https://english.news.cn/20260720/911f562a13df42b5adabafd38cca46af/c.htmlChina
China’s basic education serves more than 220 million students and turns to AI to improve the quality of basic education and better meet the needs of individual learners. Having largely achieved universal enrollment in compulsory education, China is shifting its focus from ensuring every child’s access to schooling toward providing every child with higher-quality, more personalized education.
The country’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) calls for leveraging AI to transform educational models and integrating the technology into every element, stage and scenario of education. In April, the Ministry of Education launched an “AI Plus Education” action plan to accelerate AI education in primary and secondary schools, encourage interdisciplinary teaching and expand AI applications in classrooms.
Two examples:
In Wenzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province, AI literacy classes were introduced, through which students created digital avatars that introduce the city’s culture in the local dialect using generative AI.
In Beijing, the AI “agent” at Beijing No. 13 Secondary School, through analyzing learning data, identifies common learning gaps across a class as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each student. It also provides teachers with new ideas to enrich classroom instruction via AI.
These changes were built on years of investment in digital education. China achieved internet connectivity across all primary and secondary schools in 2020, laying the foundation for wider adoption of digital learning tools. Today, AI is increasingly viewed as the next step in this transformation. The technology is also helping bridge what has long been seen as a difficult balance between standardized education and individualized learning.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all model, future education will provide individualized learning pathways tailored to each student, with greater flexibility, learner autonomy, diversified evaluation and personalized instruction becoming increasingly achievable. It is expected that the role of teachers will not been diminished but rather strengthened as they provide values-based guidance, inspiring students intellectually, or engage empathetically with students in complex situations.
According to a principal of the Foreign Languages Primary School “technology is merely the fuse. What we truly want to ignite is every child’s inner motivation, which is the confidence to say, ‘I want to learn, and I can do it.'”