American Universities Flock to China

BEIJING — In a classroom at Beijing's Tsinghua University recently, a dozen American students struggled to grasp a three-hour condensation of China's legal history, from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to the free market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

"I didn't realize that China's legal system is still under construction," said Jeremy Stallman, a second-year law student at the University of Georgia, which runs a summer study-abroad program in China.

"Everyone is saying that China is going to be a world power, so it's good to learn about it."

College administrators across the United States are echoing that opinion. Since 1995, when Beijing began to allow foreign colleges and universities to formally partner with Chinese institutions, universities have established more than 700 academic programs.

American schools — including the University of Texas at Arlington — account for more than 150 of the programs, the most of any nation, according to China's Ministry of Education. And "because of China's rapid economic growth and the need for quality education," interest in China among American universities is growing, said Qin Meiqiong, a professor of education at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

The reasons universities are flocking to China vary, but profit is high on the list, Qin and other experts said.

Schools are lured largely by China's market size. Last year, only 22 percent of more than 100 million Chinese between the ages of 18 and 22 were enrolled in post-secondary school programs, according to the Ministry of Education.

Over the next 15 years, China will need to build at least 800 colleges to meet increasing demand, Hu Ruiwen, president of the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences, told the China Daily.

China was a "ripe market for an expansion in our programs given its rapid (economic) growth and the rise of the middle class," said Kong Liang, director of a University of Texas at Arlington executive-M.B.A. program in Beijing.

Since the university started the program with Chinese partners in 2002, it has expanded to four cities and more than 200 students and "generates revenues that the university is using to provide faculty research stipends (and) student scholarships," Kong said.

Greater links with China also attract students and build associations benefiting faculty and local economies, experts said.

The University of Georgia began offering programs for undergraduates and law school students in China last summer because faculty "felt we owe it to the students to prepare them to compete in the world," said Tim Burgess, a senior vice president who traveled to China this month to teach in a program run by the university's Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

Students are also demanding more opportunities abroad. While only 5 percent of students at the University of Georgia studied overseas in the late 1990s, 27 percent do today, Burgess said.

The increase tracks growth in the number of Americans studying in China. According to the Chinese government, 11,784 Americans studied formally in China in 2006, up from 4,280 in 2000.

"The whole study abroad program has just exploded over the last few years," Burgess said. "It's changed the academic face of what students get at UGA."

The University of Georgia's study abroad programs, as well as a decade-old program at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government and a new major in Chinese language and literature, dovetail with efforts by Georgia's state government to strengthen links with China.

Georgia plans to open a trade development office in Beijing later this year and is lobbying for a Chinese consulate in Atlanta and a direct Delta flight between Atlanta and Shanghai.

"There's a lot of interaction between what the state does and what the university is doing," said Steve Wrigley, director of the Carl Vinson Institute, adding that the state government is funding some of the university's China-related programs indirectly through financial support to the university system.

Because the institute has trained hundreds of Chinese government officials — who generally receive instruction from university professors and Georgia officials in China before traveling to the University of Georgia for two weeks — it may foster closer ties between China and Georgia, he said.

Because the university trains mid-career Chinese officials, "they probably aren't at a senior enough level yet (to benefit Georgia), but in a few years they will be," Wrigley said.

Establishing programs in China also helps universities recruit Chinese students.

After 9/11, the number of foreign students applying to the University of Florida fell by roughly 30 percent, and although the figure has recovered some since, the university faces greater pressure to recruit foreign undergraduate students and "attract smart graduate students," Bai said.

The university is discussing possible research collaboration with Tsinghua University, China's top institute for science and technology, and received government approval in January to establish a joint-degree program at Zhengzhou University in central China.

Other foreign universities have invested more in China.

Florida International University and the Tianjin University of Commerce, 70 miles southeast of Beijing, opened a $50 million school of hospitality and tourism last August that was funded by the Chinese government but will be managed by FIU professors.

England's University of Nottingham opened a $35 million campus in Ningbo, a city in eastern China, in 2004 that offers British lecturers, a European-style pedestrian mall and piped-in broadcasts by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which is banned in most of China.

Georgia Tech signed an agreement with Beijing University last year to establish a joint research program in biomedicine, material science and mechanical engineering.

But the universities also face challenges unique to China.

While World Trade Organization regulations permit foreign universities to hold majority ownership of ventures in China, Beijing mandates that half of their directors must be Chinese and each head administrative officer responsible for hiring and firing staff must be a Chinese national who "ardently loves the motherland," the Chronicle of Higher Education reported last year.

Censorship — some of it self-imposed by Chinese teachers afraid to upset the government — is also a problem.

At the University of Georgia law school class on China's legal history this month, a student asked the Chinese professor how Beijing's curbs on newspaper reporting "square with the constitutional guarantee of media freedom?"

"Actually, it's important to regulate," the professor said.

"The government doesn't want to be misunderstood," he said before moving to another question.