Interviewed by people.com.cn recently Minister of Education Zhou Ji expressed that rapid development has been made in China's education sector in the past several years, achieving historic and great-leap-forward development, especially in two aspects.

One: realizing two basics: China has popularized compulsory education and eliminated teenager illiteracy basically. For a developing country with a population of 1.3 billion like China it is a marvelous achievement.

Another major breakthrough is that the scale of the higher education in China has been quadrupled in the past six years and the scope now is four times that of 1998. In addition the quality of education is still in continuous improvement. The number of students receiving higher education at schools surpassed more than 200 billion and the gross entrance proportion has reached 19 per cent of the total candidates attending higher education entrance exams, thus entering into a popular development stage of higher learning accepted internationally. It should be said that the two achievements are an historic leap forward.

He expressed that it is of far-reaching significance to realize such a leap in such a short time. If seeing it in several decades or even longer, the historic and great-leap-forward development made in the education sector of China in the past several years is the ground-breaking works for the history of China's construction of modernization as a whole, which will boost the quality of talents for the country's modernization drive as well as international competitiveness and will exert an important and far-reaching impact on the great resurgence of the Chinese nation.