China's 2025 National Guideline on Generative AI Use in Primary and Secondary Schools

In May 2025, the education-ministry-affiliated Committee on Basic Education Teaching Guidance issued China's first national 'Guide to Using Generative Artificial Intelligence in Primary and Secondary Schools.' It follows several years of controversy over facial-recognition and behaviour-monitoring cameras in Chinese classrooms, which the Ministry of Education had already pledged in 2019 to 'curb and regulate' after a public backlash at China Pharmaceutical University.

To tier permitted generative-AI use by school age, protect student data, and ensure AI complements rather than replaces human-led teaching and assessment.

Primary-school pupils are barred from independently using open-ended generative AI tools and may only use them under direct teacher supervision; middle-school students may examine the logical structure behind AI-generated content; high-school students may design, test and critique AI models as part of interdisciplinary and systems-level projects. The guideline bans teachers from using AI to grade students, answer exam questions on their behalf, or process sensitive personal data, and bans students from submitting AI-generated work as their own or using AI to cheat. It instructs local education authorities to formulate area-specific AI management rules, set up data-protection safeguards, run ethical-review mechanisms, and maintain a dynamic whitelist of generative-AI tools approved for use on school grounds.

As a compulsory national policy rather than a voluntary recommendation, the guideline is unusually prescriptive by international standards, but it is also brand new: as of mid-2025 there is no independent evaluation of how consistently schools maintain whitelists, run ethical reviews, or enforce the age tiers in practice.