OXFORDS OF THE EAST
Can China’s plans to build world-class universities succeed while the Communist Party maintains a tight grip on political and intellectual freedoms?
On September 10 last year, some of China’s top educators came together at the sprawling Tsinghua University campus in northwest Beijing. The occasion was the launch of an ambitious initiative, the latest in China’s drive to build the ‘Ivy League of the East’—world-class universities that would attract top foreign minds and perhaps, more importantly, stem the flow of Chinese talent to the West, a problem that has, as in India, plagued the nation’s research institutions.
At the centre of this drive is Tsinghua University, China’s top-ranked educational institution, and the alma mater of current president Xi Jinping, as also of his predecessor, Hu Jintao. Last September, Tsinghua unveiled a $400 million scholarship programme, modelled on Oxford University’s Rhodes scholarships. Underlining the importance Beijing places on this initiative, on hand at the unveiling ceremony was Liu Yandong, a member of the Communist Party of China’s Politburo, the top official in charge of China’s education policy. Also in attendance was American billionaire and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who donated $100 million to the programme.
In November 2015, China’s State Council announced plans to “develop world-class universities and first-class disciplines”. The focus is on improving the quality of faculty and research, with the aim of getting Chinese universities into the world’s top 15 by 2030. “It is still early, but we’re making good progress,” says David Li Daokui, a Harvard-educated economist who returned to China to become one of its most influential scholars, and someone who often advises the government on policy.
Tsinghua University and Schwarzman turned to Li to head the ‘Schwarzman Scholars’, as the ‘Chinese Rhodes’ has been named. Li firmly believes that Tsinghua, as well as other top Chinese universities, have made big strides in opening their doors to the world, which goes some way towards explaining their rapid rise in global rankings. Last year, for the first time, three of them were in the top 50 of the QS World University Rankings, with Tsinghua at 24 (see table: Rise to the Top).
“There are two aspects to this: faculty and students,” says Li. “On the faculty side, many schools in Tsinghua have already recruited top non-Chinese academics to teach. In the finance department, which I was heading, we attracted the world’s best insurance expert from the US, who now holds a chair. We are competitive in terms of pay, and that is often the bottom line.”
When it comes to students, the record is mixed. While the total number of foreign students in China has tripled in the past decade to around 400,000, few campuses are truly international in terms of population, and language remains a barrier. The Schwarzman programme is partly aimed at changing that. “Our programme is an accelerator in this regard,” says Li. “We’re putting pressure on the university to be more international, and to be bilingual.”
GOING GLOBAL
TAKING A LEAF OUT OF THE COUNTRY’S playbook on economic reforms in the 1990s—in which foreign companies were encouraged to set up joint ventures in China, partly so that the domestic partners could absorb their technology and experience—Chinese universities have been far more aggressive than India’s in courting global partnerships. China’s state-controlled education system has, in many ways, shown itself to be surprisingly flexible. It has set up numerous joint degree programmes and pushed every major Chinese university to have a top global partner. It has also welcomed foreign universities, helping them set up campuses in China. New York University has a campus in Shanghai, established with East China Normal University, while Johns Hopkins has opened a graduate school in Nanjing.
According to Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, the success of China’s universities in going global is in many ways tied to such partnerships. With Tsinghua, Yale offers a dual degree master’s programme in environmental sciences—Tsinghua offers its engineering expertise, Yale contributes on policy. Students get master’s degrees from both universities. Yale has similar partnerships with Peking University for nanotechnology and Shanghai Jiaotong University for bioinformatics. The American university is in talks with a number of Indian universities, but does not have any similar arrangement.
“Part of the success of Chinese universities [lies in] building these kinds of partnerships with top universities throughout the world,” Salovey says. “That will make it more likely that students from around the world will
come here to join incredibly talented Chinese students on these campuses, and create universities that are more international in flavour over time.”
SPECIAL EDUCATION ZONES
THAT BEING SAID, ADOPTING GLOBAL standards is far from straightforward in China’s strictly controlled education system, where Communist Party secretaries are more powerful than university presidents. This is less of a problem in the sciences or in economics, but foreign students in any department will still face difficulties, among them, a censored internet with no access to Google, Twitter or YouTube. This is hardly conducive to an academic environment, even if software to scale the ‘great firewall’ is widely available.
“I joke that we are a special education zone,” says Li. “I told our faculty and students that within Schwarzman College, they will have 100 per cent academic freedom as understood in most other countries. Everything can be discussed here. Our scholars come here to understand. They don’t come here to provoke a revolution. They don’t plan to go to Tiananmen Square to protest. They come here to learn.”
But the rest of Tsinghua’s students aren’t given this privilege. “As for the whole university, that is a complicat ed issue,” he says. “The university has its own ideas and systems.” At the same time, he hopes the push to go global will have a trickledown effect and bring greater openness to other campuses. “It is possible, especially with other international programmes. For instance, Tsinghua’s global MBA and public policy programmes are also adopting the same policies; it is a stepbystep process.”
LONG ROAD AHEAD
NOT EVERYONE SHARES HIS OPTIMISM. Qiao Mu, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, sees a huge contradiction between plans to open up the education sector and the crackdown by Xi Jinping. While embracing western faculty and research methods, the party is waging a war against ‘western ideas’. Party committees are enforcing a stricter control in university classrooms, and space for academic research in the humanities is shrinking. Qiao, for instance, was prevented from teaching in 2015 after participating in university elections and raising awareness among students on their electoral rights, part of a trend, he says, of tightening control.
Academic freedom may not be much of an issue in the sciences, where China is taking the lead, but when it comes to research, challenges remain. Zhang Jie, president of the QS fourthranked Jiaotong University, says a massive increase in funding has been key to its surge in rankings. In 2012, Beijing spent a trillion yuan (Rs 10 lakh crore) on research programmes. By that year, he says, the number of fulltime researchers in China had grown to 314,000, up by a third from 2005. The number of published articles rose by 54 per cent to 1.1 million, while patents rose eightfold to 66,755. However, as Zhang lamented in a recent essay in Nature, the quality of research was “sluggish” in part because of “ossified practices in evaluation” and a system that rewarded “quantity over quality”. Dr Yi Pi, who recently returned to Beijing after a graduate programme at Duke University, agrees. In the United States, he notes, there is much greater support, especially for research. “We need to fully embrace their methods when it comes to teaching and research.”
At the same time, Li believes the universities are moving in the right direction. His new programme, he is convinced, will change the way the university functions. “We’re demonstrating a new way of university education in China,” he says. “We’re the only college where students of different disciplines live together, and the faculty with students.” This may seem a small detail, but as Li puts it, little things can often end up being transformative.
“Our scholars don’t go to Tiananmen Square to protest. They come here to learn” David Li Daokui, Dean, Schwarzman Scholars, Tsinghua University