Basic education is a national quality education for all students. Its fundamental purpose is to improve the quality of the whole nation and lay a solid foundation for all school-age children and adolescents to study for life and participate in social life. Basic education plays an important role in improving the quality of the Chinese nation and cultivating talents at all levels.

Promoting socialist modernization is overall, basic and leading. Over the years, the state has insisted on the moderately advanced development of education, giving priority to the development of basic education, and ensuring it as a key area of infrastructure and education development.

In China, basic education includes preschool education (generally 3 to 5 years old), compulsory education (generally 6 to 15 years old), high school education (generally 16 to 19 years old) and literacy education. It covers compulsory education in primary schools and junior high schools, and has the characteristics of universality, publicity and compulsion. It is a compulsory education for all school-age children and adolescents and a public welfare undertaking that the state must guarantee.

Basic education is a dynamic concept. In fact, China's basic education refers to all forms of education before junior high school (including junior high school). In a narrow sense, it refers to nine-year compulsory education. In a broad sense, it should also include family education (English tutor) and necessary social life knowledge education.

General situation of development

Basic education in China includes preschool education, primary education and general secondary education (junior high school and senior high school). Before 1949, the basic education in China was very weak. In the year with the highest educational development, there were only 1300 kindergartens, 289,000 primary schools and 4,266 middle schools in China.

1949 after the founding of People's Republic of China (PRC), the central and local governments at all levels attached great importance to the development of basic education and invested a lot of manpower and financial resources to popularize education. Especially since 1978 reform and opening up, China's basic education has entered a new period of development.