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to hearing expressed by the British Council, Germany’s DAAD
(German Academic Exchange Service) or the Fulbright Commission
in the US.
Take, for example, the University Alliance of the Silk Road,
established in 2015 by Xi’an Jiaotong University and now involving
more than 130 universities from 35 countries. The alliance’s
manifesto, the Xi’an Declaration, proclaims that “the Silk Road is a
path to win-win cooperation promoting common development
and prosperity and a road towards peace and friendship by
enhancing mutual understanding, trust, and all-round exchanges”.
The alliance therefore will “advocate the spirit of the Silk Road
– ‘peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual
learning and mutual benefit’ – to establish cooperative education
platforms and further regional development”. What’s not to like?
Not wanting to miss out on the action, four Australian universities
are members of the alliance – the University of New South Wales
(an executive member), the University of Newcastle, the University
of Queensland and Charles Darwin University. We may not
technically be in close proximity to the Silk Road, but why allow
such technicalities to get in the way of the spirit of collaboration?
For over 30 years, China has encouraged and supported foreign
students, since Vice-Premier Li Peng told an education conference
in 1984 that “foreign student work is an integral part of diplomacy,
and must serve the general foreign policy ... With the economic
development and the growth of international stature, China will accept
more foreign students”. By 2008, China had made the transition from
being a net sender of students to a net receiver, with the 223,499
incoming foreign students that year exceeding the 179,800 who left
China. That China has become a major destination for mobile students
is a matter of considerable pride, as it is for Australia.
China’s current target is to attract 500,000 international students,
and with 442,773 last year, they will very soon meet that target,
thanks in part to large scholarship schemes, more language
preparation courses, more programs in English and improved work
rights for international students.
With this success comes familiar challenges. Local students
complained recently on Chinese social media that entry
requirements for foreigners applying to the country’s top
universities are much easier than for Chinese students applying
through the Gaokao national examinations. Kevin Rudd was our
first leader to have studied in China, but he will not be the last, and
around the world there will be many more.
As our offshore numbers flatline or decline, Chinese institutions
are just beginning to expand abroad. Peking University recently
announced it will open a branch of its business school in Oxford
early next year. This follows on from China’s first overseas
branch campus, founded by Soochow University in Vientiane,
Laos, in 2011, and which now offers undergraduate programs in
international trade, finance, Chinese and computer science.
On a more ambitious scale, Xiamen University’s campus in
Malaysia, which opened in 2015, is planning to grow to 10,000
students in the first stage, which would make it the world’s largest
international branch campus, with equal shares of students from
China, Malaysia and other countries. Student numbers have
reportedly grown from 200 in 2016 to nearly 2000 this year.
A common feature of these campuses is that Chinese public
institutions have the ability to invest considerable amounts in long-
term projects with access to extensive scholarship schemes and
without the need to be commercially self-supporting in the short
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
term, as would be the case for Australian equivalents. We will likely
see similar campuses in Australia before too long, and already a
Chinese private education group has established an operation in
Melbourne, the Global Business College of Australia.
China’s educational soft power projection also involves the
promotion of Chinese language and culture around the world
through its Hanban organisation, which follows in the footsteps of
similar state-sponsored cultural institutions, including Germany’s
Goethe-Institut, the British Council, the Alliance Française, Spain’s
Instituto Cervantes, and the Japan Foundation.
China’s network of Confucius Institutes (including 14 in Australia),
and many more Confucius Classrooms in schools, have been
established remarkably quickly since the scheme’s announcement in
2004. The success of these institutes allowed Tian Xuejun, the Chinese
vice-minister of education, to proclaim on the eve of the recent Belt
and Road Forum in Beijing that with more than 460,000 people in 53
Belt and Road countries studying Chinese at 137 Confucius Institutes
and 131 Confucius Chinese-language study classes, Mandarin has
become one of the most important languages of communication
between China and the countries involved.
All of these institutions reflect the political and cultural views
of the funding body, and tensions will invariably arise from time
to time when they are seen to challenge core principles of the
host university, sometimes leading to their closure, as occurred
at Canada’s McMaster Unive