Students are taught to play with robots in Jingxing County, Shijiazhuang City of north China's Hebei Province, Jan. 10, 2023. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By LIN Yuchen

China's science popularization campaign funds in 2021 exceeded 18.9 billion RMB, up around 10.1 percent from 2020, according to statistics released recently by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The public sector makes up a major source of the funds, to which municipal governments contributed about 79.49 percent, amounting to over 15.02 billion RMB. The national science popularization funds per capita of 2021 was 4.71 RMB, an increase of 0.54 RMB over 2020.

Expenditure on science popularization activities in 2021 was over 8.38 billion RMB, accounting for about 44.24 percent of the total funds spent.

Among the activities, over 1.03 million science popularization lectures were held, attracting about 3.38 billion audiences in total, up around 108.24 percent over 2020.

Over 726 million people participated in the science popularization contests in 2021, an increase of 294.22 percent compared to 2020.

On the media side, the total broadcasting hours of science popularization radio programs reached 146,000 in 2021, accompanied by 177,500 broadcasting hours of TV programs.

Over 855 million science popularization books and over 88 million copies of science popularization journals were published in 2021. In addition, an enhanced online science popularization network, which included 1,867 websites, 1,669 micro-blog accounts, and 7,949 Wechat public accounts, were all newly created.

The infrastructure construction of venues for science popularization cost over 3.33 billion RMB. Relevant exhibits and facilities cost above 1.93 billion RMB.

The number of sci-tech centers and museums also increased significantly to 1,677 in 2021, up 152 compared to 2020, while the yearly number of visitors to these places was 42 percent more in 2021 than in 2020, reaching over 163 million.