Figure 7.
Change in the Structure of Foreign Direct Investment
6. Substantial progress was made in improving people's lives and promoting harmony.
Positive results were achieved in making the development of education a national priority. A mechanism for ensuring adequate funding for rural compulsory education was implemented throughout the country, enabling 150 million rural primary and middle school students to be exempt from paying tuition and miscellaneous fees and to receive textbooks required by the state free of charge. A fund of 3 billion yuan was allocated from the central government to build and renovate rural boarding schools, improve rural middle school buildings in the central and western regions, and develop modern primary and middle school distance education for rural areas. The goals in the plan to make nine-year compulsory education universally available and basically eliminate illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults in the western region were met on schedule in 2007, with more than 99 percent of the target population in the country attaining these two goals. The central government allocated 2.1 billion yuan to support construction of practice laboratories for vocational education, demonstration vocational colleges, secondary vocational schools and county-level vocational education centers. New enrollment at secondary vocational schools totaled 8.01 million. The national system of scholarships and assistance grants was further improved and trials were launched to provide free education to students majoring in education at normal universities directly under the Ministry of Education. The secondary gross enrollment ratio reached 66 percent, and the tertiary gross enrollment ratio 23 percent.