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Article History

Received: 10 May 2024

Accepted: 12 March 2025

First Online: 3 April 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no known competing interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Meanwhile, Wei Yang was a member of the Editorial Board of this journal at the time of acceptance for publication. The manuscript was assessed in line with the journal’s standard editorial processes, including its policy on competing interests.

: The research utilized existing, second-hand data acquired from various organizations, such as Stats China and the Ministry of Education, China, among others; no direct data collection from human participants was conducted. Furthermore, our team had no direct contact with any participants, and we did not handle any personally identifying or sensitive information. Therefore, the study did not involve direct interaction with human participants, and there is no need to obtain additional ethical approval or informed consent from participants.

: The respondents were provided information to give consents for their responses to be used in research and aggregated data to be published in research papers.