The "Action Plan for Education Invigoration for the 21st Century" will seek to ensure that all young and middle-aged people will be able to read and write by 2000.

At present, China's education ministry says, 94% of people in this category are literate, an improvement on a literacy rate of under 82% two decades ago.

There will also be more computers installed in Chinese classrooms, adding to the 400 universities already connected to the Internet in a government-backed scheme.

Under the new proposals, nine years of compulsory education will be enforced across the whole country by 2010.

'Socialist character'

In higher education, the government will encourage the development of high-tech science research, focusing on information technology.

The Education Minister Chen Zhili, emphasising that the revised education system will maintain a Socialist character, said that the country needed "quality as well as quantity, moral education as well as intellectual development and the deepening of reform".

Funding this expansion will mean increasing the country's education budget.