This Day, That Year: Aug 6

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

An item from Aug 7, 1986, from China Daily showed a satellite for educational programs on TV being set up in Aba county, Sichuan province, enabling the locals to watch television at home. It was part of a satellite education program to train local teachers. The program opened in 1987.

Rural education in China has improved dramatically over the decades.

China's rural education reform started in 1984, and experienced a milestone in 2006 when the government made primary school and the first three years of secondary school free for all rural children and helped meet their costs.

According to the Ministry of Education, the country now has 2.9 million rural teachers, 1.7 million of them under the age of 40. In the past 13 years, 335,000 college graduates have been hired to work at rural schools in central and western China.

From 2013 to 2018, central and local governments invested 542.6 billion yuan ($78 billion) to build and renovate school buildings and buy teaching resources.

To bridge the gap between urban and rural education, different levels of government purchased 5.1 million computers.

The ministry also said that more than 90 percent of primary and secondary schools in China now have access to the internet.

Technologies such as the internet and artificial intelligence have also made teaching accessible in smaller cities and rural areas.

In an education program initiated by China Daily, a virtual learning space known as the "dual-teacher classroom "was built, in which "cyber-classes" are held twice a week in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province.

It aims to expand access to high-quality English education resources and help to improve the competence of English teachers as a way of boosting foreign-language tuition.