title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Some Hispanic or Latino American groups that have white majorities or pluralities originate in countries that do not. For example, Mexico's white only population is 9% to 17%, while Mexico is majoritarily mestizo, meaning that they have mixed European and Native American ancestry, while 52.8% of Mexican Americans are white, or identify themselves as white in the Census (See the table). The differences in racial perceptions that exist in both countries are considered: The concept of race in Mexico is subtle not only including physical clues such as skin color but also cultural dispositions, morality, economic, and intellectual status. It is not static or well defined but rather is defined and redefined by the situation. This makes racial distinctions different from those in other countries such as the United States.


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Other important differences lay in the criteria and formats used for the censuses in each country: In Mexico, the only ethnic census including categories other than Amerindian (dated back to 1921) performed by the government offered the following options in the questionnaire:


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: The census had the particularity that, unlike racial/ethnic census in other countries, it was focused in the perception of cultural heritage rather than in a racial perception, leading to a good number of white people to identify with "Mixed heritage" due cultural influence. On the other hand, while only 2.9% of the population of the United States identifies as mixed race there is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number, but historical and cultural reasons, including slavery creating a racial caste and the European-American suppression of Native Americans, often led people to identify or be classified by only one ethnicity, generally that of the culture they were raised in. While many Americans may be biologically multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify so culturally.


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Judith Ortiz Cofer noted that appellation varies according to geographical location, observing that in Puerto Rico she was considered white, but in the United States she was considered a "brown person."


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Since the early days of the movie industry in the United States of America, when white Hispanic actors are given roles, they are frequently cast in non-Hispanic white roles. Hispanic and Latino Americans began to appear in the American movie industry in the 1910s, and the leading players among them "were generally light skinned and Caucasian".


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Myrtle Gonzalez was one such American actress in the silent film era; she starred in at least 78 motion pictures from 1913 to 1917. Anita Page was an American actress of Spanish descent who reached stardom in 1928, during the last years of the silent film. Page was referred to as "a blond, blue-eyed Latin". Hilary Swank an American actress and film producer recipient of numerous awards, including two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. Her maternal grandmother, Frances Martha Clough (née Dominguez), was born in El Centro, California, and was of Mexican descent.


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: "Telenovelas" (soap operas) have been criticized for not fully reflecting the racial diversity of Hispanic and Latino Americans, and for underrepresenting non-white Hispanic, Latino Americans, and non-white Latin Americans. For example, in the 2005 US Hispanic telenovela "Olvidarte Jamas", white, blond, and blue-eyed Venezuelan American actress Sonya Smith portrayed Luisa Dominguez who is a poor mestiza woman; the actress had to wear a black wig. Sonya Smith, however, was the first Hispanic actor to portray a Hispanic without stereotypical perception (portrayed as blond and blue-eyed Hispanic, not a Hispanic mestiza nor mulatta nor Mediterranean-looking Hispanic) in a Hollywood film "Hunted by Night", an English-language movie with an all-Hispanic cast.


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: White Hispanic/white Latino literature originating from the San Joaquin Valley revolves around the lives and stories of farmworkers. Meanwhile, the autobiographies of white stateside Puerto Ricans and the poetry of the Nuyorican Movement are most often about their socioeconomic concerns.


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: A total of 27% of Hispanics marry outside their ethnicity. Non-Hispanic white/Hispanic intermarriage is the most common intermarriage in the United States representing 42% of interethnic marriages compared to white/black at 11%. Intermarriage rates between whites and Hispanics do not differ significantly among the genders (with Hispanic females slightly more likely to marry whites).


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Genetic research has found that the average non-European admixture is present in both white-Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites with different degrees according to different areas of the United States. Average European admixture among self-identified white Hispanic Americans is 73% (the average for Hispanic Americans regardless of race is 65.1%), contrasting to that of non-Hispanic European Americans, whose European ancestry totals 98.6% on average. "Average admixture," however, can be a misleading measure, as it conflates vastly different population groups and ignores marked differences within individual Latino groups. Each Latin American country has a unique demographic history. Mexican Americans and Central Americans may be more racially mestizo, for instance, but the same is not true of American Latinos from countries with higher proportions of white Latin Americans, such as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The genetic profile of American Latinos varies from group to group and is a result of unique immigration histories. For instance, the Cuban exiles "fleeing the Castro regime in the 1960s and ’70s were almost entirely white, educated and middle or upper class."


title: White Hispanic and Latino Americans

text: Farmworkers in the country are disproportionately white Hispanic/white Latino. This is especially true in some areas, for example Southern Arizona. Many are producers, in other words they are farm operators. White Hispanics/white Latinos are a larger part of the Southern Arizona population than in the rest of the country, and are a large part of the area's agricultural workforce.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. With IBM's entry into the market, VisiCalc was slow to respond, and when they did, they launched what was essentially a straight port of their existing system despite the greatly expanded hardware capabilities. Lotus's solution was marketed as a three-in-one integrated solution: it handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts, hence the name "1-2-3", though how much database capability the product actually had was debatable, given the sparse memory left over after launching 1-2-3. It quickly overtook VisiCalc, as well as Multiplan and SuperCalc, the two VisiCalc competitors.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet standard throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, part of an unofficial set of three stand-alone office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform. With the acceptance of Windows 3.0, the market for desktop software grew even more. None of the major spreadsheet developers had seriously considered the graphical user interface (GUI) to supplement their DOS offerings, and so they responded slowly to Microsoft's own GUI-based products Excel and Word. Lotus was surpassed by Microsoft in the early 1990s, and never recovered. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995, and continued to sell Lotus offerings, only officially ending sales in 2013.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: VisiCalc was launched in 1979 on the Apple II and immediately became a best-seller. Compared to earlier programs, VisiCalc allowed one to easily construct free-form calculation systems for practically any purpose, the limitations being primarily related to the memory and speed of the computer. The application was so compelling that there were numerous stories of people buying Apple II machines to run the program (see article Killer application). VisiCalc's runaway success on the Apple led to direct bug compatible ports to other platforms, including the Atari 8-bit family, Commodore PET and many others. This included the IBM PC when it launched in 1981, where it quickly became another best-seller, with an estimated 300,000 sales in the first six months on the market.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: There were well-known problems with VisiCalc, and several competitors appeared to address some of these issues. One early example was 1980's SuperCalc, which solved the problem of circular references, while a slightly later example was Microsoft Multiplan from 1981, which offered larger sheets and other improvements. In spite of these, and others, VisiCalc continued to outsell them all.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitchell Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc. 1-2-3 was originally written by Jonathan Sachs, who had written two spreadsheet programs previously while working at Concentric Data Systems, Inc. To aid its growth both in the UK and possibly elsewhere, Lotus 1-2-3 became the very first computer software to use television consumer advertising.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Kapor was primarily a marketing guru. His ability to develop his product to appeal to non-technical users was one secret to its rapid success. Unlike many technologists, Kapor relied on focus group feedback to make his user instructions more user-friendly. One example: the instructions that came with the floppy disc read: "Remove the protective cover and insert disc into computer." A few focus group participants tried to rip-off the stiff plastic envelope of disc carrier. Kapor's recognition that techno-speak instructions needed to be translated to normative English was a strong contributor to the product's popularity.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3 was released on 26 January 1983, and immediately overtook Visicalc in sales. Unlike Microsoft Multiplan, it stayed very close to the model of VisiCalc, including the "A1" letter and number cell notation, and slash-menu structure. It was cleanly programmed, relatively bug-free, gained speed from being written completely in x86 assembly language (this remained the case for all DOS versions until 3.0, when Lotus switched to C) and wrote directly to video memory rather than use the slow DOS and/or BIOS text output functions.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Among other novelties that Lotus introduced was a graph maker that could display several forms of graphs (including pie charts, bar graphics, or line charts) but required the user to have a graphics card. At this early stage, the only video boards available for the PC were IBM's Color/Graphics Adapter and Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter, the latter not supporting any graphics. However, because the two video boards used different RAM and port addresses, both could be installed in the same machine and so Lotus took advantage of this by supporting a "split" screen mode whereby the user could display the worksheet portion of 1-2-3 on the sharper monochrome video and the graphics on the CGA display.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The initial release of 1-2-3 supported only three video setups: CGA, MDA (in which case the graph maker was not available) or dual-monitor mode. However, a few months later support was added for Hercules Computer Technology's Hercules Graphics Adapter which was a clone of the MDA that allowed bitmap mode. The ability to have high-resolution text and graphics capabilities (at the expense of color) proved extremely popular and Lotus 1-2-3 is credited with popularizing the Hercules graphics card.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Subsequent releases of Lotus 1-2-3 supported more video standards as time went on, including EGA, AT&T/Olivetti, and VGA. Significantly, support for the PCjr/Tandy modes was never added and users of those machines were limited to CGA graphics.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The early versions of 1-2-3 also had a key disk copy protection. While the program was hard disk installable, the user had to insert the original floppy disk when starting 1-2-3 up. This protection scheme was easily cracked and a minor inconvenience for home users, but proved a serious nuisance in an office setting. Starting with Release 3.0, Lotus no longer used copy protection. However, it was then necessary to "initialize" the System disk with one's name and company name so as to customize the copy of the program. Release 2.2 and higher had this requirement. This was an irreversible process unless one had made an exact copy of the original disk so as to be able to change names to transfer the program to someone else.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The reliance on the specific hardware of the IBM PC led to 1-2-3 being utilized as one of the two stress test applications, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator, for true 100% compatibility when PC clones appeared in the early 1980s. 1-2-3 required two disk drives and at least 192K of memory, which made it incompatible with the IBM PCjr; Lotus produced a version for the PCjr that was on two cartridges but otherwise identical.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: By early 1984 the software was a killer app for the IBM PC and compatibles, while hurting sales of computers that could not run it. "They're looking for 1-2-3. Boy, are they looking for 1-2-3!" "InfoWorld" wrote. Noting that computer purchasers did not want PC compatibility as much as compatibility with certain PC software, the magazine suggested "let's tell it like it is. Let's not say 'PC compatible,' or even 'MS-DOS compatible.' Instead, let's say '1-2-3 compatible.'" PC clones' advertising did often prominently state that they were compatible with 1-2-3. An Apple II software company promised that its spreadsheet had "the power of 1-2-3". Because spreadsheets use large amounts of memory, 1‐2‐3 helped popularize greater RAM capacities in PCs, and especially the advent of expanded memory, which allowed greater than 640k to be accessed.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3 inspired imitators, the first of which was Mosaic Software's "The Twin", written in the fall of 1985 largely in the C language, followed by VP-Planner, which was backed by Adam Osborne. These were able to not only read 1-2-3 files, but also execute many or most macro programs by incorporating the same command structure. Copyright law had first been understood to only cover the source code of a program. After the success of lawsuits which claimed that the very "look and feel" of a program were covered, Lotus sought to ban any program which had a compatible command and menu structure. Program commands had not been considered to be covered before, but the commands of 1-2-3 were embedded in the words of the menu displayed on the screen. 1-2-3 won its 3-year long court battle against Paperback Software International and Mosaic Software Inc. in 1990. However, when it sued Borland over its Quattro Pro spreadsheet in "Lotus v. Borland", a 6-year battle that ended at the Supreme Court in 1996, the final ruling appeared to support narrowing the applicability of copyright law to software; this is because the lower court's decision that it was not a copyright violation to merely have a compatible command menu or language was upheld, but only via stalemate. In 1995, the First Circuit found that command menus are an uncopyrightable "method of operation" under section 102(b) of the Copyright Act. The 1-2-3 menu structure (example, slash File Erase) was itself an advanced version of single letter menus introduced in VisiCalc. When the case came before the Supreme Court, the justices would end up deadlocked 4-4. This meant that Borland had emerged victorious, but the extent to which copyright law would be applicable to computer software went unaddressed and undefined.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Microsoft's early spreadsheet Multiplan eventually gave way to Excel, which debuted on the Macintosh in 1985. It arrived on PCs with the release of Windows 2.x in 1987, but as Windows was not yet popular, it posed no serious threat to Lotus's stranglehold on spreadsheet sales. However, Lotus suffered technical setbacks in this period. Version 3 of Lotus 1-2-3, fully converted from its original macro assembler to the more portable C language, was delayed by more than a year as the totally new 1-2-3 had to be made portable across platforms and fully compatible with existing macro sets and file formats. The inability to fit the larger code size of compiled C into lower-powered machines forced the company to split its spreadsheet offerings, with 1-2-3 release 3 only for higher-end machines, and a new version 2.2, based on the 2.01 assembler code base, available for PCs without extended memory. By the time these versions were released in 1989, Microsoft had eroded much of Lotus's market share.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: During the early 1990s, Windows grew in popularity, and along with it, Excel, which gradually displaced Lotus from its leading position. A planned total revamp of 1-2-3 for Windows fell apart, and all that the company could manage, was a Windows adaptation of their existing spreadsheet with no changes except using a graphical interface. Additionally, several versions of 1-2-3 had different features and slightly different interfaces.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3's intended successor, Lotus Symphony, was Lotus's entry into the anticipated "integrated software" market. It intended to expand the rudimentary all-in-one 1-2-3 into a fully-fledged spreadsheet, graph, database and word processor for DOS, but none of the integrated packages ever really succeeded. Lotus 1-2-3 migrated to the Windows platform, as part of Lotus SmartSuite.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: IBM's continued development and marketing of Lotus SmartSuite and OS/2 during the 1990s placed it in direct competition with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows, respectively. As a result, Microsoft "punished the IBM PC Company with higher prices, a late license for Windows 95, and the withholding of technical and marketing support." Microsoft did not grant IBM the OEM rights for Windows 95 until 15 minutes prior to the release of Windows 95 on 24 August 1995. Because of this uncertainty, IBM machines were sold without Windows 95, while Compaq, HP, and other companies sold machines with Windows 95 from day one.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: On 11 June 2013, IBM announced it would withdraw the Lotus brand: IBM Lotus 1-2-3 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. IBM stated, "Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after 30 September 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs."


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: The name "1-2-3" stemmed from the product's integration of three main capabilities: along with its core spreadsheet functionality, 1-2-3 also offered integral charting/graphing and rudimentary database operations.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Data features included sorting data in any defined rectangle, by order of information in one or two columns in the rectangular area. Justifying text in a range into paragraphs allowed it to be used as a primitive word processor.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: It had keyboard-driven pop-up menus as well as one-key commands, making it fast to operate. It was also user-friendly, introducing an early instance of context-sensitive help accessed by the F1 key.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Macros in version one and add-ins (introduced in version 2.0) contributed much to 1-2-3's popularity, allowing dozens of outside vendors to sell macro packages and add-ins ranging from dedicated financial worksheets like F9 to full-fledged word processors. In the single-tasking MS-DOS, 1-2-3 was sometimes used as a complete office suite. All major graphics standards were supported; initially CGA and Hercules, and later EGA, AT&T, and VGA. Early versions used the filename extension "WKS". In version 2.0, the extension changed first to "WK1", then "WK2". This later became "WK3" for version 3.0 and "WK4" for version 4.0.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Version 2 introduced macros with syntax and commands similar in complexity to an advanced BASIC interpreter, as well as string variable expressions. Later versions supported multiple worksheets and were written in C. The charting/graphing routines were written in Forth by Jeremy Sagan (son of Carl Sagan) and the printing routines by Paul Funk (founder of Funk Software).


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: Lotus 1-2-3 file formats use various filename extensions including 123, wks, wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, some of these may open in the desktop applications of Collabora Online, LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, these can then be saved into the OpenDocument format or other file formats.


title: Lotus 1-2-3

text: After previewing "1-2-3" on the IBM PC in 1982, "BYTE" called it "modestly revolutionary" for elegantly combining spreadsheet, database, and graphing functions. It praised the application's speed and ease of use, stating that with the built-in help screens and tutorial, "1-2-3 is one of the few pieces of software that can literally be used by anybody. You can buy 1-2-3 and [an IBM PC] and be running the two together the same day". "PC Magazine" in 1983 called 1-2-3 "a powerful and impressive program ... as a spreadsheet, it's excellent", and attributed its very fast performance to being written in assembly language.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: Brittany Ferries is the trading name of the French shipping company, BAI Bretagne Angleterre Irlande S.A. founded in 1973 by Alexis Gourvennec, that operates a fleet of ferries and cruiseferries between France and the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain, and between Spain and Ireland and the United Kingdom.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: BAI (Bretagne Angleterre Irlande) S.A. was founded by Alexis Gourvennec. Working with fellow Breton farmers, Gourvennec lobbied for improvements to Brittany's infrastructure, including better roads, telephone network, education and port access. By 1972 he had successfully secured funding and work to develop a deep-water port at Roscoff. Gourvennec had no desire to run a ferry service, but existing operators showed little appetite for the opportunity.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: The company itself began sailings on 2 January 1973 between Roscoff in Brittany and Plymouth in the South West of England, using the freight ferry "Kerisnel", a former Israeli tank carrier. The company's primary aim at that time was to exploit opportunities presented by the UK's entry into the European Common Market, forerunner to the European Union, in order to export directly to markets in the United Kingdom.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: In 1974, "Kerisnel" was replaced by "Penn-Ar-Bed", which carried both passengers and vehicles, and the BAI company adopted the name Brittany Ferries.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: In late 2009, the new Poole–Santander freight-only service was deemed a success and the frequency was doubled: there would now be two services a week operated by "Cotentin". In November 2009, "Armorique" was laid up for the rest of the winter season. Major changes were announced in December 2009. "Barfleur" was withdrawn from service at the end of January 2010 after nearly 18 years service on the Poole–Cherbourg route. The service was temporarily served by "Armorique", which came back to service earlier than originally planned. The Poole–Santander service reverted to one sailing a week with "Cotentin" covering freight on the Poole–Cherbourg service in the absence of "Barfleur". "Condor Vitesse" continued to operate one round sailing a day in the summer months between the two ports. "Cap Finistère" ran between Portsmouth and Santander twice a week and also operated three round trips a week between Portsmouth and Cherbourg. In September 2010, Brittany Ferries announced plans to serve the Portsmouth–Bilbao route recently abandoned by P&O Ferries. The route started on 27 March 2011.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: On 21 September 2012, Brittany Ferries cancelled sailings indefinitely following two days of wildcat strikes caused by crew members who were unhappy with changes in working terms and conditions. Meetings took place between management and unions to negotiate the management proposals. A vote was taken on 30 September by union members to decide if the management proposals would be accepted. The crew members accepted the proposal and services resumed on 2 October after 12 days without services. During this period, Brittany Ferries made special arrangements with P&O Ferries and MyFerryLink to accept tickets on the Dover–Calais route. Unused tickets were refunded. Services were not affected on the Poole–Cherbourg route which was being operated by Condor Ferries.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: In 2018, Brittany Ferries commenced service between Cork, Ireland, and Santander. This was cancelled and effectively replaced in February 2020 by the Rosslare–Bilbao service which runs twice weekly. A seasonal service between Rosslare and Roscoff is also offered.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: From late March 2020, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Brittany Ferries was forced to cancel all passenger sailings until 15 May 2020 after British government advice was issued against all travel. Initially they had been offering refund vouchers valid for 2 years for affected customers. Many customers were unsatisfied with vouchers and had requested a refund. Brittany Ferries had begun to issue refunds in the last week of April for customers that wished for a refund. Customers were entitled to a refund under EU regulation 1177/2010.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: On 19 August 2020, as a consequence of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, the company confirmed that it was reducing ferry services from the end of August and laying up various ships, beginning with "Armorique" and "Bretagne". Further schedule changes are likely in the months ahead, the company confirmed in March 2021. It also confirmed the launch of a five-year recover plan following the loss of more than half of its revenue, the consequence of restrictions on passenger traffic in all markets in which it operates.


title: Brittany Ferries

text: On 20 July 2021, Brittany Ferries announced at a press conference in Paris that it had secured a charter with Stena RoRo for 2 more E-Flexers. The new vessels are due to replace the MV "Normandie" on the Portsmouth–Caen route and MV "Bretagne" on the Portsmouth–St Malo Route. The charter is expected to run for 10 years with the option to purchase after 4 years.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: Nikola Mirotić (; born 11 February 1991) is a Serbo-Montenegrin-Spanish professional basketball player for FC Barcelona of the Liga ACB and the EuroLeague. The power forward is a four-time All-EuroLeague Team member, and previously played for Real Madrid of the Liga ACB. Mirotić was drafted with the 23rd pick in the 2011 NBA draft, and played in the NBA from 2014 for the Chicago Bulls, New Orleans Pelicans and Milwaukee Bucks, before returning to Spain in the 2019 offseason.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: Growing up in Montenegro, football was Mirotić's true passion. As he got older, his family realized his height could be a lot more useful for another sport. At the age of 13, his grandfather introduced him to basketball. Mirotić started playing basketball with the Joker School in Podgorica run by retired professional basketball player Jadran Vujačić.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: After playing for the Real Madrid juniors from 2006 to 2008, Mirotić signed with the Real Madrid senior team in 2008. During the 2010–11 Euroleague season, he emerged as one of his team's most valuable players, and won the EuroLeague Rising Star award. In April 2011, he signed a five-year contract extension with Real Madrid. With Real Madrid, he won the Spanish King's Cup and the Spanish Supercup in 2012.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 23 June 2011, Mirotić was selected by the Houston Rockets with the 23rd overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft. He was later traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves, and again to the Chicago Bulls on draft night.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: In the 2012–13 Euroleague season, he finished second in the EuroLeague Rising Star voting to Kostas Papanikolaou, and he was named to the All-EuroLeague Second Team. In May 2014, he was named to the All-EuroLeague Second Team, for the second consecutive season.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: In a total of 97 EuroLeague games for Real Madrid, Mirotić averaged 10.8 points and 4.5 rebounds per game.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 18 July 2014, Mirotić signed with the Chicago Bulls to a reported three-year, $16.6 million contract. In addition, Mirotić was required to pay $3 million to Real Madrid for his contract buyout.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 19 December 2014, Mirotić scored a then career-high 27 points, as he converted all six of his three-pointers, in a 103–97 win over the Memphis Grizzlies. On 5 January 2015, he was named the Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month for games played in December. During the NBA's All-Star Weekend, Mirotić played for World Team in the Rising Stars Challenge. He scored 16 points on 6-of-9 shooting from the field in the World's 121–112 win over Team USA. On 1 March, he scored a career-high 29 points in a loss to the Los Angeles Clippers. With injuries impacting teammates during the month of March, Mirotić was expected to fill a larger role for his team. He averaged 20.8 points and 7.6 rebounds while playing 30.8 minutes per game. In his rookie season, Mirotić averaged 10.2 points, 4.9 rebounds and 1.2 assists in 82 games, giving him the recognition as a candidate for the Rookie of the Year Award. Mirotić finished second in Rookie of the Year voting with 335 votes behind Andrew Wiggins who received 604 votes. He played his first post-season game in the NBA on 18 April 2015 in Game 1 of the Bulls' first-round series match-up against the Milwaukee Bucks. In 13 minutes off the bench, he recorded 5 points and 5 rebounds.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: At the beginning of the 2015–16 season, Mirotić had a starting role ahead of All-Star center Joakim Noah. He scored a team-high 19 points in the season opening win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He started in all 18 games to begin the season, coming off the bench for the first time on 9 December against the Boston Celtics, scoring 10 points in 22 minutes of action. He continued coming off the bench following 9 December, in a back-up role to Taj Gibson. His next start came on 21 December against the Brooklyn Nets, as he started at small forward in place of Tony Snell. On 1 January, he recorded 17 points and a career-high seven assists in a 108–81 win over the New York Knicks. On 27 January, he was diagnosed with an acute appendicitis and was subsequently ruled out until after the All-Star break. He returned to action on 5 March against the Houston Rockets after missing 16 games. On 23 March, he scored a career-high 35 points in a loss to the New York Knicks.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 26 December 2016, less than two weeks after falling out of the rotation for a couple of games, Mirotić recorded a then season-high 20 points in a 90–85 win over the Indiana Pacers. After not playing by coach's decision in two straight games in early March so that management and the coaching staff could look at Joffrey Lauvergne, Mirotić landed on the inactive list. On 13 March, he returned from a three-game absence and scored 24 points on five three-pointers in a 115–109 win over the Charlotte Hornets. On 22 March, he scored a season-high 28 points in a 117–95 win over the Detroit Pistons. Four days later, he tied his season high with another 28-point effort in a 109–94 win over the Milwaukee Bucks. He had a third 28-point game on 30 March in a 99–93 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He had six three-pointers against both Milwaukee and Cleveland, becoming the first Bulls player to hit six or more three-pointers in back-to-back games.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 25 September 2017, Mirotić re-signed with the Bulls. On 17 October 2017, Mirotić was sent to the hospital after engaging in a physical altercation with teammate Bobby Portis during practice. Portis punched Mirotić in the face resulting in Mirotić suffering a concussion and multiple facial fractures. Mirotić made his season debut on 8 December, scoring six points in 14 minutes in a 119–111 overtime win over the Charlotte Hornets. On 11 December, he scored 24 points in his first start of the season in a 108–85 win over the Boston Celtics. He hit 9 of 14 shots and grabbed eight rebounds in his third appearance. On 13 December, he scored 29 points on 11-of-18 shooting with nine rebounds in a 103–100 win over the Utah Jazz. On 26 December, he came off the bench to score 24 points in 28 minutes, as the Bulls won for the eighth time in 10 games, beating the Milwaukee Bucks 115–106.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 1 February 2018, Mirotić was traded, along with a 2018 second-round pick, to the New Orleans Pelicans in exchange for Ömer Aşık, Tony Allen, Jameer Nelson, a 2018 first-round pick, and the right to swap 2021 second round picks with the Pelicans. He made his debut for the Pelicans two days later, scoring 18 points in a 118–107 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. On 10 February, he recorded 21 points and 16 rebounds in a 138–128 double-overtime win over the Brooklyn Nets. On 6 April, he scored a season-high 31 points and tied a season best with 16 rebounds in a 122–103 win over the Phoenix Suns. Three days later, he recorded 24 points and 16 rebounds in a 113–100 win over the Los Angeles Clippers, helping the Pelicans clinch a playoff spot. In Game 1 of the Pelicans' first-round playoff series against the Portland Trail Blazers, Mirotić recorded 16 points, 11 rebounds and four blocks in a 97–95 win. In Game 3, Mirotić scored a career playoff-best 30 points, as the Pelicans beat the Trail Blazers 119–102 to take a 3–0 lead in the series.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: In the Pelicans' season opener on 17 October 2018, Mirotić scored 30 points on 6 of 8 from 3-point range in a 131–112 win over the Houston Rockets. Two days later, he scored a career-high 36 points in a 149–129 win over the Sacramento Kings. On 5 November, he had 16 points and matched a career high with 16 rebounds in a 122–116 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. On 9 January, he returned to action against the Cleveland Cavaliers after missing 12 games due to an ankle injury.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 7 February 2019, Mirotić was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks in a three-team trade involving Jason Smith, Stanley Johnson, and Thon Maker. He missed the first four games with the Bucks upon being acquired with a calf injury, making his debut on 21 February against the Boston Celtics. He missed the final 11 regular-season games after suffering a fractured left thumb against the Los Angeles Lakers on 19 March. He made his return in the Bucks' opening game of the playoffs.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: On 6 July 2019, Mirotić signed a three-year deal, with the option of an extension through to 2023, with FC Barcelona of the Liga ACB and the EuroLeague. According to sources, Mirotić's contract was worth €26 million, making him the highest-paid basketball player in Europe. On 27 June 2020, Mirotic was awarded the league's Most Valuable Player award. He became the fifth player in Liga Endesa history to have multiple MVP awards, joining Darryl Middleton, Arvydas Sabonis, Luis Scola and Felipe Reyes. Mirotić finished the season averaging 19.5 points and 5.7 rebounds per game. He extended his contract until 2025 on 25 September 2020.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: In the 2021–22 season, he won his first EuroLeague MVP award, becoming the first Barcelona player to win the award in 14 years.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: Mirotić was a member of the junior national team of Spain. He helped Spain's U20 national team win the bronze medal at the 2010 FIBA Europe Under-20 Championship, where he was named to the All-Tournament Team. He also led Spain to the gold medal in 2011. Mirotić was the top scorer and MVP of the tournament, averaging 27 points (tournament record) and 10 rebounds per game.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: In June 2015, Mirotić was named by head coach Sergio Scariolo as one of 17 candidates to try out for the senior Spain men's national basketball team that would play at the EuroBasket 2015. Mirotić made Spain's final 12-man roster, and he went on to win a gold medal at the tournament, in September 2015. He also played with Spain at the 2016 Summer Olympics, where he won a bronze medal.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: Mirotić and his wife, Nina Vujačić, have a son named Aleksandar, who was born in May 2013. His wife is the daughter of his former coach and mentor, Jadran Vujačić, who also played professional basketball with Borac Čačak, KK Partizan, and Budućnost Titograd. Even though he represents the Spain national basketball team, he said that he is happy and proud to be Montenegrin.


title: Nikola Mirotić

text: Mirotić is an ethnic Serb and a Serbian Orthodox Christian. He received the Order of St. Sava in May 2017. Mirotić has participated in prayer walks and protests in Podgorica against the controversial religious law concerning the Serbian Orthodox Church.


title: Education in China

text: Education in China is primarily managed by the state-run public education system, which falls under the Ministry of Education. All citizens must attend school for a minimum of nine years, known as nine-year compulsory education, which is funded by the government. Compulsory education includes six years of primary education, typically starting at the age of six and finishing at the age of twelve, followed by three years of junior secondary education (there is a mix up in translation with middle school and secondary school so a lot of people think middle school is the entire 6 years of secondary school when it's just the first 3). Middle schooling is followed by three years of high school, by the end of which secondary education is completed. Laws in China regulating the system of education include the Regulation on Academic Degrees, the Compulsory Education Law, the Teachers Law, the Education Law, the Law on Vocational Education, and the Law on Higher Education.


title: Education in China

text: In 2020, the Ministry of Education reported an increase of new entrants of 34.4 million students entering compulsory education, bringing the total number of students who attend compulsory education to 156 million. In 1985, the government abolished tax-funded higher education, requiring university applicants to compete for scholarships based on their academic capabilities. In the early 1980s, the government allowed the establishment of the first private institution of higher learning, thus increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees from 1995 to 2005.


title: Education in China

text: In 2003, central and local governments in China supported 1,552 institutions of higher learning (colleges and universities), along with their 725,000 professors and 11 million students. Chinese investment in research and development has grown by 20 percent per year since 1999, exceeding $100 billion in 2011. As many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006. By 2008, China had published 184,080 papers in recognized international journals—a seven-fold increase from 1996. In 2017, China surpassed the U.S. with the highest number of scientific publications. In 2021, there were 3,012 universities and colleges (see List of universities in China) in China, and 147 National Key Universities, which are considered to be part of an elite group Double First Class universities accounted for approximately 4.6% of all higher education institutions in China.


title: Education in China

text: China has also been a top destination for international students and as of 2013, China was the most popular country in Asia for international students and ranked third overall among countries. China is now the leading destination globally for Anglophone African students and is host of the second largest international students population in the world. There were 26 Chinese universities on lists of the global top 200 in the 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities, behind only the United States in terms of the overall representation.


title: Education in China

text: Although Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang outperformed all other education systems in the Programme for International Student Assessment, China's educational system has been criticized for its rote memorization and its emphasis on test preparation. However, PISA spokesman Andreas Schleicher says that China has moved away from learning by rote. According to Schleicher, Russia performs well in rote-based assessments, but not in PISA, whereas China does well in both rote-based and broader assessments.


title: Education in China

text: Improving population-wide literacy was the focus of education in the early years of the People's Republic of China. In 1949, the literacy rate was only between 20-40%. The communist government focused on improving literacy through both formal schooling and literacy campaigns. In the first sixteen years of communist governance, elementary school enrollment tripled, secondary school enrollment increased by a factor of 8.5, and college enrollment more than quadrupled.


title: Education in China

text: Since the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the education system in China has been geared towards economic modernization. In 1985, the federal government ceded responsibility for basic education to local governments through the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party's "Decision on the Reform of the Educational Structure." With the education reform plan in May 1985, the authorities called for nine years of compulsory education and the establishment of the State Education Commission (created the following month). Official commitment to improved education was nowhere more evident than in the substantial increase in funds for education in the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986–90), which amounted to 72 percent more than funds allotted to education in the previous plan period (1981–85). In 1986, 16.8 percent of the state budget was earmarked for education, compared to 10.4 percent in 1984. Since 1949, education has been a source of controversy in China. As a result of continual intra-party realignments, official policy has alternated between ideological imperatives and practical efforts to further national education, though the two have often been incompatible. The Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Socialist Education Movement (1962–65) sought to end deeply rooted academic elitism, to narrow social and cultural gaps between workers and peasants and between urban and rural populations, and to eliminate the tendency of scholars and intellectuals to disdain manual labor. During the Cultural Revolution, universal fostering of social equality was an overriding priority.


title: Education in China

text: The post-Mao Zedong Chinese Communist Party leadership views education as the foundation of the Four Modernizations. In the early 1980s, science and technology education became an important focus of education policy. By 1986, training skilled personnel and expanding scientific and technical knowledge had been assigned the highest priority. Although the humanities were considered important, vocational and technical skills were considered paramount for meeting China's modernization goals. The reorientation of educational priorities paralleled Deng Xiaoping's strategy for economic development. Emphasis also was placed on the further training of the already-educated elite, who would carry on the modernization program in the coming decades. A renewed emphasis on modern science and technology led to the adoption of an outward-looking policy that encouraged learning and borrowing from abroad for advanced training in a wide range of scientific fields, beginning in 1976.


title: Education in China

text: Beginning at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978, intellectuals were encouraged to pursue research in support of the Four Modernizations and, as long as they complied with the party's "Four Cardinal Principles" they were given relatively free rein. When the party and the government determined that the structures of the four cardinal principles had been stretched beyond tolerable limits, they might restrict intellectual expression.


title: Education in China

text: Literature and the arts also experienced a great revival in the late 1970s and 1980s. Traditional forms flourished once again, and many new kinds of literature and cultural expression were introduced from abroad.


title: Education in China

text: , the government-operated primary and lower secondary (junior high) schools in China have 28.8 million students.


title: Education in China

text: Since the 1950s, China has been providing a nine-year compulsory education to what amounts to a fifth of the world's population. By 1999, primary school education had become generalized in 90% of China, and mandatory nine-year compulsory education now effectively covered 85% of the population.


title: Education in China

text: The education fundings provided by the central and provincial governments varies across regions, and those in the rural areas are notably lower than those in major urban areas. Families must supplement money provided to the school by the government with tuition fees, which means that some children have much less. However, parents place a very high value on education and make great personal sacrifices to send their children to school and university. Illiteracy in the young and mid-aged population has fallen from over 80 percent down to five percent. The system trained some 60 million mid- or high-level professionals and near 400 million laborers to the junior or senior high school level. Today, 250 million Chinese get three levels of school education, (elementary, junior, and senior high school) doubling the rate of increase in the rest of the world during the same period. Net elementary school enrollment has reached 98.9 percent, and the gross enrollment rate in junior high schools 94.1 percent.


title: Education in China

text: China's educational horizons are expanding. In the 1980s, the MBA was virtually unknown but by 2004 there were 47,000 MBAs, trained at 62 MBA schools. Many people also apply for international professional qualifications, such as EMBA and MPA; close to 10,000 MPA students are enrolled in 47 schools of higher learning, including Peking University and Tsinghua University. The education market has rocketed, with training and testing for professional qualifications, such as computer and foreign languages, thriving. Continuing education is the trend, once in one's life schooling has become lifelong learning.


title: Education in China

text: International cooperation and education exchanges increase every year. China has more students studying abroad than any other country; since 1979, there have been 697,000 Chinese students studying in 103 countries and regions, of whom 185,000 have returned after finishing their studies. The number of foreign students studying in China has increased rapidly; in 2004, over 110,000 students from 178 countries were studying at China's universities.


title: Education in China

text: Investment in education has increased in recent years; the proportion of the overall budget allocated to education has been increased by one percentage point every year since 1998. According to a Ministry of Education program, the government will set up an educational finance system in line with the public finance system, strengthen the responsibility of governments at all levels in educational investment, and ensure that their financial allocation for educational expenditure grows faster than their regular revenue. The program also laid out the government's aim that educational investment should account for four percent of GDP in a relatively short period of time.


title: Education in China

text: For non-compulsory education, China adopts a shared-cost mechanism, charging tuition at a certain percentage of the cost. Meanwhile, to ensure that students from low-income families have access to higher education, the government has initiated ways of assistance, with policies and measures for scholarships, work-study programs and subsidies for students with special economic difficulties, tuition reduction or exemption and state stipends.


title: Education in China

text: The government has committed itself to markedly raising educational levels overall, as evidenced in a Ministry of Education program; it is estimated that by 2020, of every 100,000 people 13,500 will have had a junior college education or above and some 31,000 will have had senior high school schooling. It is also estimated that illiteracy and semi-literacy rates will fall below three percent and average schooling duration across the population will increase from eight years to nearly 11.


title: Education in China

text: Chinese high school students won multiple gold medals every year consistently at many International Science Olympiad Competitions like the International Biology Olympiad, the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, the International Olympiad in Informatics, the International Earth Science Olympiad, the International Mathematical Olympiad, the International Physics Olympiad and the International Chemistry Olympiad. In a 2009 survey from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance by the OECD, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the best results in mathematics, science and reading. The OECD also found that even in some of the very poor rural areas the performance is close to the OECD average. While averages across the breadth of other countries are reported, China's rankings are taken from only a few select districts.


title: Education in China

text: The PISA 2018 results showed that students of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang topped the rankings in reading, mathematics and science and China's school children are now the smartest in the world. OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria said the students from the 4 Chinese provinces had "outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating countries" and the 10% most socio-economically disadvantaged students in these 4 areas "also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10% most advantaged students in some of OECD countries". He cautioned that these 4 provinces and municipalities "are far from representing China as a whole." Yet their combined populations amount to over 180 million people, and the size of each region is equivalent to a typical OECD country even if their income is well below the OECD average. "What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average".


title: Education in China

text: Deng Xiaoping's far-ranging educational reform policy, which involved all levels of the education system, aimed to narrow the gap between China and other developing countries. Thus, modernizing education was critical to modernizing China, which included; devolution of educational management from the central to the local level as the means chosen to improve the education system. Centralized authority was not abandoned, however, as evidenced by the creation of the State Education Commission. Academically, the goals of reform were to enhance and universalize elementary and junior middle school education; to increase the number of schools and qualified teachers, and to develop vocational and technical education. A uniform standard for curricula, textbooks, examinations, and teacher qualifications (especially at the middle-school level) was established, and considerable autonomy and variations in and among the autonomous regions, provinces, and special municipalities were allowed. Further, the system of enrollment and job assignment in higher education was changed, and excessive government control over colleges and universities was reduced. According to Macau-based PLA watcher Antony Wong Dong, the education system of the PRC still discourages innovation and independent thinking, causing delays in even such high-profile national projects as the J-XX fifth-generation jet fighters.


title: Education in China

text: At a national education conference held in Beijing on 10 September 2018, Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of teaching Chinese socialism to the country's youth, in order to foster support for the Communist Party and its policies.


title: Education in China

text: The Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education (中华人民共和国义务教育法), which took effect on 1 July 1986, established requirements and deadlines for attaining universal education tailored to local conditions and guaranteed school-age children the right to receive at least nine years of education (six-year primary education and three years secondary education). People's congresses at various local levels were, within certain guidelines and according to local conditions, to decide the steps, methods, and deadlines for implementing nine-year compulsory education in accordance with the guidelines formulated by the central authorities. The program sought to bring rural areas, which had four to six years of compulsory schooling, into line with their urban counterparts. Education departments were exhorted to train millions of skilled workers for all trades and professions and to offer guidelines, curricula, and methods to comply with the reform program and modernization needs.


title: Education in China

text: Provincial-level authorities were to develop plans, enact decrees and rules, distribute funds to counties, and administer directly a few key secondary schools. County authorities were to distribute funds to each township government, which was to make up for any deficiencies. County authorities were to supervise education and teaching and to manage their own senior high schools, teachers' schools, teachers' in-service training schools, agricultural vocational schools, and exemplary primary and junior high schools. The remaining schools were to be managed separately by the county and township authorities.


title: Education in China

text: The compulsory education law divided China into three categories: cities and economically developed areas in coastal provinces and a small number of developed areas in the hinterland; towns and villages with medium development; and economically backward areas.


title: Education in China

text: By November 1985, the first category—the larger cities and approximately 20 percent of the counties (mainly in the more developed coastal and southeastern areas of China)—had achieved universal 9-year education. By 1990, cities, economically developed areas in coastal provincial-level units, a small number of developed interior areas (approximately 25 percent of China's population), and areas where junior middle schools were already popularized were targeted to have universal junior-high-school education. Education planners envisioned that by the mid-1990s, all workers and staff in coastal areas, inland cities, and moderately developed areas (with a combined population of 300 million to 400 million people) would have either compulsory 9-year or vocational education and that 5 percent of the people in these areas would have a college education, building a solid intellectual foundation for China. Furthermore, the planners expected that secondary education and university entrants would have increased by the year 2000.


title: Education in China

text: The second category targeted under the 9-year compulsory education law consisted of towns and villages with medium-level development (around 50 percent of China's population), where universal education was expected to reach the junior-high-school level by 1995. Technical and higher education was projected to develop at the same rate.


title: Education in China

text: The third category, economically backward (rural) areas (around 25 percent of China's population), were to popularize basic education without a timetable and at various levels according to local economic development, though the state would try to support educational development. The state also would assist education in minority nationality areas. In the past, rural areas, which lacked a standardized and universal primary education system, had produced generations of illiterates; only 60 percent of their primary school graduates had met established standards.


title: Education in China

text: As a further example of the government's commitment to nine-year compulsory education, in January 1986 the State Council drafted a bill passed at the Fourteenth Session of the Standing Committee of the Sixth National People's Congress that made it illegal for any organization or individual to employ youths before they had completed their nine years of schooling. The bill also authorized free education and subsidies for students whose families had financial difficulties.


title: Education in China

text: Tuition-free primary education is, despite compulsory education laws, still a target rather than a realized goal throughout China. As many families have difficulty paying school fees, some children are forced to leave school earlier than the nine-year goal.


title: Education in China

text: The 9-year System is called "Nine Years - One Policy", or "九年一贯制" in Chinese. It usually refers to the educational integration of the elementary school and the middle school. After graduating from elementary school, graduates can directly enter into the junior high school. The grades in schools that implement the 9-year System are usually called Grade 1, Grade 2, and so on through Grade 9.


title: Education in China

text: China's basic education involves pre-school, nine-year compulsory education from elementary to junior high school, standard senior high school education, special education for disabled children, and education for illiterate people.


title: Education in China

text: China has over 200 million elementary and high school students, who, together with pre-school children, account for one sixth of the total population. For this reason, the Central Government has prioritized basic education as a key field of infrastructure construction and educational development.


title: Education in China

text: In recent years, senior high school education has developed steadily. In 2004 enrollment was 8.215 million, 2.3 times that of 1988. Gross national enrollment in senior high schools has reached 43.8 percent, still lower than that of other developed countries.


title: Education in China

text: The government has created a special fund to improve conditions in China's elementary and high schools, for new construction, expansion, and the re-building of run-down structures. Per-capita educational expenditure for elementary and high school students has grown greatly, teaching and research equipment, books, and documents being updated and renewed every year.


title: Education in China

text: Government's aim for the development of China's basic education system is to approach or attain the level of moderately developed countries by 2010.


title: Education in China

text: Graduates of China's primary and secondary schools test highly in both basic skills and critical thinking skills; however, due to poor health, rural students often drop out or lag in achievement.


title: Education in China

text: "Key schools" is a term for institutions with a record of academic achievements which were given priority in the assignment of teachers, equipment, and funds. Many of these key schools were shut down during the Cultural Revolution, reappeared in the late 1970s and, in the early 1980s, and became an integral part of the effort to revive the lapsed education system. Because educational resources were scarce, key schools also were allowed to recruit the best students for special training to compete for admission to top schools at the next level. Key schools constituted only a small percentage of all regular senior middle schools and funneled the best students into the best secondary schools, largely on the basis of entrance scores. In 1980 the greatest resources were allocated to the key schools that would produce the greatest number of college entrants.


title: Education in China

text: In early 1987, efforts had begun to develop the key school from a preparatory school into a vehicle for diffusing improved curricula, materials, and teaching practices in local schools. Moreover, the appropriateness of a key school's role in the nine-year basic education plan was questioned by some officials because key schools favored urban areas and the children of more affluent and better educated parents. Changchun, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Xiamen, and other cities, and education departments in Shanghai and Tianjin were moving to establish a student recommendation system and eliminate key schools. In 1986 the Shanghai Educational Bureau abolished the key junior-middle-school system to ensure "an overall level of education." Despite the effort to abolish the "Key Schools" system, the practice still exists today under other names, and education inequality is still being widely criticized by some government officials and scholars.


title: Education in China

text: Training schools, also called training centers, are a type of private education offered by companies that teach students in China who are typically from 3–12 years old. These schools exist to improve student performance in academic subjects such as English, math, and Chinese. Training schools can range from a one-room operation with only one teacher to very large corporations with hundreds of thousands of students.


title: Education in China

text: The institution of primary education in a country as vast as China has been an impressive accomplishment. In contrast to the 20 percent enrollment rate before 1949, in 1985 about 96 percent of primary school age children were enrolled in approximately 832,300 primary schools. This enrollment figure compared favorably with the recorded figures of the late 1960s and early 1970s when enrollment standards were more egalitarian. In 1985, the World Bank estimated that enrollments in primary schools would decrease from 136 million in 1983 to 95 million in the late 1990s and that the decreased enrollment would reduce the number of teachers needed. Yet qualified teachers would continue to be in demand.


title: Education in China

text: Under the Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education, primary schools were to be tuition-free and reasonably located for the convenience of children attending them; students would attend primary schools in their neighborhoods or villages. Parents paid a small fee per term for books and other expenses such as transportation, food and heating. Previously, fees were not considered a deterrent to attendance. Under the education reform, students from poor families received stipends, and state enterprises, institutions, and other sectors of society were encouraged to establish their own schools. A major concern was that scarce resources be conserved without causing enrollment to fall and without the weakening of the better schools. In particular, local governments were told not to pursue middle-school education blindly while primary school education was still developing, or to wrest money, teaching staff, and materials from primary schools.


title: Education in China

text: Children usually entered primary school at seven years of age for six days a week, which after regulatory changes in 1995 and 1997 were changed to five and a half and five days, respectively. The two-semester school year consisted of 9.5 months, and began on 1 September and 1 March, with a summer vacation in July and August and a winter vacation in January and February. Urban primary schools typically divided the school week into twenty-four to twenty-seven classes of forty-five minutes each, but in the rural areas, the norm was half-day schooling, more flexible schedules, and itinerant teachers. Most primary schools had a five-year course, except in such cities as Beijing and Shanghai, and later other major cities, which had reintroduced six-year primary schools and accepted children at six and one-half years rather than seven.


title: Education in China

text: The primary-school curriculum consisted of Chinese, mathematics, physical education, music, drawing, and elementary instruction in nature, history, and geography, combined with practical work experiences around the school compound. General knowledge of politics and moral training, which stressed the love of the motherland, love of the political party, and love of the people (and previously love of Chairman Mao), was another part of the curriculum. A foreign language, often English, is introduced in about the third grade. Chinese and mathematics accounted for about 60 percent of the scheduled class time; natural science and social science accounted for about 8 percent. Putonghua (commonly spoken language) was taught in regular schools and pinyin romanization in lower grades and kindergarten. The Ministry of Education required that all primary schools offer courses on morality and ethics. Beginning in the fourth grade, students usually had to perform productive labor two weeks per semester to relate classwork with production experience in workshops or on farms and relate it to academic study. Most schools had after-hour activities at least one day per week to involve students in recreation and community service.


title: Education in China

text: By 1980 the percentage of students enrolled in primary schools were high, but the schools reported high dropout rates and regional enrollment gaps (most enrollees were concentrated in the cities). Only one in four counties had universal primary education. On average, 10 percent of the students dropped out between each grade. During the 1979–83 period, the government acknowledged the "9-6-3" rule, that is, that nine of ten children began primary school, six completed it, and three graduated with good performance. This meant that only about 60 percent of primary students actually completed their five-year program of study and graduated, and only about 30 percent were regarded as having primary-level competence. Statistics in the mid-1980s showed that more rural girls than boys dropped out of school.


title: Education in China

text: Within the framework of the "Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education" and the general trend toward vocational and technical skills, attempts were made to accommodate and correct the gap between urban and rural education. Urban and key schools almost invariably operated on a six-day full-time schedule to prepare students for further education and high-level jobs. Rural schools generally operated on a flexible schedule geared to the needs of the agricultural seasons and sought to prepare students for adult life and manual labor in lower-skilled jobs. They also offered a more limited curriculum, often only Chinese, mathematics, and morals. To promote attendance and allow the class schedule and academic year to be completed, agricultural seasons were taken into account. School holidays were moved, school days shortened, and full-time, half-time, and spare-time classes offered in the slack agricultural seasons. Sometimes itinerant teachers were hired for mountain villages and served one village in the morning, another village in the afternoon.


title: Education in China

text: Rural parents were generally well aware that their children had limited opportunities to further their education. Some parents saw little use in having their children attend even primary school, especially after the establishment of the agricultural responsibility system. Under that system, parents preferred that their children work to increase family income - and withdrew them from school - for both long and short periods of time.


title: Education in China

text: Preschool education, which began at age three, was another target of education reform in 1985. Preschool facilities were to be established in buildings made available by public enterprises, production teams, municipal authorities, local groups, and families. The government announced that it depended on individual organizations to sponsor their own preschool education and that preschool education was to become a part of the welfare services of various government organizations, institutes, and state- and collectively operated enterprises. Costs for preschool education varied according to services rendered. Officials also called for more preschool teachers with more appropriate training.


title: Education in China

text: The 1985 National Conference on Education also recognized the importance of special education, in the form of programs for gifted children and for slow learners. Gifted children were allowed to skip grades. Slow learners were encouraged to reach minimum standards, although those who did not maintain the pace seldom reached the next stage. For the most part, children with severe learning problems and those with handicaps and psychological needs were the responsibilities of their families. Extra provisions were made for blind and severely hearing-impaired children, although in 1984 special schools enrolled fewer than 2 percent of all eligible children in those categories. The China Welfare Fund, established in 1984, received state funding and had the right to solicit donations within China and from abroad, but special education has remained a low government priority.


title: Education in China

text: Today, China has 1,540 schools for special education, with 375,000 students; more than 1,000 vocational training institutes for disabled people, nearly 3,000 standard vocational training and education institutes that also admit disabled people; more than 1,700 training organizations for rehabilitating hearing-impaired children, with over 100,000 trained and in-training children. In 2004, 4,112 disabled students entered ordinary schools of higher learning. Of disabled children receiving special education, 63.6 percent of total recruitment numbers and 66.2 percent of enrollment were in ordinary schools or special classes thereof.


title: Education in China

text: Secondary education in China has a complicated history. In the early 1960s, education planners followed a policy called "walking on two legs," which established both regular academic schools and separate technical schools for vocational training. The rapid expansion of secondary education during the Cultural Revolution created serious problems; because resources were spread too thinly, educational quality declined. Further, this expansion was limited to regular secondary schools; technical schools were closed during the Cultural Revolution because they were viewed as an attempt to provide inferior education to children of worker and peasant families.


title: Education in China

text: In the late 1970s, government and party representatives criticized what they termed the "unitary" approach of the 1960s, arguing that it ignored the need for two kinds of graduates: those with an academic education (college preparatory) and those with specialized technical education (vocational). Beginning in 1976 with the renewed emphasis on technical training, technical schools reopened, and their enrollments increased.


title: Education in China

text: In the drive to spread vocational and technical education, regular secondary-school enrollments fell. By 1986 universal secondary education was part of the nine-year compulsory education law that made primary education (six years) and junior-high-school education (three years) mandatory. The desire to consolidate existing schools and to improve the quality of key middle schools was, however, under the education reform, more important than expanding enrollment.


title: Education in China

text: Junior secondary education is more commonly known as middle school or junior high school education, it consists of the last three years of compulsory education. Students who live in rural areas are often boarded into townships to receive their education.


title: Education in China

text: Senior secondary education often refers to three years of high school education, as from grade 10 to grade 12. Normally, students who have finished six years of primary education will continue three more years of academic study in middle schools as regulated by the Compulsory education law at the age of twelve. This is not compulsory for senior secondary education, where junior graduates may choose to continue a three-year academic education in academic high schools, which will eventually lead to university or to switch to a vocational course in vocational high schools.


title: Education in China

text: Generally, high school years usually have two semesters, starting in September and February. In some rural areas, the operation may be subject to agricultural cycles. The number of lessons offered by a school every week is very subjective and largely depends on the school's resources. In addition to normal lessons, periods for private study and extracurricular activity are provided as well. The academic curriculum consists of Chinese, Mathematics, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, History, Ideology & Political Science, Music, Fine Arts, PE, Technology, Computing, etc. Some schools may also offer vocational subjects. Generally speaking, Chinese, Mathematics, and English are considered as three main subjects as they will definitely be examined in Gaokao. In most provinces, students also need to be examined in either natural sciences, which incorporate Physics, Chemistry and Biology, or social sciences, which incorporate Geography, History, and Ideology & Political Science.


title: Education in China

text: In China, a senior high school graduate will be considered as an educated person, although the majority of graduates will go on to universities or vocational colleges. Given that the competition for limited university places is extremely intense, most high schools are evaluated by their academic performance in Gaokao by parents and students.


title: Education in China

text: Zhongkao (中考), the Senior High School Entrance Examination, is the academic examination held annually in China to distinguish junior graduates. Most commonly, students will be tested in Chinese, Mathematics, English, Physics, Chemistry, Political Science and PE. Scoring systems vary across regions.


title: Education in China

text: Admission for senior high schools, especially selective high schools, is somewhat similar to the one for universities in China. Students will go through an application system where they may choose the high schools at which they wish to study in an order to their preference before the high schools set out their entrance requirements. Once this is completed and the high schools will announce their requirements based on this information and the places they will offer in that year. For instance, if the school offers 800 places in that year, the results offered by the 800th intake student will be the standard requirements. So effectively, this ensures the school selects the top candidates in all the students who have applied to said school in that academic year. The severe competition only occurs in the very top high schools, normally, most students will have sufficient results for them to continue their secondary education if they wish to.


title: Education in China

text: There are other official rules of admission in certain top high schools. If a prestigious senior high school wants to admit 800 students a year, the admissions office ranks students’ scores from highest to lowest and then selects their first 700 students. The other 100 positions are provided to the students who do not meet the required standard, but still want to study at that school. These prospects need to pay extra school fees. A student can't perform badly in Zhongkao, if their scores are close to the required standard, they could still study in that top school if they can afford the expenses. Those who study in that high school must place a maximum of two points below the standard requirement. Usually, 0.5 points is a standard. For instance, if a student is two points below the standard requirement, they pay four times as much as the student who gets 0.5 points below the standard requirement. The admissions of the 100 students who are required to pay the school fees usually do not get the same admission letters as normal students receive, but they can still study and live with normal students in the same high school, with the same teacher.


title: Education in China

text: The "Law on Vocational Education" was issued in 1996. Vocational education embraces higher vocational schools, secondary skill schools, vestibule schools, vocational high schools, job-finding centers, and other adult skills and social training institutes. To enable vocational education to better accommodate the demands of economic re-structuring and urbanization, in recent years the government has remodeled vocational education, oriented towards obtaining employment and focusing on two major vocational education projects to meet society's ever more acute demand for high quality, skilled workers. These are cultivating skilled workers urgently needed in modern manufacturing and service industries, and training rural laborers moving to urban areas. To accelerate vocational education in western areas, the Central Government has used government bonds to build 186 vocational education centers in impoverished western area counties.


title: Education in China

text: Both regular and vocational secondary schools sought to serve modernization needs. A number of technical and "skilled-worker" training schools reopened after the Cultural Revolution, and an effort was made to provide exposure to vocational subjects in general secondary schools (by offering courses in the industry, services, business, and agriculture). By 1985 there were almost 3 million vocational and technical students.


title: Education in China

text: Under the educational reform tenets, polytechnic colleges were to give priority to admitting secondary vocational and technical school graduates and providing on-the-job training for qualified workers. Education reformers continued to press for the conversion of about 50 percent of upper secondary education into vocational education, which traditionally had been weak in the rural areas. Regular senior high schools were to be converted into vocational secondary schools, and vocational training classes were to be established in some senior middle schools. Diversion of students from academic to technical education was intended to alleviate skill shortages and to reduce the competition for university enrollment.


title: Education in China

text: Although enrollment in technical schools of various kinds had not yet increased enough to compensate for decreasing enrollments in regular senior high schools, the proportion of vocational and technical students to total senior-high-school students increased from about 5 percent in 1978 to almost 36 percent in 1985, although development was uneven. Further, to encourage greater numbers of junior-high-school graduates to enter technical schools, vocational and technical school graduates were given priority in job assignments, while other job seekers had to take technical tests.


title: Education in China

text: 1. Technical schools, which offered a four-year, post-junior high course and two- to three-year post-senior high training in such fields as commerce, legal work, fine arts, and forestry;


title: Education in China

text: 2. Workers' training schools, which accepted students whose senior-high-school education consisted of two years of training in such trades as carpentry and welding;


title: Education in China

text: 3. Vocational technical schools, which accepted either junior-or senior-high-school students for one- to three-year courses in cooking, tailoring, photography, and other services; and


title: Education in China

text: These technical schools had several hundred different programs. Their narrow specializations had advantages in that they offered in-depth training, reducing the need for on-the-job training and thereby lowering learning time and costs. Moreover, students were more motivated to study if there were links between training and future jobs. Much of the training could be done at existing enterprises, where staff and equipment was available at little additional cost.


title: Education in China

text: There were some disadvantages to this system. Under the Four Modernizations, technically trained generalists were needed more than highly specialized technicians. Also, highly specialized equipment and staff were underused, and there was an overall shortage of specialized facilities to conduct training. In addition, large expenses were incurred in providing the necessary facilities and staff, and the trend in some government technical agencies was toward more general technical and vocational education.


title: Education in China

text: Further, the dropout rate continued to have a negative effect on the labor pool as upper-secondary-school technical students dropped out and as the percentage of lower-secondary-school graduates entering the labor market without job training increased. Occupational rigidity and the geographic immobility of the population, particularly in rural areas, further limited educational choices.


title: Education in China

text: Although there were 668,000 new polytechnic school enrollments in 1985, the Seventh Five-Year Plan called for annual increases of 2 million mid-level skilled workers and 400,000 senior technicians, indicating that enrollment levels were still far from sufficient. To improve the situation, in July 1986 officials from the State Education Commission, State Planning Commission, and Ministry of Labor and Personnel convened a national conference on developing China's technical and vocational education. It was decided that technical and vocational education in rural areas should accommodate local conditions and be conducted on a short-term basis. Where conditions permitted, the emphasis would be placed on organizing technical schools and short-term training classes. To alleviate the shortage of teachers, vocational and technical teachers' colleges were to be reformed and other colleges and universities were to be mobilized for assistance. The State Council decided to improve training for workers who had passed technical examinations (as opposed to unskilled workers) was intended to reinforce the development of vocational and technical schools.


title: Education in China

text: Expanding and improving secondary vocational education has long been an objective of China's educational reformers, for vocational schools are seen as those which are best placed to address (by providing trained workers) the rising needs of the nation's expanding economy, especially its manufacturing and industrial sectors. Without an educated and trained workforce, China cannot have economic, hence social and national, development. Yet, given a finite, and often quite limited, a pot of money for secondary schools, and allocation competition/conflict necessarily exists between its two sub-sectors: general education and vocational/technical education. Regardless, an over-enrollment in the latter has been the overall result of the mid-1980s reforms. Yet firms that must seek workers from this graduate pool have remained unimpressed with the quality of recruits and have had to rely on their own job-training programs that provide re-education for their newly hired workers. The public, also, has not been very enthusiastic over vocational secondary education which, unlike general education, does not lead to the possibility of higher education. The public's perception is that these schools provide little more than a dead end for their children. Also, vocational institutions are more expensive to run than their counterparts in general education, and they have not had sufficient money to modernize their facilities, as China's modernizing national economy demands. By mid-decade of the 21st Century, therefore, academics and policy-makers alike began to question the policy that pours funds into vocational schools that do not do their intended function.


title: Education in China

text: In 2021, 56,000,000 students attended 190,000 privately operated schools, with 12,000 of them having primary and/or junior high school levels. These students represent about 20% of all students in China. By 2021, the Chinese central government was nationalizing some for-profit private schools.


title: Education in China

text: As of January 2021, SICAS –Study In China Admission System listed China as having 300 international schools.


title: Education in China

text: ISC defines an 'international school' in the following terms: "ISC includes an international school if the school delivers a curriculum to any combination of pre-school, primary or secondary students, wholly or partly in English outside an English-speaking country, or if a school in a country where English is one of the official languages offers an English-medium curriculum other than the country's national curriculum and is international in its orientation." This definition is used by publications including "The Economist". There were 177,400 students enrolled in international schools in 2014.


title: Education in China

text: 2013 Nicholas Brummitt, managing director of ISC, reported that there were 338 international schools in Mainland China as of 2013, with 184,073 students. Slightly more than half of the international schools are in the major expatriate areas of China: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong Province, while the remainder is in other areas. Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou have the most international schools while significant numbers also exist in Shenzhen and Chengdu.


title: Education in China

text: Many international schools in Beijing and Shanghai, in accordance with Chinese law, are only permitted to enroll students who have citizenship in areas other than Mainland China. This is because Mainland Chinese students are required to have a certain curriculum, and schools that do not include this curriculum are not permitted to enroll Mainlanders. Mainlander children who hold foreign passports are permitted to attend these schools. As of 2014, 19 international schools in Beijing are restricted to non-Mainlanders. There are also schools using international curricula that accept both Mainlander and non-Mainlander students.


title: Education in China

text: By 2004, increased international business operations resulted in an increase of foreign children. Many of the original post-1949 international schools used International Baccalaureate and North American curricula. By 2004 many international schools in Beijing and Shanghai using the British curricula had opened. The number of international schools in China grew from 22 schools in 2001 to 338 schools in 2013; over the same period, enrollment in international schools rose 25 times to 184,073 students. By the 2010s, many Mainland Chinese parents began sending their children to international schools that accept Mainland students to increase their children's chances of going overseas.


title: Education in China

text: There is an increasing number of international universities representation in China in recent years, including but not limited to CEIBS and Yale Center Beijing. Columbia Global Centers Beijing opened in 2009 and Harvard Institute Shanghai opened in 2010. Cornell Global is planning to have presence in both Beijing and Shanghai. Stanford University established an academic center in Peking University. Washington University in St. Louis established an EMBA program with Fudan University in 2002 which has since been constantly ranked as one of the best in the world.


title: Education in China

text: Higher education in China is the largest in the world. By the end of 2021, there were over 3,000 colleges and universities, with over 44.3 million students enrolled in mainland China and 240 million Chinese citizens having received high education. The gross rate of enrollment in schools of higher learning reached 58.42 percent in 2020.


title: Education in China

text: In 2015, a tertiary education development initiative called Double First Class University Plan designed by the People's Republic of China government, which aims to comprehensively develop elite Chinese universities into world-class institutions through developing and strengthening their individual faculty departments by the end of 2050. In 2017, the full list of Double First Class University Plan was published. 140 universities have been included in the plan and approved as Double First Class Universities, making up less than 5% of the total number of universities and colleges in China.


title: Education in China

text: The quality of higher education in modern China has changed at various times, reflecting shifts in the political policies implemented by the central government. Following the founding of the PRC, in 1949, the Chinese government's educational focus was largely on political "re-education". In periods of political upheavals, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ideology was stressed over professional or technical competence. During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), tens of thousands of college students joined Red Guard organizations, which persecuted many university faculty members as "counter-revolutionaries" and effectively closed China's universities. When universities reopened in the early 1970s, enrollments were reduced from pre-Cultural Revolution levels, and admission was restricted to individuals who had been recommended by their work unit ("danwei"), possessed good political credentials, and had distinguished themselves in manual labor. In the absence of stringent and reasonably objective entrance examinations, political connections became increasingly important in securing the recommendations and political dossiers necessary to qualify for university admission. As a result, the decline in educational quality was profound. Deng Xiaoping reportedly wrote Mao Zedong in 1975 that university graduates were "not even capable of reading a book" in their own fields when they left the university. University faculty and administrators were demoralized by the political aspects of the university system.


title: Education in China

text: Efforts made in 1975 to improve educational quality were unsuccessful. By 1980 it appeared doubtful that the politically oriented admission criteria had accomplished even the purpose of increasing enrollment of workers and peasant children. Successful candidates for university entrance were usually children of cadres and officials who used personal connections that allowed them to "enter through the back door." Students from officials' families would accept the requisite minimum two-year work assignment in the countryside, often in a suburban location that allowed them to remain close to their families. Village cadres, anxious to please the parents/officials, gladly recommended these youths for university placement after the labor requirement had been met. The child of an official family was then on his or her way to a university without having the academic ability, a record of political activism, or a distinguished work record.


title: Education in China

text: After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, steps were taken to improve educational quality by establishing order and stability, calling for an end to political contention on university campuses, and expanding university enrollments. This pressure to maintain quality and minimize expenditures led to efforts both to run existing institutions more efficiently and to develop other college and university programs. As a result, labor colleges for training agro-technicians and factory-run colleges for providing technical education for workers were established. In addition, eighty-eight institutions and key universities were provided with special funding, top students and faculty members, and other support, and they recruited the most academically qualified students without regard to family background or political activism.


title: Education in China

text: The commitment to the Four Modernizations required great advances in science and technology. Under the modernization program, higher education was to be the cornerstone for training and research. Because modernization depended on a vastly increased and improved capability to train scientists and engineers for needed breakthroughs, the renewed concern for higher education and academic quality - and the central role that the sciences were expected to play in the Four Modernizations - highlighted the need for scientific research and training. This concern can be traced to the critical personnel shortages and qualitative deficiencies in the sciences resulting from the unproductive years of the Cultural Revolution when higher education was shut down. In response to the need for scientific training, the Sixth Plenum of the Twelfth National Party Congress Central Committee, held in September 1986, adopted a resolution on the guiding principles for building a socialist society that strongly emphasized the importance of education and science.


title: Education in China

text: Reformers realized that the higher education system was far from meeting modernization goals and that additional changes were needed. The Provisional Regulations Concerning the Management of Institutions of Higher Learning, promulgated by the State Council in 1986, initiated vast changes in administration and adjusted educational opportunity, direction, and content. With the increased independence accorded under the education reform, universities and colleges were able to choose their own teaching plans and curricula; to accept projects from or cooperate with other socialist establishments for scientific research and technical development in setting up "combines" involving teaching, scientific research, and production; to suggest appointments and removals of vice presidents and other staff members; to take charge of the distribution of capital construction investment and funds allocated by the state, and to be responsible for the development of international exchanges by using their own funds.


title: Education in China

text: The changes also allowed the universities to accept financial aid from work units and decide how this money was to be used without asking for more money from departments in charge of education. Further, higher education institutions and work units could sign contracts for the training of students.


title: Education in China

text: Higher education institutions also were assigned a greater role in running inter-regional and inter-departmental schools. Within their state-approved budgets, universities secured more freedom to allocate funds as they saw fit and to use the income from tuition and technical and advisory services for their own development, including collective welfare and bonuses.


title: Education in China

text: There also was a renewed interest in television, radio, and correspondence classes (see distance learning and electronic learning). Some of the courses, particularly in the college-run factories, were serious, full-time enterprises, with a two- to three-year curriculum.


title: Education in China

text: National examinations to select students for higher education (and positions of leadership) were an important part of China's culture, and, traditionally, entrance to a higher education institution is considered prestigious. Although the examination system for admission to colleges and universities has undergone many changes since the Cultural Revolution, it remains the basis for recruiting academically able students. When higher education institutions were reopened in the early 1970s, candidates for entrance examinations had to be senior-middle-school graduates or the equivalent, generally below twenty-six years of age. Work experience requirements were eliminated, but workers and staff members needed permission from their enterprises to take the examinations.


title: Education in China

text: Each provincial-level unit was assigned a quota of students to be admitted to key universities, the second quota of students for regular universities within that administrative division, and a third quota of students from other provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities who would be admitted to institutions operated at the provincial level. Provincial-level administrative units selected students with outstanding records to take the examinations. Additionally, preselection examinations were organized by the provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities for potential students (from three to five times the number of places allotted). These candidates were actively encouraged to take the examination to ensure that a sufficient number of good applicants would be available. Cadres with at least two years of work experience were recruited for selected departments in a small number of universities on an experimental basis. Preferential admission treatment (in spite of lower test scores) was given to minority candidates, students from disadvantaged areas, and those who agreed in advance to work in less developed regions after graduation.