Chinese universities seek global competitiveness

Modernisation, reform and opening up to the outside world have transformed China's economy from highly-centralised and planned into dynamic and market-oriented. The higher education sector has to adopt resulting challenges and new approaches, including privatisation and decentralisation. How are Chinese universities addressing global changes to become more competitive and successful?

The government has decentralised and privatised higher education by allowing private and overseas universities to run programmes in mainland China. These must be joint ventures and overseas partners have to reinvest any surpluses.

Structural reforms include curriculum redesign, financing, privatisation, and strategies to achieve 'world-class' universities. Chinese students now pay for their university tuition. Domestic universities are working hard to develop their research capacity and earn more income to develop and internationalise their research and teaching programmes.

In order to strengthen international competitiveness of Chinese universities, the government has implemented several major projects, for example:

• The 211 Project aims to develop 100 key universities and disciplines with additional funding to improve teaching and research facilities.
• The 985 Programme aims to transform Beijing and Tsinghua Universities into world-class universities by 2015 and 2011 respectively – both having to compete internationally for research performance.

Given the increasing competition between leading universities worldwide, the Chinese government has identified national research centres for humanities and social sciences and national laboratories to promote scientific research. The government is also implementing policies to ensure more people benefit from higher education. Although still mainly concentrated in coastal areas or major cities, in the last decade, the number of undergraduate and postgraduate students has increased to 20 million.

Other successes include:

• Zhejiang University now ranks in the top three of China's University League after merging four local universities in Hangzhou area to combine talents and resources.
• In May 2008, the College of Government and Public Affairs at Sun Yat-Sen University launched the new Social Welfare and Social Policy Research Institute, which is strengthening links with top Chinese research institutes and international centres.
• The government is encouraging Chinese and overseas universities to work together. By June 2004, there were 745 joint programmes, with 169 allowed to award overseas or Hong Kong degrees.
• The Ministry of Education is currently supporting PhD students to study overseas for a year during their research programme.

Future challenges
With investment concentrated on a selected few, the university sector in China is becoming highly stratified and unequal in terms of state funding. Also, the rapid increase of higher education providers and student numbers has caused concerns for quality assurance. In order to raise academic standards, the Chinese government is therefore emphasising rigorous quality assurance reviews and further research. Chinese academics are being sent on international exchanges to learn good practices, while foreign academic experts are invited to advise the government or universities on how to conduct high quality research and teaching. International collaboration is being encouraged and the quest for 'world-class universities' has definitely shaped the future development of higher education in China.

Ka-Ho Mok
Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
T +852 28598016
ka-ho.mok@hku.hk