Yang Dongping, a professor from Beijing University of Science and Technology, recently published an article in the People's Daily, in which he points out that preschool education is largely ignored in China.

According to latest statistics, among 60 million children aged between 3 and 6 in China, only 21.79 million of them have the opportunity to go to in kindergarten. Chinese central government only spends 1.2-1.3 percent of its total revenue on preschool education annually, and compared with other countries, this proportion is relatively low.

Yang says that most children in cities can go to kindergarten, but the problem is the government has failed to make regulations to control the charge of tuition fees, which has caused many kindergartens to charge overly high. In many rural areas, preschool education is developing slowly.

Yang says that in most developed countries, preschool education is provided by educational authority for free, and while currently in China, this is not the case in its well-developed areas.

(China News Service November 7, 2007)