In the past five years, about 2.5 million students in China went abroad to study and almost 80 percent of them came back after, an official of the Ministry of Education said at a news briefing Tuesday.

Studying abroad provides diversified choices for Chinese students and the country at the same time, and is also enriching domestic educational resources to meet people's educational demand, like Sino-foreign cooperative education, Liu Jin, Director of the International Cooperation and Exchange Department of the Ministry of Education said.

Currently, over 300,000 students are studying in such cooperatively-run colleges, he said, and the country has also strengthened cooperation with Germany to improve China's vocational education.

From 2016 to 2020, the education ministry approved 580 Sino-foreign cooperatively-run schools and educational programs. And by the end of 2020, the total number of such institutes stands at 2,332, of which 1,230 are colleges and universities.

Liu said that since China launched the "Belt and Road Initiative" in 2017, students from countries along the Belt and Road account for 54.1 percent of total overseas students in China.

And in 2019, the number of exchange students between China and Russia exceeded 100,000, a year ahead of schedule. In 2012, China and Russia signed the Action Plan for China-Russia Cultural Cooperation, where the two countries set out to boost student exchanges with supporting policies and send 100,000 students to study in each other's country by 2020.