The move has been another major advance in promoting educational equality after the central government exempted students in rural areas from tuition and miscellaneous fees related to nine-year compulsory education last year, said the official.
About 4 million students at 1,800 colleges and universities and 16 million students at 15,000 secondary vocational schools would benefit from the financial aid scheme, he said.
The ministry would strive to make the national scholarships, bursaries and student loans available to more students, and require schools to put aside certain amount of money out of their earnings to support needy students, said the official.
The financial aid provided by all-level financial authorities during this fall semester would reach 15.4 billion yuan (2.03 billion dollars) and that for the whole year of 2008 would be 30.8 billion yuan (4.05 billion dollars), according to the official.
He said the nation had given priority to rural education development to support needy students there to finish their nine-year compulsory education.
By 2010, the nation would have allocated accumulatively 218.2 billion yuan (28.7 billion dollars), of which 125.4 billion yuan from the central government, to carry out the scheme, according to the official.
Last year the central government exempted students in rural areas of western China from tuition and miscellaneous fees related to nine-year compulsory education. The same has been applied in the central and eastern regions this year.
The exemption has relieved the financial burden on 150 million rural families with school-age children. Yet most urban, middle-class parents think the scrapped charges are just "a drop in the bucket" compared with the hefty amount they have to pay, averaging 30,000 yuan in Beijing, for their children to enter the best schools.
The nine-year compulsory education, including six years at elementary school and three years at junior high school, was enforced in China in 1986.
"We are planning to offer three to five teachers or volunteers to each Confucius Institutions in the coming years," Xu Lin, director of the office, said here Sunday
China has so far set up 155 Confucius Institutes, schools or classrooms in 53 countries and regions worldwide.
Xu said each year, there are 10,000 positions of teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the world by conservative estimate, but only 2,000 teachers are available from China.
Last year, China sent 1,004 Chinese teachers to 80 countries and 1,050 volunteers to 34 countries.
In addition to recruiting more Chinese teachers, the office also plans to launch Confucius Institute online and broadcast services to make it more accessible for people interested in learning Chinese, Xu said.
According to the Ministry of Education, about 30 million foreigners are learning Chinese, and the figure will hit 100 million by 2010. In China alone, the number of foreigners studying Mandarin has grown from 36,000 ten years ago to 110,000 this year.
The Confucius Institute, headquartered in Beijing, is a non-profit organization aimed at promoting the Chinese language and culture. By 2010, 500 Confucius Institutes and classrooms are expected to be set up around the world.
Confucius, born in 551 B.C., was a great Chinese thinker, philosopher, statesman and educator. He was also the founder of Confucianism.
Thousands are held under the "re-education through labour" system
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Reforming the "re-education through labour" system is one of 20 items to be tabled at next week's National People's Congress, the China Daily reported.
The newspaper backed changes to the law, but warned of stiff opposition.
The system, known as "laojiao", allows police to send mainly petty criminals to jail for up to four years.
As many as 400,000 people have served terms in "re-education through labour" camps, the China Daily reports.
Adopted in 1957 as a way of tackling dissidents, the law is now frequently used to punish suspects in minor crimes such as prostitution, drug use and petty theft.
However, critics say it has also been used as a way of detaining political and religious activists.
'Lots of disagreements'
The China Daily said the NPC would consider a new, more lenient version of the law when it meets next week.
Under the proposal, the camps would be re-named "correctional centres", all bars and gates would be removed and the incarceration period shortened to less than 18 months, the paper reports.
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PARLIAMENTARY AGENDA
 Draft laws on tax and property
New motions aimed at tackling government corruption
School fee exemptions for some areas
Macro-economic controls
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In an editorial, the China Daily welcomed the proposed changes, saying the current law is "increasingly out of step with the country's progress in protecting human rights".
However, the newspaper pointed out that the proposed legislation has been on the parliament's agenda for the last two years, "and the standing committee said there were still "lots of disagreements" this year".
There are also no plans to change another labour camp system called "reform through labour", or "laogai", under which political activists have also been detained.
The annual session of the National People's Congress, which largely rubber-stamps decisions made by the ruling Communist Party, opens on Monday.
As well as "laojiao", the parliament is also expected to consider important laws on corporate tax and property rights as well as education.