Chinese universities broaden international outlook

International students at Tsinghua University. [Photo/VCG]

Cheng Fangping, education professor at Renmin University of China, said, "International education cooperation and exchanges have been an important part of the nation's education policies since reform and opening-up."

This is driven by the opening-up policy and the nation's efforts to become a higher education power globally, Cheng said.

The rise of the country's universities in global rankings is not surprising, as no nation puts more resources into higher education than China, which is home to the world's fastest-growing higher education system, in quality as well as quantity, he said.

In 2017, China launched the Double World-Class Project, which includes building world-class universities with Chinese characteristics and Chinese first-class disciplines at a global level. The aim is for the country to have 42 world-class universities and some 456 world-class disciplines in 95 universities by the middle of the century.

According to the plan, by 2050, the number of world-class Chinese universities and disciplines will have risen massively. They will be at the top of world-class rankings and China will have a strong higher education system.

The country spent more than 4.6 trillion yuan ($668 billion) on education nationwide last year, up by 8.39 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Education. More than 1.2 trillion yuan was spent on higher education, up by 8.15 percent from the previous year and accounting for about 1.3 percent of national GDP.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2018 "Education at a Glance" report, public spending on higher education in the US is 1.3 percent of GDP. That is equal to public spending in Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and higher than spending rates in Germany (1.2 percent), France (1.2), Canada (1.2), Spain (1), Italy (0.8) and Japan (0.7).

This year, Tsinghua University received a budget of more than 29.7 billion yuan, ranking first among all mainland universities, and up from 26.9 billion yuan last year. Zhejiang University ranked second with 19.1 billion yuan and Peking University third with 19 billion yuan.

Chen Wei, an official at Peking University's Office of Policy and Legislative Affairs, said increased government investment in higher education means universities can hire good teachers globally and have more resources to invest in academic research. This in turn can raise their rankings globally, as academic standing and research impact are important factors in these rankings.

The rise up the rankings is also the result of numerous reforms conducted by universities in teaching and teacher evaluation, he said.

For example, university teachers used to have contracts for life unless they made serious mistakes. However, they now have to be assessed more often, and those that have not made progress academically within a certain period are fired, Chen said, adding that this has prompted teachers to focus more on academic research and an increase in the number of papers published.

According to a statement from QS, the higher education analysts, of the mainland's 42 ranked universities, 32 have improved their performances for its Citations per Faculty indicator.

The country's top 10 universities produced 428,191 research papers in the five-year period used by QS to assess research impact, while the top 10 universities in the US produced 443,996. This means that the output gap narrowed to 15,805 papers, while last year it was 37,233, it said.

Wu Libo, director of Fudan University's planning office, said that according to Essential Science Indicators, a database that surveys more than 11,000 journals worldwide, the university this year published more than 3.7 times the number of papers it produced 10 years ago.

Citations this year were 9.2 times the number for 2009, she said, adding that the university last year published nearly 700 research papers in top journals, including Nature and Science.