The Chinese government strictly follows laws and regulations about compulsory education whereby school-age children should be enrolled in nearby schools without the need to sit exams. It also promotes the school district system and the nine-year compulsory system, under which an elementary school pupil will automatically move on to study in the junior high school in the same school district irrespective of his grades in the elementary school. In 2015, the State Council promulgated the "Notice on Further Improving the Mechanism Guaranteeing Funds for Compulsory Education in Urban and Rural Areas." With this notice, China established a mechanism for the first time that applies common funding standards to both urban and rural areas, with the focus on the latter. The mechanism benefits 140 million students, including more than 13 million children of rural migrant workers, more than 30 million boarding students, about 12 million private school students, and about 5 million small-scale school students and students receiving special education. From the fall semester of 2011, the government started to carry out a nutrition improvement program for rural students receiving compulsory education. The program benefits over 30 million students every year. Efforts have been made to increase the number of rural student enrollments in key universities. Since 2012, the government has implemented special national programs on targeted enrollment in rural and poor areas. In 2015, 75,000 students were enrolled, an increase of 10.5 percent over 2014.
Regional gap in education has further narrowed. The government has increased the college and university enrollment rate of the students from central and western provinces and expanded the scope of the Collaboration Program on Supporting Enrollment in Central and Western Regions. In 2015, the province with the lowest enrollment rate saw the gap with the national average narrowed from 15.3 percentage points in 2010 to less than 5 percentage points. The government has also established the Program on Rejuvenating Higher Education in Central and Western Regions. The central government has provided more funds to strengthen the basic facilities and performance of colleges and universities in these regions.
Educational gap between different groups has further narrowed. Female education has made remarkable progress. In 2013, the number of illiterate females aged 15 and above was 6.7 percent, 17.4 percentage points lower than that in 1995, and the illiterate female population had decreased by more than 70 million compared with 1995. The growth in the number of educated women and the decline in female illiteracy are both greater than those of males.
The government is striving to ensure equal access to compulsory education for children of rural migrant workers. In 2015, compulsory education schools in urban areas of China admitted a total of 13.67 million children of rural migrant workers, with around 80 percent studying at public schools and nearly 6 percent at private schools through a government-funded scheme. In 2016, the State Council promulgated the "Opinions on Strengthening Care and Protection of Left-behind Children in Rural Areas" and "Opinions on Strengthening Protection of Children in Difficult Situation" to safeguard the lawful rights and interests of minors. The Chinese government also works hard to offer greater education opportunities to persons with disabilities. There is one independent special education school in every county with a population of more than 300,000 people and a high population of disabled children. The government also supports the establishment of special education resource centers, encourages regular schools to enroll children with special needs, provides convenience for disabled students to take part in college entrance examinations, and promotes integrated education. Almost 90 percent of blind, deaf-mute, and mentally handicapped children have access to compulsory education. It works to improve the system for subsidizing students with financial difficulties, which offers full coverage from pre-school education to graduate education. In 2015, the government subsidized more than 84.33 million students throughout China, an increase of 29.36 percent compared with 2009, and spent more than RMB156.03 billion, 2.25 times the level of 2009.
The quality of education for ethnic minorities has been continuously improved. China has already created an ethnic education system including ethnic minority primary schools, middle schools, vocational colleges and higher education institutions. Before the PRC was founded in 1949, the illiteracy rate of ethnic minorities in China was above 95 percent, and there was only one higher education institution for ethnic minorities. In the early days of the PRC, there were only 1,300 ethnic minority students in institutions of higher learning across the country, accounting for only 1.4 percent of all students. By 2015 the education level of ethnic minority groups and ethnic minority areas had grown comprehensively. There were 25,955,700 ethnic minority students at that time. There were 32 different types of ethnic minority colleges and universities, and 2,142,900 junior college and college students from ethnic minority groups, accounting for 8.16 percent of the national total. Ethnic minority peoples have expanding access to a broader scope of higher education. Full coverage from undergraduate education to graduate education has been realized for all ethnic minority groups. All of China's 55 ethnic minority groups have graduate students. From 2012 to 2015, under the Program for Training High Caliber Core Personnel for Ethnic Minority Groups, China enrolled and trained 16,000 master's degree candidates and 4,000 doctoral candidates.
