BEIJING - A white paper issued by China's State Council Information Office on Friday said China has invested heavily on improving its health care services.

According to the white paper, titled "Development of China's Public Health as an Essential Element of Human Rights," China invested 42 billion yuan (around 6.3 billion U.S. dollars) from 2011 to 2015 to support the building of 1,500 county-level hospitals, 18,000 town and township health centers, and more than 100,000 village clinics and community health centers.

By the end of 2016, there were 983,394 medical and health institutions in China, said the paper.

China has also built a medical education system of the largest scale in the world, with a total number of 3.95 million students studying at 922 medical colleges and universities, and 1,564 secondary schools with medical courses, by the end of 2016, it said.

By the end of 2016, the number of health workers totaled 11.173 million, with 8.454 million technical personnel and 2.31 physicians for every 1,000 people, said the paper.

The Chinese government has also increased its support for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), investing a special fund of 4.6 billion yuan to support the capacity building of TCM from 2013 to 2015, according to the paper.