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&$The Chinese characters liu xue (study overseas) on a banner as several high school students ask for information about overseas universities at an undergraduate recruitment consulting event in Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu province. (Photo / China Daily)&$

While millions of her peers are revising intensively for this year’s national college entrance exam, which falls on June 7 and 8, Su Zixuan is able to feel rather more relaxed.

After getting an offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March, the 17-year-old is one of thousands of Chinese students heading overseas for her higher education.

The number of Chinese students studying abroad has rapidly increased in recent years. For the 2009 to 2010 academic year, a total of 229,300 Chinese students were being educated abroad, up 30 percent from the previous year, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Education.

“Since 2000, the number of Chinese students abroad increased at an average annual rate of 20 percent. By 2014, the number is expected to hit 550,000 to 600,000,” said Sang Peng, director of the Beijing Overseas-Study Service Association.

Industry experts pointed out that there is a prevailing trend of Chinese students studying overseas at a younger age.

“Not long ago, the majority of Chinese students went abroad to pursue a master’s degree or PhD. Undergraduates only accounted for 30 percent of the total,” said Richard Yang, director of Aoji Enrolment Center of International Education Ltd, part of the Aoji Education Group.

It is likely this will change over the next three years. Those in high school or undertaking undergraduate studies are expected to make up 70 percent of those being educated abroad. Of them, students in higher education will make up 30 percent, Yang said.

Chen Hua, business director of Beijing-based intermediary agency Wiseway International Co Ltd, believes high school graduates will become the main component of students studying abroad from 2011.

This trend is also reflected in the fact that the number of Chinese students sitting the college entrance exam is in a downward trend.

Some 9.57 million high school students across China registered to take the college entrance exam in 2010, approximately 650,000 fewer than the previous year, and 930,000 fewer than 2008, figures from the Ministry of Education showed.

In Beijing, it is the fifth year in a row that the numbers have fallen. About 76,000 students signed up to take the exam this year, down 6 percent from a year earlier, marking the lowest ever application level, according to Beijing Education Examination Authority.

So, what is behind the lowering age of overseas Chinese students?

First, going abroad is an alternative to the national college entrance exam, which has long been described as a stampede of “thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of horses across a single log bridge”.

“I decided to send my 14-year-old son to Australia for his high school education this autumn because there is too much pressure on him to prepare for the college entrance exam,” said Zhang Ran, a manager of a pharmaceutical company in Beijing.

“The enormous pressure will definitely harm a child’s physical and mental health, and I don’t think it’s&

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More students choose to study abroad

China has generally implemented reforms in a gradualist or piecemeal fashion.

The Chinese government faces numerous economic development challenges, including:
(a) reducing its high domestic savings rate and correspondingly low domestic demand through increased corporate transfers and a strengthened social safety net;
(b) sustaining adequate job growth for tens of millions of migrants and new entrants to the work force; (c) reducing corruption and other economic crimes; and
(d) containing environmental damage and social strife related to the economy’s rapid transformation.

China is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with an average growth rate of 10% for the past 30 years.

Nevertheless, key bottlenecks continue to constrain growth.

The two sectors have differed in many respects.

China has acquired some highly sophisticated production facilities through trade and also has built a number of advanced engineering plants capable of manufacturing an increasing range of sophisticated equipment, including nuclear weapons and satellites, but most of its industrial output still comes from relatively ill-equipped factories.

China’s increasing integration with the international economy and its growing efforts to use market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem.

The ministry made the announcements during a press conference held in Xiamen on the upcoming United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Forum and the 14th China International Fair for Investment and Trade.

From January to June, the ODI in financial sectors was up by 44 percent to $17.9 billion, and in July alone, the ODI recorded $8.91 billion, the highest this year.

China is expected to have 200 million cars on the road by 2020, increasing pressure on energy security and the environment, government officials said yesterday.

China’s challenge in the early 21st century will be to balance its highly centralized political system with an increasingly decentralized economic system.

Since the late 1970s, China has decollectivized agriculture, yielding tremendous gains in production.

Except for the oasis farming in Xinjiang and Qinghai, some irrigated areas in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, and sheltered valleys in Tibet, agricultural production is restricted to the east.

China ranks first in world production of red meat (including beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork).

Oil fields discovered in the 1960s and after made China a net exporter, and by the early 1990s, China was the world’s fifth-ranked oil producer.

There are large deposits of uranium in the northwest, especially in Xinjiang; there are also mines in Jiangxi and Guangdong provs.

China’s exploitation of its high-sulfur coal resources has resulted in massive pollution.

Since the 1980s China has undertaken a major highway construction program.