This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Here is the news.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has called for accelerated development of vocational education.
To mark the Vocational Education Week last week, Li said developing modern vocational education is an effort to exert China's abundant talent advantage, and encourage people to start businesses and make innovations.
He said the Vocational Education Week is aimed to create a consensus among the public that it is honorable to work, still better to have a specialty skill and greater to be able to innovate.
The Premier said vocational education should be quality and employment oriented and serve the development. Reform, innovation and integration of education and production should be focused, in a bid to cultivate a high-quality labor force, and improve the manufacturing and service quality of China.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Funded by the government, China will send 10,000 students to study in France in the next five years, as part of an initiative to continue deepening Sino-French ties.
The program has been officially launched following a meeting on China-France high-level cultural and people-to-people exchanges held in Beijing last week.
China has more than 40,000 students studying in France, with 2,000 of them being government-funded; while France has 10,000-plus students in China, ranking 10th in terms of China's international students.
China hopes to foster a group of talent, especially on majors that are needed in China and where France excels, including nuclear power and aerospace.
In China, the number of people who study French has reached 100,000. More than 130 universities have a major in French. In France, the number of people who study Chinese has exceeded 50,000, making it the fifth most popular foreign language that people are interested in learning.
China and France have also set up a cooperative mechanism in vocational education for courses including catering, hotel management and elderly care.
The two countries are working on an internship plan, in which they will each send 1,000 vocational school students to study and work as interns in the other country's enterprises and companies.
