On the Way

Newly established Westlake University aims to be a world-class private research facility

China’s youngest university, Westlake University, consists of a cluster of buildings on a plot of land encircled by water. It is named after the West Lake, the iconic landmark of Hangzhou City, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province.

“Westlake University officially sets sail,” announced Shi Yigong, the university’s president and also a world-renowned scientist, on October 20 at its launching ceremony. Shi introduced the university as the first private research university in the history of the People’s Republic of China, which is also nonprofit and supported by the government.

The nascent university currently has a small team, with 68 key instructors, 139 doctoral candidates, 96 staff members, 159 other researchers as well as 17 employees of the Westlake Education Foundation, which is financing the school.

Small as it is, it harbors a big dream. Shi said that the university hopes to explore China’s higher education reform and become a world science and technology leader.

Meeting the demand

In the four decades since the launch of reform and opening up, China’s higher education has made great progress. A number of excellent public universities represented by Tsinghua and Peking universities have come abreast with the world’s first-class universities in many aspects, said Shi.

However, currently and in the predictable future, “Chinese universities cannot fully meet the public’s desire for high-quality educational resources, nor can they meet the country’s need for cutting-edge science and technology to achieve sustainable development and economic transformation,” he pointed out.

“This gap needs to be filled by the joint efforts of a generation of people,” he said. That is why he and some like-minded people turned to private universities for solutions.

Throughout the modern history of science and education development, private universities have shown great strength because of their flexibility and diversity, Shi noted. A number of private universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, have not only trained generations of outstanding scholars, including many Nobel laureates, but also become the engines powering science- and technologyintensive economic development.

On March 11, 2015, several scholars and people from the business circle submitted a proposal to the Central Government to establish a private research-oriented university. The initiators included Shi and Chen Shiyi, President of Southern University of Science and Technology and former Vice President of Peking University, as well as Pan Jianwei, the arch designer of China’s quantum satellite and Vice President of China University of Science and Technology.

On December 10, 2016, the Westlake Institute for Advanced Study, the predecessor to Westlake University, was established, with Shi as its first president.

On April 2 this year, the Ministry of Education approved the establishment of Westlake University and on October 20, it was inaugurated in Hangzhou.

The university is positioned to be small but of high quality. Within the next six years, only doctoral candidates will be admitted. Currently, it only has three schools, namely, science, engineering and life sciences. In the future, even after it admits undergraduates, its total enrollment will not exceed 5,000.

Qiu Min, the university’s vice president, recently said that the short-term goal of the university is to build a first-class academic team and have a group of first-class students. In the future, the university will strive to be a first-class university.

Heralding reform

The launch of Westlake University has received widespread public attention because of the fact that it distinguishes itself from other universi- ties in that it is private, research-oriented and high-aiming. Most universities in China are government funded, whereas a small number are private.

According to Shi, when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, there were 69 private institutions of higher learning in the country. In the early 1950s, they gradually turned into public schools. After that, there was no private higher education for 30 years. Since the 1980s, private higher education has gradually reemerged and developed remarkably in recent years. Private universities are becoming an important force in China’s higher education system. However, compared with public universities in the same period, private universities are still in the initial stage, and they tend to be small and underdeveloped, focused on vocational skill training to prepare students for the job market. Moreover, a significant number of private colleges and universities are for profit.

The funding of Westlake University is organized by a foundation, the Westlake Education Foundation. China began to implement the Private Education Promotion Law in September 2017, requiring private nonprofit universities to be funded by foundations. However, the law also stipulates that nonprofit private universities should be treated like public ones. “This means that local governments will give nonprofit private universities the same support and preferential land, tax policies and other treatment as