Ministry notes improvement in global education cooperation

More than 80 percent of overseas Chinese students have chosen to return to China to work after graduating over the past decade, the Ministry of Education said on Tuesday.

In turn, the central government has opened a national employment platform to help these students find jobs, said Liu Jin, director of the ministry's department of international cooperation and exchanges.

Liu made the remarks at a news conference while sharing some of the achievements that the nation has realized in international education cooperation and exchanges that have occurred since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012.

She said 65 percent of Sino-foreign partnership education programs and institutes that have been established over the past 10 years have focused on the fields of science, engineering, agriculture and medicine.

These programs have made it possible for nearly 10,000 Chinese students who had planned to attend schools abroad to study with foreign universities while remaining in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu said.

The government has also launched a slew of policies to improve the quality of foreign students studying in China.

International students from 195 countries and regions studied in China during the 2020-21 academic year, with 76 percent of them pursuing academic degrees, 35 percentage points more than in 2012, Liu said.

A total of 159 countries and regions have opened Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, and China has signed degree recognition agreements with 58 countries, she added.