Students in more than 200 middle and primary schools in Beijing have been able to go on the Internet for educational purposes, according to Beijing Municipal Education Commission.
Network education and computer basics have been playing an increasingly important role in daily schooling.
The city requires all the middle schools to open compulsory IT courses as of this year. All the primary and middle schools should have their own computer rooms, and one-tenth of the local middle schools should provide at least one computer for every 10 students.
According to the educational schedule, all the primary and middle schools will open Internet education programs by 2005. So far, 29 local primary and middle schools have been set up as experimental bases for a modern education and technology system.
Related statistics show that 749 primary and middle schools in the city own over 20,200 computers, and 467 of them have opened computer science courses.
According to the latest official statistics, around 22.5 million Chinese citizens are Internet users, around 56 percent of whom are below the age of 24. Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai are the top three with the largest number of Internet surfers.
(Xinhua 02/14/2001)
