Chinese Higher Education Enters a New Era

Academe, Nov/Dec 2003 by Duan, Xin-Ran

As Chinese society changes, higher education is undergoing major transformations. The university model of the United States and other Western countries exercises a powerful infuence.

New trends in Chinese higher education are attracting the attention of global educators. Since the establishment of Western-oriented modern universities at the end of nineteenth century, Chinese higher education has continued to evolve. Over the past two decades, however, tremendous economic development in China has stimulated reforms in higher education that have resulted in some remarkable changes.

The first modern institution, Peiyang University, was founded on October 2, 1895, in Tianjin. The university changed its name to Tianjin University in 1951 and became one of the leading universities in China. Next, Jiaotong University was founded in Shanghai in 1896. In the 1950s, most of this university was moved to Xi'an, an ancient capital city in northwest China, and became Xi'an Jiaotong University; the part of the university remaining in Shanghai was renamed Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Tianjin University celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 1995, followed by Xi'an Jiaotong and Shanghai Jiaotong Universities in 1996. Other leading universities, such as Zhejiang University (1897), Beijing University (1898), and Nanjing University (1902) also recently celebrated their hundredth anniversaries, one after another. These celebrations marked the beginning of a new chapter in Chinese higher education.

For more than half a century, from 1896 to 1949, Chinese higher education progressed according to the Western university model, although Chinese universities suffered heavily in the Resistance War against the Japanese Invasion (1937-45) and in the War of Liberation (1946-49). With the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, however, Chinese higher education cut off links to the Western world and turned, for various political reasons, toward the former Soviet Union's model for universities. A reconstruction of Chinese higher education, involving reorganization of universities and disciplines, took place nationwide in the early 1950s. In this movement, common comprehensive universities were reformed into single disciplinary universities such as universities of literature and arts, universities of engineering, medical colleges, agricultural colleges, railway institutes, and so on.

The well-known "Big Eight Institutes," located in northwest Beijing, was among these reorganized institutions. It included an aeronautical engineering institute, a medical institute, an iron and steel engineering institute, a petroleum institute, a geological institute, an institute of mining technology, a forestry institute, and an institute of agricultural machinery.

Each reorganized university or institute offered many more majors in specific curricula than were available under the Western model. For example, the discipline of mechanical engineering was typically transformed into subdisciplines to permit general mechanical engineering students to major in machine tools, casting, welding, or forging, while thermal power engineering majors could specialize in boilers, turbines, internal combustion engines, compressors, or refrigeration machinery. These far-reaching changes eliminated any real comprehensive university in China for nearly five decades. The current reorganization of higher education, initiated in the late 1990s, involves a return to a truly comprehensive university.

Since China adopted its open-door policy approximately twenty-five years ago, Chinese higher education has begun once again to draw closer to the advanced Western world. China's decision to send scholars and students to the United States at the end of the 1970s, after thirty years of hostility between the two countries, marked a dramatic turning point in the nation's educational history. Today, about 50,000 Chinese students are studying in the United States, accounting for 10 percent of the total international students in the country. More Chinese students have gone to other countries to study. According to statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), China sends more students than any other country to study abroad. In the other direction, more students from the United States and elsewhere are going to China to study language, culture, history, traditional Chinese medicine, science, engineering, and other fields. The increasing number of international students worldwide demonstrates a relatively quick change in the integration of global education.

In 1998, the Chinese government announced that it would build some Chinese universities into world-class institutions. To achieve that goal, the government promised to increase the educational allocation in the national budget by 1 percent a year for each of the five years following 1998. When Chinese president Jiang Zemin attended the hundredth anniversary ceremony at Beijing University in 1998 and the ninetieth anniversary ceremony at Tsinghua University in 2001, he emphasized this ambitious goal of advancing several of China's higher education institutions into the top tier of universities worldwide in the next several decades. In the meantime, China has received educational aid from UNESCO and many other international organizations and sources, including the World Bank, which recently loaned China $14.7 billion for educational development.