More than 190 billion yuan ($27.5 billion) was invested in Chinese emerging companies in 2016, as China has become one of the world's largest innovation centers, a UN official said on Monday.
China has shifted from being the "world's factory" to one of the largest startup centers across the world, Chen Lizhen, an official from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Regional Bureau for Education, said at the annual conference of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Alliance of China (IEEAC) held at Northeast Normal University on Monday, stressing the need for "startup education."
"Approximately 4 million new startups were set up in China in 2015, up 20 percent year-on-year," Chen was quoted by the China News Service as saying.
However, only 17.8 percent of the college students have received systematic entrepreneurship education, according to the annual report on Chinese college students' employment and entrepreneurship (2015-16) released by Northeast Normal University.
"The college students are the main force to promote China's domestic policy of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, and fostering innovative entrepreneurs who meet social demand is essential to advanced education," said Yang Xiaohui, vice chairman of the IEEAC.
Meanwhile, a total of 989 startups had been closed by the end of 2015 and the average survival span of these companies was 32 months. Most of these companies were operating in the industries of e-commerce, local life services and social media, according to a report cited by news site tech.qq.com on January 22.
In virtual reality headset sector, for example, 90 percent of the new manufacturers had gone bankrupt, the China Business News reported on December 6.
