The firm bid to the promotion of universities and research has been one of the unchanged constants of Chinese leadership over the past four decades. At all times it has been a process with strong state investment and with central planning guidelines and very ambitious strategies, drawn up and implemented over a long timescale.
The initial bid to the reconstruction and expansion of the university system (1977-1995)
When Deng Xiaoping came to power after the death of Mao Zedong (1976) and the defeat of the Gang of Four, he did so by promoting the principle of “seeking truth through facts” (实事求是) as the cornerstone of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. This is a quotation from a text written in 1938 by the then-young Mao Zedong which paradoxically was to used to legitimise the task of de-Maoisation, i.e., systematically dismantling the political legacy of the last years of the Great Helmsman’s life, without ever taking down his portrait from Tiananmen Square. Pragmatism and objective knowledge had to replace the ideological dogmatisms and unbridled fantasies of the fundamentalist communism of the Cultural Revolution.
Science, technology and knowledge, rebuilt from scratch, were placed at the centre of the new modernising effort. Gone were the turbulent times of a Cultural Revolution that had led to the literal closure of all educational institutions and universities for more than a decade. With the reinstatement in 1977 of the gaokao (高考), the entrance examination, and the reopening of universities and other medium and higher education institutions, a period of two decades began in the late 1970s when the emphasis was on rebuilding a university system that had been devastated by successive purges of professors and, even more pervasively, by the years of closure. First and foremost, the aim was to grow and multiply the system, to overcome the enormous precariousness at the outset, and thus to be able to absorb the growing demand for student access to the university. The aim was to make up for lost time.
The old universities were reopened. Some, like Peking University, had been created by the foreign powers that semi-colonised China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All had been reformulated on the basis of the Soviet university model in the 1950s. In contrast to other sectors, the slow but decisive influx of foreign capital and private ownership in China did not affect publicly-owned and managed higher education.
The international projection of the Chinese university system was not a priority at the time, but the departure of young Chinese to study at prestigious universities was. Thousands of Chinese students were awarded scholarships every year to study at foreign universities, especially in the United States. This gesture of openness had a major impact, with very high rates of return.
In the late 1970s, a period of two decades began when the emphasis was on rebuilding a university system that had been devastated by successive purges of professors and, even more pervasively, by the years of closure
With this initial impulse in university higher education in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a reconnection with secular culturalist values in the Confucian tradition. Study and knowledge were (and are) seen as the highest form of social and individual advancement and self-improvement. The Chinese meritocratic tradition had turned the figure of the literate into the ruler and the guarantor of the reproduction of power by means of a display of knowledge that was publicly evaluated. The competitive exams for the different ranks of bureaucracy were one of the most globally fertile and profitable Chinese “inventions”. The imperial academies institutionally conducted this process of higher learning. The reformist phase initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s updated this centuries-old culturalist trend.
The creation of a national university elite (1995-2017)
In the mid-1990s, under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, there was a substantial strategic change that was clearly oriented towards hierarchical stratification, leaving behind the more or less equal treatment and funding for all universities. A decision was made then to favour and clearly differentiate the elite of a few research universities, capable of competing internationally in a few decades.
The political and economic context of this shift in university policies is that of China in the late 1990s. It was in those years that China was clearly committed to accelerating economic growth based on foreign investment and the offshoring of international industry (which led to technology transfer). That resulted in China growing at a double-digit annual rate. It was in those years that China’s explicit commitment to the apparent oxymoron of market socialism was confirmed in its constitutional order. China’s detractors on the new left called it state capitalism, neo-liberal communism or market Leninism.
In the initial reformist phases of the 1980s and early 1990s, gradualism and trial-and-error experimentation with markets in very specific and limited areas and sectors marked China’s economic and institutional development. But everything accelerated decisively from 1993 onwards, once Deng Xiaoping had eliminated any shadow of political dissidence (after the bloody and expeditious repression of the 1989 Tiannamen protests) and when he had also put out of action the influent old guard, reluctant to economic and social change. China in the 1990s was in the midst of a process of adjustment to World Trade Organisation membership (which took place in December 2001). It was also in the process of consolidating its financial markets and of rapid territorial and sectoral expansion of internal and external private investment.
China became the main stage of globalisation. It became the world’s factory. The great economic growth came at this time thanks to an immeasurably cheap labour force, willing to work hard for very little in an exporting and manufacturing offshore industry. Although growth at that time was still viewed in quantitative terms, the Chinese leadership envisaged a future horizon that had to be very different: linked in the long term to an increase in added value, productivity, innovation, design, in-house technology, energy efficiency, international projection…. In this horizon, the university and research would play a key role.
In the late 1990s China was also in the midst of a process of restructuring its old heavy industry, forged in the 1950s following Soviet models. At the same time, it was beginning to apply profitability and productivity criteria to large state-owned production and administrative conglomerates in all sectors. Until then, practically nothing of the old socialist economy had been dismantled or reformed (with the exception of the rural collective farms). Until the mid-1990s, there had been no privatisation, no reforms in the state industries, only management decentralisation. It is precisely in this context of structural reforms in all public institutional and economic sectors at the end of the 1990s that the first plans for restructuring the university system were formulated in China, which determined the course and future projection of today’s Chinese universities [1]1 — Ma, W. (2007). The Flagship University and China’s Economic Reform. A P. G. Altbach & J. Balán (Eds.), World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America (pp. 31-53). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. .
In 1995, this strategic shift began with Project 211. The name of the project comes from an abbreviation of the slogan “In preparation for the 21st century, successfully managing 100 universities” (面向 21世纪, 办好 100 所 高校). The aim was to concentrate financial resources and internal reform efforts on 100 universities (which eventually became 116, 6% of the Chinese university system), with the aim of raising the quality of teaching, research standards, access to high quality internet and synergies for socio-economic development. Universities could be included in the project as long as they met strict scientific, technical and human resource requirements. During the first stage of Project 211, from 1996 to 2000, approximately USD 2.2 billion were allocated. In the second phase, the total was USD 700 million.
In 1998, three years later, Project 985 was launched. The name alluded to the date of its announcement in a speech by leader Jiang Zemin at the Peking University centenary celebrations in May 1998. Project 985 overlapped with Project 211. It emphasised the desire to promote and fund an even more elitist and exceptionally small group of universities in order to turn them into world-class centres for the 21st century. The project involved both central, provincial and local governments allocating large amounts of funding to build new research centres, upgrade facilities, hold international conferences, attract world-renowned professors and visiting scholars, and help Chinese professors attend conferences abroad. A total of 39 universities have been included in Project 985’s special funding and improvement programmes. Most of the 39 Project 985 universities are ranked among the top 500 universities in the world according to different world rankings.
Within this programme, the greatest efforts were focused on an even more elitist group of only nine universities. In 2009 it was institutionally formalised into the C9 League (九校联盟), which was seen and presented as the Chinese equivalent of the US Ivy League. In the first two years of the programme (1999-2001) some USD 1.2 billion were invested in promoting these nine top universities alone. Between 2004 and 2007, the C9 universities received half of the total USD 2.8 billion in funding for the 39 universities included in Project 985. Six of the new universities that form this exclusive C9 League (Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China and Fudan University) are among the top 100 in the world’s top university rankings. The other three are close behind.
These strategies of concentrating funding and reform efforts in a very small segment of university centres, with very demanding entry requirements (stricter than those of the most renowned universities in the Anglo-Saxon world), aimed at placing these universities in a the top tier of international quality, generated some dissenting voices in those areas that expressed (mutedly) the unease of the centres that had not been invited to the party: the vast majority, 94% of the university were inevitably doomed to play a sectoral or regional function, to teaching rather than research. Critics pointed out that the gap that opened up between the little more than a hundred universities included in Projects 211, 985 and C9 and the overwhelming majority of the more than two thousand centres that were excluded from those programmes was completely contrary to the principles of equality proper to a socialist state such as China. The projects were also criticised for stifling competition and minimising university autonomy. By concentrating research funding in a few institutions, opportunity costs were identified: the money was not necessarily spent on the most deserving projects.
In the past decade, Xi Jinping’s China has taken an authoritarian (if not totalitarian) turn that has significantly reduced transparency, freedom of expression and academic freedom, especially in the fields of social sciences and humanities
While these critical voices may not have had much impact, they have perhaps influenced some of the changes in recent years, along with the perception that the enormous accelerated pressure to publish and generate patents has led to an inflation of irrelevant, low-quality fakes and papers that have very little impact or lack effective knowledge production. In the past decade, Xi Jinping’s China has taken an authoritarian (if not totalitarian) turn that has significantly reduced transparency, freedom of expression and academic freedom, especially in the fields of social sciences and humanities. This is one of the major handicaps holding back the future of Chinese universities. A number of high-profile professors have been dismissed outright for their refusal to toe the Party line. That in 2019 Fudan University (like other Chinese universities before and afterwards) removed references to freedom of thought and the pursuit of truth from its founding mottoes, replacing them with loyalty to the Party and patriotism, is surely revealin [2]2 — David Y. F. Ho (2014) Why Aren’t There More World-Class Universities in China? Global Asia. 9, (4) 96-99. .
New plans to consolidate world-class universities (2017-2050)
Without breaking with the basic philosophy of the previous programmes and partly in response to the deficiencies detected, two new parallel and complementary plans were launched in 2017, which have introduced some very relevant variables, and which have opened up the competition in a part of the centres that had previously been systematically excluded from the prioritisation programmes.
The World First Class University and First Class Academic Discipline Construction Plan (世界一流大学和一流学科建设), commonly known as the Double First Class University Plan (双一流) prioritises 42 first-class universities. In parallel, the plan identifies 465 first-class disciplines, i.e. areas of knowledge scattered across a total of 95 different universities. In addition to the novelty of identifying not just universities but disciplines, the plan sets out demanding periodic accreditations that can lead to loss of rank. Provincial governments are required to reorganise the university map, with mergers and local hierarchies. The plan now targets the system as a whole to improve quality. According to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019/20, most of the 42 top-ranked universities are already among the 500 best universities in the world. And the goal is that within a decade they will all be in the top hundred, and most of them in pre-eminent positions. The 2050 horizon is for China to clearly overtake the USA and Europe as the world’s leading university power. And this is not wishful thinking or a rhetorical bet.
Given its enormous economic and demographic weight, China’s numbers are always unbeatable in absolute quantitative terms. The current battle, though, is a qualitative one. China today has the largest higher education system in the world. In terms of student numbers, in 2019, total enrolment in regular higher education institutions exceeded 30 million. In terms of internationalisation, in 2019 China sent more than 550,000 students abroad, which made it the world’s largest source of international students. Conversely, 440,000 students from 205 countries studied in China in 2019, making China the largest study abroad destination in Asia.
Of particular significance in this area of internationalisation is the Thousand Talents Plan (千人 计划), which was launched in 2008. The plan promotes the return of distinguished Chinese researchers and professors abroad. It has been very effective in temporarily recruiting Chinese researchers from the diaspora, who have made temporary stays, but has been less effective in getting them to disengage from their foreign universities to settle permanently in China. In recent years this plan has been the subject of strong controversy, especially in the US, Canada and Australia, as it has been seen as a cover for scientific, industrial and military espionage.
The approval of 14th Five-Year Plan in March 2021 has reinforced and multiplied the commitment to technological sovereignty and scientific development as an imperative necessity, in a geostrategic context of technological competition (or war) with military implications [3]3 — Mu-ming Poo. (2021) Innovation and reform: China’s 14th Five-Year Plan unfolds. National Science Review, 8, (1), nwaa294. Available online. . Thus, for example, 37 degrees specifically focused on artificial intelligence have been implemented from one year to the next [4]4 — Liao Shumin (2021). AI Is Among 37 Undergrad Majors Added by China’s Universities. Article published on 3 March 2021 at Yicai Global. Available online. .
Beyond the global prestige of the rankings, Chinese universities have a key role to play in this strategic technical-scientific development. To give just one example, the leading university in the Chinese university system, Tsinghua University, in addition to being at the top of the rankings, nourishing the government with cadres and senior leaders, and leading research in all fields of knowledge, has generated a conglomerate of technology companies dedicated to the pursuit of top-level research in strategic sectors: Tsinghua Holdings [5]5 — The China Files, published at The Wire China. Available online. .
Beyond the global prestige of the rankings, Chinese universities have a key role to play in China’s strategic technical-scientific development. For example, 37 degrees specifically focused on artificial intelligence have been implemented from one year to the next
Tsinghua Holdings has an immense influence on China’s scientific and technological competitiveness: it incorporates a group of companies, including Tsinghua Unigroup, key players in the semiconductor industry. Through these subsidiaries, it has led some of Beijing’s most ambitious efforts to acquire technologies abroad and form joint ventures with firms such as HP, Intel, Western Digital and Micron. The subsidiary TusHoldings has built science and technology parks in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Russia and Israel. Security and IT company Tsinghua Tongfang’s Nuctech works in 150 countries, including supplying security equipment for the Rio Olympics, the Belgian railways and the Australian Customs Service. On this side too, Tsinghua University is leading the way in global outreach that other Chinese universities are expected to follow.
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References
1 —Ma, W. (2007). The Flagship University and China’s Economic Reform. A P. G. Altbach & J. Balán (Eds.), World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America (pp. 31-53). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
2 —David Y. F. Ho (2014) Why Aren’t There More World-Class Universities in China? Global Asia. 9, (4) 96-99.
3 —Mu-ming Poo. (2021) Innovation and reform: China’s 14th Five-Year Plan unfolds. National Science Review, 8, (1), nwaa294. Available online.
4 —Liao Shumin (2021). AI Is Among 37 Undergrad Majors Added by China’s Universities. Article published on 3 March 2021 at Yicai Global. Available online.
5 —The China Files, published at The Wire China. Available online.
Manel Ollé
Manel Ollé is a lecturer in History and Culture of Modern and Contemporary China in the Department of Humanities at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (UPF). He is also coordinator of the UPF Master of Chinese Studies. His main research fields are Maritime China in 16th and 17th century, Europeans Perceptions of China and Southeast Asian Chinese Diaspora. He is a member of the Asia Pacific Study Group at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Visitant Researcher at the National Research Centre of Overseas Sinology from the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU Beijing). He is co-director of the project "Southern European Historical Materials Concerning China in the 16th and 17th Centuries". He has published several books, essays and articles on Chinese history, such as La invención de China (2001), La Empresa de la China: de la armada invencible al Galeón de Manila (2002) or Made in China: el despertar social, político y cultural de China (2005). He has also translated several Chinese authors and books into Catalan.
