Chinese netizens have expressed frustration and even anger after the Chinese team came sixth at the Romanian Master of Mathematics competition, a field usually dominated by the country.

All six contestants from China failed to win gold medal at the competition and the one with best performance came 15th.

China won the gold medal in 2009 and 2012 and came in second in 2010 and third in 2015 and 2017.

The Romanian Master of Mathematics is one of the most challenging international high school competitions. A total of 24 teams from around the world competed in the 11th Romanian Master of Mathematics. Contestants work through six problems over two days, and the team score is based on the combined highest three individual scores.

China has always prided itself in the mathematics abilities and netizens started to criticize the Ministry of Education's decision to ban schools from using the results of Mathematical Olympiad as enrollment criteria in 2001 to alleviate students' academic burden.

Qu Zhenhua, the leader of the Chinese team and associated professor in the mathematics department at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, told Pear Video that the country has not sent its best students to the competition, and the students participating in the RMM this year was only a regional team from Shanghai.

They did not come to Romania to win gold medal, the competition is only for training, he said, adding that "they has done well and performed to their level."

Learning Mathematical Olympiad is not for everyone and only students with special talent should get trained in the sector, he added.

Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, said it used to be very popular for parents to send their children to tutoring classes to prepare them for math competitions, which allowed their children to win places in better schools.

However, education authorities have been taking aim at the classes amid fears of adding too much pressure on students, and most children who took the classes had little interest in math competitions, he said.

"Students' development should be natural and parents should not force them to learn something they do not like and they do not need to be the first in everything."