End decade-old deficit

The Ministry of Education recently made it a new-year task to help raise the country's fiscal expenditure on education to 4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Admittedly, this is not a grand goal: The Chinese government actually planned to accomplish the task a decade ago. According to a guideline on China's educational reform and development issued in 1993, the proportion of fiscal spending on education to GDP should have reached that level by the end of 2000.

But for various reasons, a conspicuous deficit in public spending on education has occurred through the past decade as the Chinese economy kept stunning the world with its faster-than-expected growth.