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A conference for the campaign to provide all schools with internet access was held on November 12 in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. Zhong Denghua, Vice Minister of Education, and Luo Xiaoyun, Vice Governor of Jaingxi Province, attended and addressed the conference. Other participants included heads of the Division for Communications Development, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and provincial-level education-related government agencies, as well as representatives from the educational authorities in Jiangxi, Hainan, Xinjiang, Guangxi, Guizhou and Qinghai, Hunan Communications Administrative Bureau, and major telecom enterprises such as China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Broadcasting Network, China Satellite Communications, and China Education and Research Network.
The conference stressed the significance of the campaign for school access to the internet and urged for further cooperation to connect every school to the internet, in order to enable them to keep up with emerging teaching trends, and thereby lay the foundation for the modernization of education through informatization. Thanks to the concerted efforts of all parties since the beginning of the campaign, by the end of the third quarter of 2020, the proportion of primary and secondary schools across the country with access to the internet has increased to 99.7%, compared to 85.3% at the end of 2017. Though progress has been substantial, several issues remain to be solved, such as lack of awareness and willingness to use the available tools, and inefficient application of internet services. More work was therefore needed to target these remaining problems.
The conference called for further synergies to ensure no school would be left out and achieve completion of the campaign by the end of the year. Meanwhile, it also required parties to accelerate the development of special networks for educational use and make more systematic planning with future goals in mind, to support the vision of “Internet Plus Education”.