A white paper on China's smart education was released at the 2025 World Digital Education Conference, which concluded on Friday in the city of Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province.
The white paper showcases the progress and achievements made since the implementation of the national digital education strategy.
Data shows that the national smart education platform gathered high-quality digital educational resources, including over 110,000 resources for primary and secondary education, more than 11,300 online courses for vocational training, and 31,000 high-quality online courses for higher education, along with over 2,000 lifelong learning courses.
As of April 2025, the platform had registered over 164 million users, with visitors from more than 220 countries and regions.
The white paper indicates that 2025 will mark the beginning of a smart education era, with artificial intelligence fundamentally transforming educational content, teaching methods, governance, and the overall educational landscape to create a future-oriented system.
It highlights the importance of building future schools by deeply integrating intelligent technologies into management, services, and decision-making processes, thereby enhancing the modernization of school governance.
The white paper clearly states the goal of establishing overseas digital education learning centers, prioritizing the support for digital technology training in developing countries. It emphasizes the need to strengthen talent development and technical support to bridge the digital education gap and eliminate barriers to educational equality.
The Proposal for the Establishment of an International Digital Education Standards Framework and Large Model for Education-Overall Reference Framework Alliance Standard were also released at the conference to promote international exchange and cooperation in digital education.
"The standards are vital for guiding the development of digital education. They not only provide essential support for this progress but also act as a driving force for collaboration among countries worldwide," said Shu Hua, deputy director of the Department of Science, Technology, and Information at the Ministry of Education.
White paper on China's smart education released at World Digital Education Conference
China will strive to further reduce the number of heavy pollution days and improve water quality in rural areas during the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu said on Thursday.
While meeting the press following the closing meeting of the fourth session of the 14th National People's Congress (NPC), Huang outlined the main tasks of pollution control during the 2026-2030 period.
Although the national average proportion of heavy pollution days has dropped to less than one percent last year, said Huang, during autumn and winter seasons, such weather events still occasionally occur in certain regions, including the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and surround areas, as well as urban clusters in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.
Therefore, reducing the number of heavy pollution days will continue to be a major task for relevant authorities, he said.
"An important goal of pollution prevention and control during the 15th Five-Year Plan period is to continue reducing the number of heavy pollution days. We are quite confident in achieving this. We will adhere to the approaches of systematic and source-based management, addressing both symptoms and root causes, with a focus on the latter. In particular, we will seize the favorable opportunities brought by advancing the goal of peaking carbon emissions during the 15th Five-Year Plan period and the promulgation of the Ecological and Environmental Code today to promote green and low-carbon development of our industrial, energy, and transportation structures, as well as the development of new quality productive forces. Our fundamental solution is to reduce pollutant emissions at the source," he said.
Water quality improvement is another major task, according to Huang.
Over the years, China has seen significant progress in managing the water quality in major rivers and lakes, but in rural areas and urban-rural fringe areas, pollution problems, like black and odorous waters, remain quite prominent in small and micro water bodies, he said, adding that these pollution sources near people's homes may seem minor, they are actually directly related to the well-being of the people.
"This year, we will introduce relevant documents to deepen water pollution control, shifting our focus and efforts further towards rural areas, urban-rural fringe areas, and counties. At the same time, we'll set up over 200 national-level monitoring sites and a number of monitoring sites at the provincial level, in order to help local authorities to better manage small and micro water bodies," said Huang.
China will strive to further improve air, water quality in following five years: minister
