When Liu Yucheng, a fifth-grade student in Beijing, complains about having to regularly shuttle between his piano, badminton and chess classes on weekends, his 70-year-old grandmother usually comforts him with her own childhood experiences.
"When I was a child, we longed to go to school, even just for basic education, but the chances were slim," said the grandmother Wang Zaifen, who barely finished primary school in a village in northeast China's Liaoning Province.
The experiences of the grandmother-and-son duo mirror the earth-shaking transformations in the country's education sector in the past decades, which were made possible by China's eye-catching economic growth plus a millennia-old culture that values education.
Official figures showed that when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, a startling 80 percent of its population was illiterate. In 2023, however, China had 498,300 schools, enrolling 291 million students and employing nearly 18.92 million full-time teachers. The gross enrollment rates for preschool, secondary and higher education reached 91.1 percent, 91.8 percent and 60.2 percent, respectively.
Huai Jinpeng, minister of education, said that China, home to 1.4 billion people, has built the world's largest education system. He further elaborated that China aims to become a leading country in education by 2035, an aspiration of the Chinese nation since modern times.
PEOPLE-CENTERED APPROACHES
Working towards this lofty goal, China has successively rolled out education policies emphasizing the people's needs while carefully weighing disparities among its 30-some provincial-level regions, which differ greatly in terms of economic prosperity and educational resources.
One distinctively Chinese solution to leveling education services in underdeveloped regions has been paired assistance. The pairing program dates back to the 1990s and allows education resources to be directed from developed regions to those lagging behind. The Ministry of Education (MOE) said China had dispatched 243,000 teachers to work in the middle and western regions and rural areas.
Chang Tu, a middle school chemistry teacher from Shanghai, has been working in Xining, the capital of northwest China's Qinghai Province, since 2022. He is now the principal of a local middle school that enrolls about 800 students, over 97 percent of whom are ethnic Tibetans. The school was built in 2019 specifically for students from Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, located in the hinterland of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, with contributions from Shanghai.
For the past couple of years, Chang and six other teachers from Shanghai have assumed teaching and management responsibilities to demonstrate how a modern school is properly run.
"We have referred to the experiences of Shanghai to improve performance reviews for teachers and management routine of students," said the man with tanned skin typical of a plateau dweller. "We hope to leave behind a team that can stay put."
In 2005, China set up hotlines for college students from impoverished families to seek financial help. As of now, up to 160 million students have benefited from the government's assistance policies each year.
The welfare of teachers has been continuously improved. Approximately 1.3 million rural teachers in middle and western regions have received monthly subsidies of around 400 yuan (about 57 U.S. dollars).
In urban areas, particularly major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where students face fierce competition, authorities have taken measures to optimize enrollment policies for compulsory education to make admissions more just and parents less anxious. In 2021, central departments issued a document proposing the "double reduction" policy to reduce excessive homework loads and after-school tutoring hours for primary and junior high school students.
Liu's mother, Lin Jia, a company employee in Beijing, acknowledged her anxiety about her son's future, who still faces considerable risks of failing exams to enter senior high schools and colleges.
Like the hundreds of millions of Chinese parents who are often caught in the dilemma of balancing study and play for their children, Lin said people gradually develop their own understanding of quality education.
"To me, my son's physical and psychological health comes first," Lin told Xinhua. "I don't push him too hard; I'm just trying my best to help him achieve better academic performance at school while also offering him chances to learn sports and music."
In recent years, some pioneers have been exploring new frontiers of basic education. ETU School, an education innovation project, started recruiting students in Beijing in 2016. The school offers "student-centered whole-person education by combining the leading pedagogy from around the world with China's culturally rich curriculum" and enrolls students from kindergarten to senior high.
Li Yinuo, the co-founder of ETU, said in an earlier media interview that the school had faced many difficulties concerning policies, capital, venue and parents' anxieties. "We must rise to the challenge if we really want to offer good education," she said.
SERVE SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
At a key meeting of the Communist Party of China held this summer, the Chinese leadership decided to fully implement the strategy of invigorating China through science and education, highlighting education, science, technology and talent as the basic and strategic underpinning of Chinese modernization.
Last year, the MOE and several other departments issued guidelines on strengthening science education for primary and middle school students. Thanks to a joint initiative by the MOE and other parties this year, town schools in less developed regions have welcomed scientists, popular science talents, and science museum staff for their mobile science classes.
China has also released a reform plan, requiring universities to optimize and adjust around one-fifth of their academic disciplines and majors by 2025. According to the plan, new academic programs will be established to align with emerging technologies, new industries and business models. Those failing to evolve with social and economic advancements will be phased out.
In March this year, the MOE released the 2024 catalog of undergraduate majors for colleges and universities, which listed 24 new majors among 816 majors. The new majors range from high-power semiconductor science and engineering to intelligent marine equipment to classical Chinese studies.
Chen Xianzhe, a professor at the School of Education, South China Normal University, said the adjustments of majors reflect the trends of China's higher education, which focus more on meeting socioeconomic needs, raising students' competitiveness in the job market, and promoting interdisciplinary integration and innovations.
The country has also directed more emphasis on vocational education. In 2022, a guideline was issued to advance reform and high-quality development of vocational education, aiming to enhance the capacities of vocational schools and increase the quality, adaptability and appeal of vocational education to train more high-caliber technicians and skilled workers.
China's international influence in the education sector has also grown. It has signed agreements with 59 countries and regions to recognize each other's academic diplomas and degrees. The national smart education platform, launched in 2022, has recorded over 50 billion visits to date, with over 10 million overseas users located across more than 200 countries and regions.
Wang Guangyan, vice minister of education, said at a recent press conference that China welcomes prestigious overseas polytechnic universities to cooperate with their Chinese counterparts in providing higher education services.
From "too little" to doubts of "too much," China's decades-long quest for quality education is ongoing, aiming to unlock the kind of education that genuinely suits young Chinese. "We Chinese are all familiar with the saying that education is the last thing to sacrifice," said Wang Zaifen, who showed up on time on a rainy evening to pick up her grandson from his badminton class.