, and ensure that their financial allocation for educational expenditure grows faster than their regular revenue. The program also laid out the government's aim that educational investment should account for four percent of GDP in a relatively short period of time.