Over the past five years since the Eighteenth Party Congress, the volume of students coming to China to study has continued to expand, and China has become the world’s largest source of overseas students and the third most popular destination students choose to study abroad after the US and UK, according to statistics released by the China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) on Wednesday during a press conference.

In 2016, there were 545,500 Chinese students studying abroad, an increase of 36.26 percent compared with the data in 2012, the first year of the Twelfth Plan, and there were 409,100 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China in 2016, an increase of 58.48 percent compared with 2012, statistics released by MOE have shown.

Of the 545,500 students studied abroad in 2016, 30,000 were funded by the government, 16,300 by their employers, and 498,200 at their own expense, according to statistics released on Wednesday.

The MOE said 432,500 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China in 2016, including 22,500 funded by the government, 20,000 by their employers, and 390,000 at their own expense.

The difference between the number of Chinese students studying abroad and that of those coming back continued to narrow, and with the ratio down to 1.26 to 1 in 2016, which means nearly 80 percent of outbound students returned to China after their studies abroad.

Over the past five years, international students studied in China increased to a large extent, hitting 440,000 in 2016, with an increase by 35 percent compared with that in 2012. Also, China has become the world’s third most popular destination international students choose to study abroad after the US and UK, according to data put public by MOE on Wednesday.

A total of 442,773 international students studied in China’s educational institutions in 2016, with an increase of 11.35 percent from the 2015 total of 397,635. Among the international students in China, 60 percent were from Asia, 18 percent Europe and 11 percent Africa. The top five source countries were South Korea (15.93% of total), the US (5.38%), Thailand (5.20%), India (4.23%) and Pakistan (4.21%).

It is noticeable that the number of students from Belt and Road countries choosing to study in China increased significantly, and the number of international students from 64 countries surrounding the Belt and Road has hit to 207,746 in 2016, an almost 13.6 percent increase from the 2015.

According to statistics released by the MOE, the major distribution of international students studied in China diversified a lot in 2016. Compared more than half of international students choosing Chinese language in 2012, the ratio has declined to 38.2 percent in 2016. And the top three chose by international students in 2016 were western medicine, engineering and business.