Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Is education in China free?
Education in China is a state-run system of public education run by the Ministry of Education. All citizens must attend school for at least nine years, known as the nine-year compulsory education, which is funded by the government. Compulsory education includes six years of primary education, starting at age six or seven, and three years of junior secondary education (junior middle school) for ages 12 to 15. Some provinces may have five years of primary school but four years for junior middle school. After junior middle school, there are three years of senior middle school, which then completes the secondary education.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
International students have been coming to British Columbia for post-secondary education for almost as long as the higher education system has been established in the province. Globalization and modern technology has made it easier to obtain education in other countries, and governments are taking note when they consider their post-secondary student populations as a possible source of skilled workers to join the local economy.
China is a largely-homogenous society; over 90 percent of its population has historically been Han Chinese. Some of the country's ethnic groups are distinguishable by physical appearance and relatively-low intermarriage rates. Others have married Han Chinese and resemble them. A growing number of ethnic minorities are fluent at a native level in Mandarin Chinese. Children sometimes receive ethnic-minority status at birth if one of their parents belongs to an ethnic minority, even if their ancestry is predominantly Han Chinese. Pockets of immigrants and foreign residents exist in some cities.
CORE was a consortium of universities that began with 26 IET Educational Foundation member universities and 44 China Radio and TV Universities, with a total enrollment of 5 million students. It aimed to provide Chinese universities with free and easy access to global open educational resources and provides the framework for Chinese-speaking universities to participate in the shared, global network of advanced courseware with MIT and other leading universities.
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
Optional kindergarten education is provided for all children between three and six years old, after which school attendance is compulsory for at least nine years. Primary education usually lasts for four years and public schools are not stratified at this stage. In contrast, secondary education includes three traditional types of schools focused on different levels of academic ability: the "Gymnasium" enrols the most academically promising children and prepares students for university studies; the "Realschule" for intermediate students lasts six years; the "Hauptschule" prepares pupils for vocational education.
Christians ranked as the second most educated religious group around in the world with an average of 9.3 years of schooling. Christians were found to have the second highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita while in absolute numbers ranked in the first place (220 million). According to the study, Christians in North America, Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions are highly educated since many of the world universities were built by the historic Christian churches, in addition to the historical evidence that "Christian monks built libraries and, in the days before printing presses, preserved important earlier writings produced in Latin, Greek and Arabic". According to the same study, Christians have a significant amount of gender equality in educational attainment, and the study suggests that one of the reasons is the encouragement of the Protestant Reformers in promoting the education of women, which led to the eradication of illiteracy among females in Protestant communities.
Standard Cantonese functions as a "lingua franca" in Guangdong province, and speakers of other Chinese varieties (such as Chaozhou, Minnan, Hakka) living in Guangdong may also speak Cantonese. On the other hand, Standard Mandarin Chinese is the standard language of the People's Republic of China and the only legally-allowed medium for teaching in schools throughout most of the country (except in minority areas), so residents of Taishan speak Mandarin as well. Although the Chinese government has been making great efforts to popularize Mandarin by administrative means, most Taishan residents do not speak Mandarin in their daily lives, but treat it as a second language, with Cantonese being the lingua franca of their region.
Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires over 3,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 1,945 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. However, even today, students in South Korea are taught 1,800 characters.
In general, statistical information in regards to the rate of incarceration for women in China has been found difficult to compare that to other countries around the world. However, some scholars argued in 2003 that approximately one-fifth of the total number of women in the United States would be equivalent to that of the total population of women incarcerated in China.
In addition to his entertainment career, Cheng is completing his part-time university studies in tourism management at Hsing Wu College. As all males in Taiwan have to enlist for National Service, Cheng is due to enlist as soon as he completes his education. In 2010 Cheng represented Taiwan and performed at the 7th Asia Song Festival, organised by "Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange", at the Seoul Olympic Stadium.
Although there are more than 40,000 Chinese characters in written Chinese, many are rarely used. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.
The Chinese economic reform (; known in the West as the Opening of China) refers to the program of economic reforms termed "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" and "socialist market economy" in the People's Republic of China (PRC) which reformists within the Communist Party of China - led by Deng Xiaoping - started in December 1978.
In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China claims that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.
Most educational institutions in the U.S. are non-profit. Colleges and universities in the U.S. vary in terms of goals: some may emphasize a vocational, business, engineering or technical curriculum while others may emphasize a liberal arts curriculum. Many combine some or all of the above. Another consideration is the male-female ratio; overall, 56% of enrolled college students are women, but the male-female ratio varies by college and year and program. Admissions guidance counselors can offer views about whether a public or private school is best, and give a sense of the tradeoffs.
According to an Amnesty International report, “available information indicates that thousands of people are executed and sentenced to death in China each year.” Human rights groups and foreign governments have criticized China's use of the death penalty for a variety of reasons, including its application for non-violent offenses, allegations of the use of torture to extract confessions, legal proceedings that do not meet international standards, and the government's refusal to publish statistics on the death penalty. However, the vast majority of death sentences, as acknowledged by both the Chinese Supreme Court and the United States Department of State, are given for violent, nonpolitical crimes which would be considered serious in other countries.
In southern China (not including Hong Kong and Macau), where the difference between Standard Chinese and local dialects is particularly pronounced, well-educated Chinese are generally fluent in Standard Chinese, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of the local dialect. The choice of dialect varies based on the social situation. Standard Chinese is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect (be it non-Standard Chinese or non-Mandarin altogether) is generally considered more intimate and is used among close family members and friends and in everyday conversation within the local area. Chinese speakers will frequently code switch between Standard Chinese and the local dialect. Parents will generally speak to their children in dialect, and the relationship between dialect and Mandarin appears to be mostly stable; even a diglossia.
Under the auspice of the Li Ka Shing Foundation, STU has become one of the few universities in Mainland China that awards full scholarships to overseas exchange students. The university has established close academic ties with nearly 20 universities in such countries as the United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Russia, Australia and Germany, and launched exchange programs for undergraduates and graduate students.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the mainland of People's republic of China, as well as in Republic of China (Taiwan). It is mostly enforced for murder and drug trafficking, and executions are carried out by lethal injection or gun shot. Although Chinese government is often lambasted by Western governments on this issue, capital punishment as a legal penalty receives overwhelming public support in China , and remains popular in many other countries in Asia, including Japan with 80% of respondents supporting the death penalty.
The incarceration rate of the People's Republic of China varies depending on sources and measures. According to the World Prison Brief, the rate for only sentenced prisoners is 118 per 100,000 (as of 2015). The rate for prisoners including estimations for the number of pre-trial detainees and those in administrative detention is 164 per 100,000 (as of 2015). In a 2010 interview Harry Wu, a U.S.-based human rights activist and ex-Chinese labor camp prisoner, estimates that "in the last 60 years, more than 40–50 million people" were in Chinese labor camps, but that period includes the mass incarcerations of the 1950s or the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and is not representative of modern China.
December 1, 1927, Republic Daily published, Chinese rural education movement spot which is edited by Tao Xingzhi and translated by Zhang Zonglin. This is a report sent by the Chinese representative to the World Education Conference in Canada. The editorial emphasizes that rural education in China is a major event for one-fifth of the world's population, but the situation of rural education in China is not satisfactory. To this end, China Education Improvement Society has formulated a plan to transform rural education in China, ready to be phased in three stages. The report elaborates on the details of this plan and introduces the situation of carrying out rural education campaigns in Xiaozhuang, Nanjing.
Under the Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education, primary schools were to be tuition-free and reasonably located for the convenience of children attending them; students would attend primary schools in their neighborhoods or villages. Parents paid a small fee per term for books and other expenses such as transportation, food, and heating. Previously, fees were not considered a deterrent to attendance. Under the education reform, students from poor families received stipends, and state enterprises, institutions, and other sectors of society were encouraged to establish their own schools. A major concern was that scarce resources be conserved without causing enrollment to fall and without weakening of the better schools. In particular, local governments were told not to pursue middle-school education blindly while primary school education was still developing, or to wrest money, teaching staff, and materials from primary schools.
Few educational institutions serve special needs students. As of 2008, 1640 institutions specifically serve disabled people, with forty-six thousand teaching staff spread across those institutions.
In China, students with disabilities are usually separated from typical classrooms and placed in schools dedicated to special education. The first school dedicated to students with disabilities in China was established in 1987 in the city of Beijing. Currently this school has 60 staff members who teach more than 200 children in 17 classrooms. The school provides professional development and resource centers and an intensive diagnostic and training center for 3- and 4-year-olds with autism, as well as special education classes for school-age children". The school is described as being very academic however the students are involved in active activities and plenty of one on one time with their instructors. The school also recruits students from all around China due to the scarcity of special education schools across the country. Segregation in education is what is typically seen within special education in China, however China has begun to adopt the idea of classroom inclusion which has proven to be beneficial in other nations who have adopted the method. Although this strategy is fairly new in China it has already shown positive results “Between 1987 and 1996, the school entrance rate of students with disabilities rose from 6% to 60%, and a large majority of these students were in general education classrooms.” Meaning students with special needs are being placed in typical classrooms with specialized instruction being given to students who have varying needs.
During the process of securing an Olympics bid from the International Olympics Committee (IOC), China promised to improve its human rights record. Wang Wei, head of the bid committee was quoted saying, "We are confident that the Games coming to China not only promote our economy but also enhance all social conditions, including education, health and human rights." However, China largely failed to improve its human rights abuses and major news sources around the world criticised both the Chinese government for failing to fulfil its promise and the IOC for not being more discerning in its choice for the 2008 Olympics. Activists argued that China’s human rights violations were incompatible with the spirit of the Olympic Games.