"The government should continue to tilt more key universities' seats to students from poverty-stricken regions and the countryside, so as to let more of them receive quality education, and obtain upward social mobility in fair competition," Premier Li Keqiang said in a meeting on education reform on Friday in Beijing.

The wide income gap between urban and rural areas and excessive concentration of education resources in cities reduce the opportunities for students from rural areas and poor families to attend key universities.

Last year, the average personal income of urban residents was 2.73 times more than the average income of rural residents.

About 300 million farmers work and live in cities, but it remains difficult for their children to go to local schools, and most of them can only sit the national college entrance exam in their rural hometowns, where the threshold for entering key universities is much higher than in big cities.

Last year, students from rural areas accounted for more than 40 percent of the total number of students enrolled in Chinese universities. But the proportion was much lower in the key universities. Last year, only 19 percent of Peking University's freshmen came from the countryside.