Educating the Masses

RDX : 看前半就好

by Helen Joyce and James Miles

Posted November 7, 2008

Pity the aspiring Chinese high-school student. Despite recent breakneck expansion—the number of places in Chinese universities has increased six-fold in the last six years—the country can offer university places to only one-fifth of its 125 million college-age youths. Youngsters hopeful of entry to elite universities must cram through their high-school years to have any chance. Meanwhile, even as the number of graduates has ballooned, the value of their degrees has plummeted. Many recent graduates have found only menial jobs, or none at all.

Then there is the question of the quality of instruction. China has a long and enduring tradition of elevating rote learning above independent thought, and theory above practice. This often means Chinese graduates are ill-prepared for work. Engineering students, for example, may be good at mathematics but poor at solving problems. A recent survey of academics at Australia’s Monash University found widespread complaints that students from China were unwilling to participate in class discussion. It put this down to growing up in a transmissive educational environment where teachers are seen as the font of knowledge.


Chinese universities’ rush to expand and generate more revenue has also led to some dubious practices. For instance, state-run universities are admitting less-qualified but higher-paying students to affiliated private institutions whose diplomas look remarkably similar to their own.

Parents with money and guanxi—the web of personal connections and obligations that permeates life in China—can give lavish gifts and call in favors to get their children into elite schools, and occasionally even get hold of extracts from the gaokao, the national university-entrance examination. So their children, like the cleverest ones, are served adequately by the world’s biggest university system. But it fails the masses—and produces less than meets the eye.

A 2005 study by McKinsey revealed a “paradox of shortages amid plenty.” Of the country’s 1.6 million young engineers, it estimated 10% were sufficiently well trained to work in multinationals—a talent pool no larger than that in Britain, a far smaller country that itself has big problems persuading youngsters to study engineering.

Foreign study may be a way out for the small number who are rich enough to pay for it or clever enough to win scholarships. But it is no solution for China as a whole. A 2007 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that of the one million Chinese students who had studied overseas from 1978 to 2006, 70% did not return. It blamed a higher standard of living abroad and the one-child policy for this brain drain.

China knows that its universities—devastated during the Maoist era and woefully underfunded for much of the 1980s and 1990s—cannot compete with those of the West. Shanghai Jiaotong University’s global ranking puts no Chinese university in the top 200; Times Higher Education, a British magazine, puts Peking University 50th and only six Chinese institutions in the top 200. But that may be about to change. During the mid-1990s, China began spending more money on scientific research at the top 100 or so of its higher education institutions (of which there are more than 1,800). In 1998, then President Jiang Zemin announced plans to turn some of them into “first-rate universities of international advanced level,” which naturally meant a healthy infusion of funding.

The results are easy to see on the campuses of Peking and Tsinghua universities. Around the run-down buildings of the Maoist era have sprung up modern faculty offices, lecture halls and laboratories. Once ill-paid professors now live in spacious new apartments. Several local governments have been building whole new university districts in the hope that well-financed clusters of talent and technology will boost the development of high-tech industries.

This is by no means all government money. Student enrolment has been growing faster than state spending. Universities once almost entirely dependent on government funds are now able to boost their incomes from (fast-rising) tuition fees. They are also borrowing heavily from banks—to the extent that officials worry that some are building up unsustainable levels of debt.

The drive for improvement goes beyond money, too. The government is acutely conscious that Chinese students, though proficient in mathematics and the sciences, do poorly when it comes to lateral and creative thinking. A “curriculum reform” launched in 1999 gives schools greater choice of teaching materials and encourages teachers to treat pupils more as equals and foster classroom debate. And in addition to looking at gaokao scores, universities are now considering school reports and nonacademic achievements. Few, though, expect rapid change. Retraining teachers will be costly and difficult, particularly given that many parents, let alone teachers themselves, are wary of new-fangled methods that might affect test results.

After the student-led unrest of 1989, the Chinese authorities launched a sweeping campaign against Western influence in education. In their effort to make universities more competitive, they are now putting aside such concerns. Since 1995, when foreign universities were first allowed to partner with Chinese ones, they have established more than 700 academic programs in China. According to China’s Ministry of Education, the United States (once accused of stirring up the 1989 protests) accounts for more than 150, the most of any nation.

The two largest foreign transplants, though, are both British. In 2006 Nottingham University opened its second foreign campus, Nottingham Ningbo, in Zhejiang province. (Its first, in Malaysia, opened a year earlier). It was built by Zhejiang Wanli Education Group, a privately run but government-owned company that owns the assets and controls the governing board. Nottingham University recruits students and faculty, decides on course content, conducts examinations and confers degrees. Like the Malaysia campus, it is modeled on the original, with rolling parkland, gracious stone buildings and versions of Nottingham University’s signature clocktower (those in China and Malaysia have digital chimes).

Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, 100 kilometers from Shanghai, opened just a year later. This brand-new university is owned and run by a board on which the two partners, Xi’an Jiaotong, a top 10 Chinese institution, and England’s Liverpool University, are minority members. The owners of the industrial park on which it is situated paid for construction and put up half the $2 million bond required by the government. Laureate, an international private-education company that was already collaborating with Liverpool on online courses, put up the other half. The first few cohorts will get degrees from Liverpool, after which the new university will award its own degrees.

A bachelor’s degree at either English outpost takes four years, a year longer than at either of their home institutions, because the first year is mostly devoted to English language tuition and state-mandated political indoctrination—official literature in China still describes the mission of universities as being to “train successors for the socialist cause.” Both charge 50,000 yuan ($7,310) a year, 10 times the cost of tuition at other Chinese universities, but just one-third of what a Chinese undergraduate at Nottingham or Liverpool would pay.

There is certainly no shortage of youngsters keen on this hybrid Chinese-English experience. Drummond Bone, who as Liverpool’s vice-chancellor led the creation of the new university (he stepped down from the post in September), says the students at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool are outstanding: “They are a self-selecting bunch of internationally minded young people. Teaching them is very exciting.” Meanwhile, Nottingham Ningbo already ranks 15th in China in terms of average scores on the gaokao.

A foreign university that wants to set up shop in China must find a Chinese partner—an educational company or university—and cannot take any profits. In reality that does not stand in the way of making money. Both parties, foreign and Chinese, can receive payment for services they render to the joint venture.

And there is money to be made from Chinese students visiting the home institution. This autumn Nottingham welcomed 350 Nottingham Ningbo students; Liverpool welcomed 50 Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool students in financial mathematics alone. The fees are lower than is usual for Chinese students, but still well worth having.

Both Nottingham Ningbo and Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool sprang up at staggering speed. The Chinese government first allowed foreign universities in 2003; Nottingham signed a memorandum of understanding in March 2004. The turf was cut a month later and the campus built in a year. Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool went from agreement to its first students in just two years.

But matters do not always proceed so fast, or indeed at all. In 2005, the University of Montana said it hoped to open a campus for 2,000 Chinese undergraduates in autumn 2006. Nothing happened. In 2006, Kean University, a state institution in New Jersey, announced that it would be opening Kean University-Wenzhou the following year. That proposal became mired in negotiations. “The deal you struck yesterday is not necessarily good today,” Dawood Farahi, Kean’s president, told the New York Times in February. “The Chinese sign an agreement, and then the next day, you get a fax saying they want an amendment.”

Other institutions have pulled out upon realizing too much is being demanded. In the past few years Oklahoma City University, the University of Washington and the State University of New York have been invited to negotiate setting up Chinese campuses. All three got cold feet over ultra-short timeframes and an expectation that home staff and students would spend long periods in China. Ray Bromley, vice-provost for international education at the New York institution’s campus, says they were expected to send over specific faculty selected by Chinese officials.

Officially, the door to China is now closed, even though it shouldn’t be, since under the terms of China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 foreign institutions are allowed to set up joint educational endeavors, with foreign majority ownership permitted. But last year the Chinese government decided not to allow in any more foreign universities until it sees how the current crop fare, and can decide which model works best.

According to Andrew Halper, a partner and head of the China Business Group at Eversheds, an international law firm, the door could well be pushed open again by the right university. “They used the phrase ‘yuanze shang,’ which means ‘in principle,’” he explains. “What this means is that ‘you really have to convince us, there will be exceptions potentially permitted, we are not saying absolutely no, but it is going to have to take some special circumstances.’”

The general opinion is that from now on only top-flight institutions will be welcome—at least if they want to partner with ones that are highly regarded locally. Yet these are precisely the universities that are likely to see most danger, and least benefit, in a Chinese adventure. The vice-chancellors of Nottingham and Liverpool emphasize that what they risked was reputation; neither put up capital. They felt this risk was worthwhile for the chance to propel their universities—both well-respected in their home country—onto the world stage.

By contrast, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman said in a recent speech that although her university was keen on international collaborations, it was unlikely to open a campus abroad soon. “There is no asset that is of more value to us than the Princeton name,” she said. “A degree from Princeton University has a particular meaning in the world today, and until we are absolutely persuaded that we could replicate the Princeton educational experience on another site, we are not inclined to lend our name to a degree.”

As long as China’s universities remain outside the top ranks, and a wealthy middle class keeps growing, demand for foreign education will keep on rising. China is the largest exporter of students, with about 400,000 university students abroad. The government is trying to respond with measures to entice these talents back home after graduation. It has also set up business parks especially for returned overseas students and promised lighter regulation and less paperwork for those who found businesses. Some of the extra state money given to elite universities must be used to recruit Chinese scholars from abroad. And initiatives such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ “Hundred Talents Programme” give successful returnees up to 2 million yuan ($292,000) for better research facilities, housing and salaries.

No matter how hard the government tries, though, returnees do not necessarily find things easy. China is changing fast, and networks may have closed while they were away. They can be resented by those who stayed home, and many earn far less than they expected. According to David Zweig, a China-watcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, their salaries are still around 60% more than had they not gone abroad.

There have been some successes. In Shanghai alone returnees run more than 1,700 private firms, Mr. Zweig says, and his research in China’s export and high-tech development zones suggests that some bring technologies that are benefiting the economy.

And returnees come back with new experiences and ideas. He Ruoxing, an undergraduate studying engineering at Liverpool, explains how her ideas have changed. “I liked aerodynamics and I thought I liked formal reasoning. But my tutor here has taught me that engineering is for people. Now I think I want to work for an airline or an airplane company, and do something good for human beings.” Zheng Ma, a doctoral student in business and management at Nottingham, says she has learned to communicate differently. “I never asked questions back home. Here it is lots of group discussions; British students always talk. To change my mind back would be quite difficult.”

In 1993 Mr. Zweig and others asked Chinese people who had studied in America, and stayed on, why they had not gone home. Political instability, low pay and poor research facilities, they said, plus the complex nature of interpersonal ties in Chinese workplaces and the power superiors would have over their lives.

China has changed a great deal since then—but Chinese students who study abroad still learn to look at their own country with new eyes. In 2007, Greg Philo of Glasgow University asked Chinese students in Britain what, if anything, they would like to take back to China. They spoke positively of sexual tolerance and multiculturalism, and of the welfare state’s guarantee of health care and some dignity in old age.

Brought up in a country where voluntary organizations are frowned upon as a potential threat to the Party, they admired the ubiquity of local campaigning and fund-raising efforts. One talked of a dispute with her landlord which she resolved by threatening to complain to the council; others of the ease of setting up a business somewhere they would not have to square officials and police. And most said they had learned that it was also worthwhile to relax and enjoy life occasionally.

Most obviously, returnees bring new ideas and ways of thinking back with them. But the ones who don’t come back may turn out to have a greater effect. A strategy of tempting Chinese students abroad to return by offering them privileges cannot be sustained forever. Catching up with the standards of the West’s best universities, says Zhou Mansheng, an education ministry researcher, will be the work of one or two generations. But only when what is on offer at home matches what can be found abroad will the road to success no longer start by leaving.

Helen Joyce is education correspondent for the Economist, based in London. James Miles is the Economist’s Beijing bureau chief.