China hunts abroad for
academic talent By Pallavi Aiyar
BEIJING - Having already impressed the
world with the creation of its glittering,
international-quality infrastructure, the
erstwhile Middle Kingdom has now turned its
attention to transforming its universities into
world-class institutions.
"Our government
realizes the connection between a nation's overall
power and the quality of its higher education,"
said Dr Weiying Zhang, assistant president of
Peking University.
In this latest bid to
raise the country's global prestige, Chinese
universities backed by massive injections of
governmental funding
are
spending billions of dollars to attract top
foreign-educated and overseas-born Chinese,
building cutting-edge research centers, partnering
with the world's best educational institutions,
and developing new programs taught in the
international lingua franca - English.
Under a central government program started
in 1998 called the 985 Project, 10 of China's
leading universities were given special three-year
grants in excess of 1 billion yuan (US$124
million) for quality improvements. Peking and
Tsinghua universities, the top two ranked
institutions in mainland China, each received 1.8
billion yuan. These grants were awarded in
addition to special financial support provided by
the 211 Project, a separate program aimed at
developing 100 quality universities for the 21st
century.
In 2004, the second phase of the
985 Project was launched and the number of
universities under its purview was enlarged to 30.
Included in this second phase of special funding
was Beijing Normal University
(BNU), ranked 15th in the country. Its special
"international department" alone receives some 16
million yuan annually from the center.
Han
Bing, deputy director of the international
department, explained that the funds are used to
hold international conferences, attract
world-renowned academics as faculty, and support
BNU scholars in attending conferences abroad.
Han said BNU hosts 30-40 scholars from
leading Western universities annually. While most
of these join the university faculty as guest
lecturers and researchers for a semester, those
who are hired as full-time faculty can expect
$40,000 a year.
The positions are open to
all nationalities, although cultural affinities
and language requirements have meant that so far
only ethnic Chinese have been recruited by BNU as
full-time staff. "We hope to get a more
international academic mix in the future," said
Han.
At Peking University's Guanghua
School of Management, of which Zhang is the
executive dean, full professors with PhDs from
prestigious universities abroad can expect $60,000
a year. Such pay levels are reasonably attractive
to overseas academics, comparable to US pay levels
of anywhere from $30,000 to $300,000 and up
(depending on the institution and the prominence
and seniority of the individual involved). This
year the school recruited its first
non-ethnic-Chinese faculty member, a Canadian
national and former associate dean of the
University of Victoria. The ability to offer
internationally competitive salaries is key to
attracting quality academics, said Zhang.
The official national salary given to a
full professor in China today as set by the
Ministry of Education (MOE) is a mere 4,000 yuan
per month. But for the past few years, the
government has permitted individual academic
departments to supplement official salaries with
private funds that the departments raise through
fees, consultancies and commercial spinoffs. Thus
the Guanghua School of Management makes up the
difference between official and actual salaries
through the revenue it gains from its executive
MBA (master of business administration) program,
for which it charges a hefty $35,000 per year.
BNU in its turn supplements salaries with
the money it generates from the $2,700 a year paid
by foreign students learning Mandarin in its
language programs. The university has more than
2,000 foreign students enrolled in various
courses, and has academic agreements with 153
universities abroad, including Princeton
University, which holds an annual summer-school
program at the BNU campus.
As a result of
its improved pay scales, the Guanghua school
currently boasts some 50 "returned scholars"
(Chinese nationals who return to the mainland
after studying abroad) and more than half of the
faculty hold foreign PhDs. "These are not PhDs
from any old university," said Zhang, himself a
DPhil from Oxford. "We only look at Ivy League or
Oxbridge-educated talent."
In fact several
of the research institutes at China's better
universities have a minimum requirement of a
foreign PhD for faculty members. The first such
center, called the China Center for Economic
Research (CCER), was established in 1995 at Peking
University. One of CCER's earliest staff members,
Professor Feng Lu, recalled the Herculean efforts
required to persuade quality academics to return
to China a decade ago. In contrast, he said, there
are now more than 50 applications for every
vacancy advertised at the center.
Examples
of world-renowned academics choosing China as
their new home abound. In 2004, Princeton
Professor Andrew Chi-chih Yao, one of America's
leading computer scientists, took up a place at
Beijing's Tsinghua University to lead an advanced
computer-studies program. Though born in Shanghai, Yao is a US
national. Peking University in its turn
successfully wooed Tian Gang, a leading
mathematician from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), to return to his native China
and set up an international research center for
mathematics.
"For a world-class
university, it's necessary to attract the best
students and faculty internationally. Eventually
we don't just want the best Chinese students, but
the best from around the world," said Zhang. As a
result, Chinese universities are increasingly
offering courses wholly taught in English and in
collaboration with internationally recognized
partners. The Guanghua School of Management offers
a dual-degree program in English with the National
University of Singapore. In addition,
undergraduate courses and an MBA program in
English wholly administered by Guanghua are on
offer.
Dual-degree programs are becoming
increasingly common as foreign universities are
lured by China's potential. CCER's MBA (called
BiMBA), for example, is jointly offered with
Fordham University in New York City, which
contributes both faculty and curriculum.
Similarly, Tsinghua University's International MBA
is jointly taught with MIT's Sloan School of
Management.
In September 2004, the
University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China (UNNC)
began its first intake of students. The school is
a branch of the United Kingdom's Nottingham
University and is China's first joint-venture
university with an independent campus (there are,
however, more than 700 foreign-affiliated colleges
in mainland China). At UNCC, all students are
required to speak only English during study and
even while socializing.
The net result of
all these joint-venture projects is that it
increasingly makes sense for Chinese students to
stay at home, rather than seek more expensive but
largely similar degrees in the West. However,
Zhang pointed out that collaboration with Western
partners and the promotion of English cannot in
itself fundamentally close the gaps in China's
current educational system. For him, one of the
most significant reforms pioneered at Peking
University and promoted by himself has in fact
been the end to lifetime tenure, for decades a
defining characteristic of Chinese universities.
Since 2003, professors at Peking
University are no longer promoted on the basis of
seniority but with an eye to their research and
publication records. If a new lecturer cannot make
it to associate professor within six years, he or
she is asked to leave. "This was the only way to
change the orientation of our faculty towards
academic research," explained Zhang.
The
combined results of these efforts are already
paying off. Despite the common perception that
Indian higher education, with such renowned
institutions as the Indian Institute of Technology
and the Indian Institute of Management, is
superior to its Chinese counterpart, China's
universities in fact beat India's in almost every
international ranking.
According to the
well-regarded Shanghai Jiaotong University
(SJTU) Academic Ranking of World Universities,
mainland China has two universities in the top
300, while India has none. Mainland China features
eight times in the top 500, India only three. The
SJTU rankings are compiled on the basis of
university alumni and staff winning major academic
prizes, the publication of highly cited research
articles published in prestigious academic
journals, and articles indexed in major citation
indices.
According to Dr Subarno
Chatterji, an English-literature professor at
Delhi University with a DPhil from Oxford, there
are no special incentives in India to attract
top-quality academics from abroad. Salaries remain
fixed at government-funded institutions by the
University Grants Commission at Rs50,000
(US$1,130) per month for full professors, and
there is "little concerted or organized interface
between academia and the corporate world".
Chatterji himself is contemplating leaving India
to teach at Miyazaki University in Japan. "They
pay their academics very well," he said wryly.
Calla Weimer, a fellow at the economics
department of the National University of
Singapore, said, "The NUS economics department
increasingly sees China as a competitor in
attracting and retaining good faculty, but the
same does not hold for India." She added: "While
Chinese economists are being lured back to
universities in their home country, Indians seem
more content to remain in Singapore."
The
long strides China has taken toward literacy and
basic education have put India to shame for years.
For example in 2000, only 47% of all children in
India had managed to complete Grade 5 of
elementary schooling, as opposed to 98% of Chinese
children. But China's remarkable recent
renaissance in higher education means that even
elite education in India is falling behind the
standards being set to the north of the Himalayas.
In 1978, only about 1.4% of the Chinese
population was enrolled in higher education, or
held a university degree of some type. Today the
figure is close to 20%. Currently, some 20 million
students are studying in various kinds of higher
educational institutions in mainland China.
However, China still has a considerable
distance to go before its aspirations to create
truly world-class universities become a reality.
According to the SJTU rankings, the United States
had more than 50 universities in the top 100,
compared with zero for China.
The absence
of critical thinking and freedom of expression in
university classrooms - the result of China's
authoritarian political system - hampers the
development of academic debate. Michael Pettis, a
professor at the Guanghua School of Management and
former adjunct professor at Columbia University,
said "the fundamental problems with Chinese
education - an intensive focus on rote learning
and an inability to develop arguments" - remain,
despite the large inflows of university funding
from the central government.
Zhang said,
"We still suffer from too much governmental
control and have little leeway to implement
reforms without cumbersome permissions and
procedures." Chinese universities are unable, for
example, to develop new programs or curricula
without prior governmental approval. "To do
something good and experimental invariably means
violating government rules," rued Zhang. He added
that university presidents in China remain
government appointees and are rarely academics.
Thus, despite having the funds available
to make the cream of international academia fairly
lucrative offers, even China's leading
universities have so far only been able to recruit
China-born or ethnic-Chinese scholars in any
significant numbers.
"We have been able to
improve our hardware considerably," said BNU's
Han. "But as is always the case in China, the
software takes longer."
Pallavi
Aiyar is the Beijing correspondent for the
Indian Express newspaper.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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