Starting from the fall semester this year, China would allocate around 50 billion yuan (US$6.6 billion) every year to fund needy students, said an official with the Ministry of Finance on Sunday.

The move has been another major advance in promoting educational equality after the central government exempted students in rural areas from tuition and miscellaneous fees related to nine-year compulsory education last year, said the official.

About 4 million students at 1,800 colleges and universities and 16 million students at 15,000 secondary vocational schools would benefit from the financial aid scheme, he said.

The ministry would strive to make the national scholarships, bursaries and student loans available to more students, and require schools to put aside certain amount of money out of their earnings to support needy students, said the official.

The financial aid provided by all-level financial authorities during this fall semester would reach 15.4 billion yuan (US$2.03 billion) and that for the whole year of 2008 would be 30.8 billion yuan (US$4.05 billion), according to the official.

He said the nation had given priority to rural education development to support needy students there to finish their nine-year compulsory education.

By 2010, the nation would have allocated accumulatively 218.2 billion yuan (US$28.7 billion), of which 125.4 billion yuan from the central government, to carry out the scheme, according to the official.

Last year the central government exempted students in rural areas of western China from tuition and miscellaneous fees related to nine-year compulsory education. The same has been applied in the central and eastern regions this year.

The exemption has relieved the financial burden on 150 million rural families with school-age children. Yet most urban, middle-class parents think the scrapped charges are just "a drop in the bucket" compared with the hefty amount they have to pay, averaging 30,000 yuan in Beijing, for their children to enter the best schools.

The nine-year compulsory education, including six years at elementary school and three years at junior high school, was enforced in China in 1986.

(Xinhua News Agency September 9, 2007)