BEIJING, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- China's 220 million primary and middle school students on Wednesday started their new semester by watching the TV program "My Dream, Chinese Dream."
The TV program was jointly produced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and China Central Television (CCTV) and aired from 9:00-10:40 on Wednesday morning.
Celebrities including Yuan Longping, a scientist dubbed as the "father of hybrid rice," Ma Yun, a self-made Internet business tycoon and also CEO of Alibaba Networking Technology Co., and movie star Li Lianjie, among others, shared their dreams with the students in the TV program.
The ministry had issued a circular requesting schools nationwide to organize students to watch the program in their first class of the new semester.
"The TV program is hoped to inspire and educate young people to have dreams and work hard to realize them," said Wang Dinghua, an official in charge of primary and middle school affairs with the MOE.
"A person's dream might be small, but when we get together, we will have a very big dream," said Li Lianjie, the action movie star better known to English-speaking audiences as Jet Li, when delivering a speech in the program.
He hoped that children across the country would uphold their personal dreams with one hand and the nation's dream with the other.
After watching the TV program, class meetings were held in many schools to discuss students' dreams and the Chinese dream.
Shi Xiujie, a 12-year-old student from Yuhuatai Primary School in the eastern city of Nanjing, said "my dream is to be a teacher. I will teach my students how to protect themselves in disasters like the mudslide in Zhouqu."
Zhang Xu, another student in Nanjing, said his dream was to create an IT firm like Microsoft, "China needs to have its own operating system like Windows."
Chinese students had their first national TV class in 2008.
In that year, students were given tips on how to survive a natural disaster. In 2009, students were taught to love their home, friends and motherland.