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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, February 27, 2004

Govt to offer more free textbooks to students in poverty

The Chinese government is to provide free textbooks to more primary and high school students from poor families.


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The Chinese government is to provide free textbooks to more primary and high school students from poor families.

A circular, jointly issued by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education, also directs regional governments to exempt poor students from miscellaneous charges and to give them subsidies.

A source with the Ministry of Finance said China initiated the free text book system, funded by the central government, in 2001. The system covered 32 percent of students from impoverished families in central and western China, including 56 counties in the south of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the region'sborder areas.

The budget for the system was raised from 100 million yuan (12.05 million US dollars) in 2001 to 400 million yuan (48.2 million dollars) in 2003, according to the source.

Top official blames high textbook prices for dropouts
High textbook prices are under fire in southwest China's Yunnan Province as Bai Enpei, the province's top official, said on Feb. 26 the expensive textbooks had forced many rural school kids to quit school.

Bai, secretary of the provincial committee of the Communist Party of China, said at a teleconference that it was necessary to invite public bidding into the distribution and publishing of textbooks to bring down their prices.

"People can only receive an average of about three years of education in Lahu Autonomous County of Lancang alone, for example, and many kids from poor rural families had to leave school because of the expensive tuition," Bai said.

"The prices of textbooks must be brought down and the interests of the ordinary people should not suffer for the hefty profits of a few departments," he said.

Home to about one third of China's ethnic minority population, Yunnan Province is among China's poorest areas and faces a tough challenge in providing universal education to its rural population.

In some of China's outlying mountainous areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, many children of poverty-stricken families still cannot afford to go to school, and quite a lot of pupils drop out of school to help support the family.

Much of the government educational expenditure, however, is spent on school administration and paying teachers, and only a small part is used on improving teaching facilities and purchasing textbooks.

To solve the problem, the China Youth and Children's Development Foundation launched Project Hope in 1989 to seek public support to help poor school-age children in rural areas to complete primary school education.

Source: Xinhua


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