Chinese universities

China: Delocalization could be future of higher education

Noticias

Asia/ China/ 12.05.2020/ By: Joshua Kobb/ Source: global.chinadaily.com.cn.

The global higher education market was valued last year at $65.4 billion and has been projected to reach $118 billion by 2027.

International education represents a large part of learning activities and is a major source of tuition revenue from nondomestic students. In 2018, nearly 1.1 million foreign students were studying in the United States. Of them, 34 percent came from China, representing approximately $11 billion in fees.

Over the past several years, trends in student mobility have been changing. The US, while still the largest destination for foreign students, has seen the rate of increase in foreign students fall since 2014. As a result, some institutions have seen tuition revenue drop more than 25 percent.

With the global rise of nationalism and protectionism, students have adjusted their choice of destinations, favoring host countries with perceived greater safety and better post-study job opportunities. In a recent survey, 87 percent of high school college counselors in China reported that students and parents were reconsidering plans for studying in the US.

The COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating these trends. In the immediate term, outbound students will experience difficulties in obtaining visas, and many campuses are questioning whether they will open their fall semesters for on-site classes. In the medium term, outbound students will explore destinations closer to home, as well as foreign collaborative programs in their home countries.

Faced with this business challenge, the pursuit of an offensive delocalization strategy makes sense for universities. While delocalization generally refers to moving resources overseas, two different forces of delocalization can be identified: defensive and offensive.

In the former, a company moves resources overseas to benefit from lower production costs. In the latter, resources are moved overseas to better serve international markets. This may be due to reducing barriers to consumption or localization of the product or service to make it more attractive. An example of this strategy can be found in the Disney company, which gambled on a larger market interested in a Disney experience closer to their homes. Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai now figure prominently in the offer, with each localized to some degree.

Students from China celebrate their graduation from Columbia University. [Photo/Xinhua]

In the new normal, faced with looming declines in international student enrollments and subsequent loss of tuition revenue, the pursuit of an offensive delocalization strategy makes sense for higher education. This translates into the establishment of overseas campuses, allowing institutions to attract and serve international students more effectively by creating market proximity and reducing barriers to a US education.

This strategy is not new in higher education. INSEAD, the Sorbonne and HEC Paris, for example, operate international campuses. New York University opened its third overseas campus in Shanghai in 2013. Of the 1,600 current students, 50 percent are from China.

Chinese universities provide important support for foreign collaboration in China. NYU Shanghai is jointly established with East China Normal University, and Duke Kunshan University is a partnership with Wuhan University.

Zhejiang University recently established an international campus as a platform for university and program-level cooperative partnerships.

With an international business school and joint institutes with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Edinburgh, the new ZJU campus will host multiple foreign collaborative initiatives.

With close to 1 million outbound students per year from China, the nation is the largest single source of international students in the world. At the same time, China has become the third-largest destination for foreign students, thanks to opportunities from the Belt and Road Initiative.

Future development in transnational education will likely see an increase in the establishment of overseas campuses and university-level collaborative programs in China as a way to serve outbound domestic students and international students looking for new destination opportunities.

For institutions relying on tuition revenue from international students, in particular those in the US, delocalization to China should be a strategy to consider.

Source of the notice: https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/12/WS5eb9fc91a310a8b241154f1a.html

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China ramps up tech education in bid to become artificial intelligence leader

Noticias

Asia/ China/ 14.01.2020/ Source: www.nbcnews.com.

A bespectacled eight-year-old has become the poster child for China’s campaign to dominate the world of high tech.

From his home in Shanghai, Vita Zhou hosts training videos for other children on how to code for artificial intelligence. He already has almost 80,000 followers on the Chinese streaming website Bilibili, and some of his videos have gained more than 1.3 million views. Vita has even attracted the attention of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who sent him birthday wishes Monday on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.

“What do you think? Isn’t it easier to write code once you understand how it works?” Vita says in one video. With the help of his dad, Zhou Ziheng, he demonstrates how to write codes with Apple-developed Swift Playgrounds, an app teaching kids basic coding through interactive games.

Vita’s celebrity comes as China steps up efforts to become a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. The trend of teaching young people to code has been on the rise in recent years, particularly as the Asian giant fights to close the gap in its workforce in the technology sector, most notably AI talent. In November, China’s education ministry updated its curriculum to include books about AI, big data, coding and quantum computing.

A quarter of the 422-page recommended reading list is now about science, math, chemistry, aerospace, medicine and most notably AI.

“Coding’s not that easy but also not that difficult — at least not as difficult as you have imagined,” Vita, who is familiar with Swift, Scratch and C++ languages, told the AFP news agency.

China has a lot of ground to make up on AI, with the number of top researchers in the field standing at one-fifth of that in the United States in 2017, according to research by the Washington-based Center for Data Innovation.

At the same time, it faces a shortage of 5 million AI professionals, according to a 2017 article from the state-owned newspaper People’s Daily.

These disadvantages have not stopped it from setting ambitious targets: The country aims to catch up with the U.S. next year, based on “A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” a government blueprint.

In order to close in on the talent gap, the country is now speeding up AI education for children, in addition to efforts to increase the talent base from universities. By 2018, there were 96 Chinese universities with AI-related programs, up from just 19 in 2017.

Despite some shortcomings, a trove of Chinese AI companies such as iFlytek, SenseTime, Cloudwalk and DJI, have caught the world’s attention for standing out in sound recognition, facial recognition and drone technologies. China’s big tech companies, such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei, also have invested heavily in AI research and development.

Image: A trainer leading a class at a children's computer coding training center in Beijing
A trainer leading a class at a children’s computer coding training center in Beijing on Nov. 8, 2019Wang Zhao / AFP – Getty Images file

Some of those companies have taken a hit in China’s trade war with the U.S., with Washington blocking a few Chinese tech firms from acquiring its most advanced technologies. But experts say the roadblocks are only fueling China’s desire to get ahead.

“The increasingly fierce trade and technology competition between China and the U.S. puts pressure on China to improve its innovative capacity,” said Zhang Xusheng, a science, technology, engineering and math professor at Zhejiang University. “And it naturally means we need to bring the students to study high-tech and be more innovative.”

In 2018, the education ministry added AI to the high school curriculum, encouraging around 25 million teenagers to study the technology. The same year, China’s first AI textbook for high school students — which introduces the basics of image recognition, sound recognition, text recognition and deep learning — was put into use in more than 40 pilot schools.

“I would like to read the books to explore the scientific reasoning behind things like AI, aerospace, programming and big data,” Cui Jingjing, 14, a high school student in Fujian, said. “I am also keen to join science competitions.”

“I think China will win the AI race with the U.S.,” Cui said, “We are catching up very fast.”

China is not alone in ramping up AI education. While the private sector has led the response to AI, governments like France, South Korea and the United States also have strategies in place to expand their workforce in the sector with increased investments, although predominantly at the postsecondary level, according to a 2019 UNESCO report.

Many European Union member states are also reviewing their curricula to integrate more lessons about computational thinking in the classroom. Some countries like Austria, Poland and Lithuania have long provided strong computer science education in high schools.

Image: A pupil reading a book outside a classroom as she waits to attend a class at a children's computer coding training centre in Beijing
A pupil reading a book outside a classroom as she waits to attend a class at a children’s computer coding training centre in Beijing on Nov. 8, 2019.Wang Zhao / AFP – Getty Images file

The enthusiasm for AI education goes beyond policy. The market value of the coding industry for children reached around $57 million in 2018 and is expected to surge to around $4.3 billion by 2023, increasing 650 percent in the span of five years, according to a report by iResearch, a Shanghai-based consulting company.

That investment is transforming classrooms. In Shenzhen, China’s tech hub, an AI program for students in grades 3 to 8 was being piloted in 2019.

Zheng Weicheng, a primary school math teacher in Fujian province, thinks that teaching AI also has broader benefits by helping children establish scientific concepts and improve their problem-solving ability, which will directly benefit their future development.

“Well-equipped youths lead to a powerful country,” Zheng said.

Source of the notice: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-ramps-tech-education-bid-become-artificial-intelligence-leader-n1107806

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Education as an instrument for China’s soft power

Alfred Marleku

By: Alfred Marleku.

 

China is lavishing scholarships on foreign students and opening up institutions around the world as it looks to exert influence and serve the national interest in a different way.

Alongside its rapid economic development and increasing political impact in the world, China is making significant progress in building up soft power capacities by using education as the key instrument to boost its influence abroad.

The concept of soft power in the field of international relations started to be used by the well-known scholar Joseph Nye. He argues that soft power involves culture, values, and ways to disperse impact and build an image. All this, according to him, aims to facilitate state cooperation, administration and a race to distribute influence, values and ideology to other states.

In recent years, China has significantly increased its influence abroad by using education as a source and instrument of soft power. This has been done by using two main approaches.

Firstly, by establishing Chinese educational institutions in different countries of the world. Second, by offering attractive programmes and support through scholarships for students from around the world to study at Chinese universities.

For this reason, in 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a formal document stating that the purpose of their education reform initiative at international level is to make it possible for Chinese soft power to serve the national interest.

One of the main Chinese educational instruments, which is estimated to have an annual value of around $10 billion, is the establishment and operation of the Confucius Institutes, which operate in around 120 countries around the world through about 500 centres.

These institutes are established by the state and their main purpose is to familiarise foreigners with the Chinese ideological approach and its culture by offering them various services such as Mandarin language courses or training in cooking Chinese food, calligraphy etc.

However, the impact for China’s soft power has not remained only at the institutional or individual student level, but has also extended to influential politicians. In 2013, after a visit to China, former British prime minister, David Cameron stated that Britain should look beyond traditional principles where students are offered only German and French as a foreign languages and should focus on learning Mandarin.

It does not seem casual that, a few years later, Cameron was engaged to lead an investment fund in UK, worth about $1 billion, which aimed at backing China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

On the other hand, China has invested steadily in increasing its universities’ capacities in order to compete globally with world-class institutions through two initiatives, known as Project 211 and Project 985. These educational platforms aim to create opportunities for foreign students to study Chinese language and culture and, at the same time, encourage Chinese students to study abroad.

It is estimated that nearly half a million foreign students are studying in China. According to official statistics, in 2017, these students attended 935 higher education institutions. As far as the Asian continent is concerned, China is considered to be the most popular and attractive destination for international students. Most of them come from South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, the US, Russia, and Japan.

To attract as many foreign students as possible, the Chinese government allocates more than 10,000 scholarships to students from countries interested in pursuing studies in China through the Silk Road Scholarship programme. The largest number of these scholarships are dedicated to countries impacted by the Belt Road, making up about 65 percent. But Europe is not left behind in this regard. The Chinese government has recently launched the Chinese Ambassador Scholarship programme dedicated to students from Romania.

In fact, it is considered normal practice and is very common for powerful states, as part of their strategy to extend their impact in the international arena, to apply soft power by launching various scholarship programmes. Around a century ago, the United Kingdom implemented the Rhodes Scholarship programme, which aimed at promoting British imperialist values in the world.

On the other hand, in 1946, the United States launched the Fulbright Programwhich aims to disseminate American values abroad. Whereas, the former Soviet Union in 1961 created Patrice Lumumba University in order to teach the principles of socialism to students coming from the so-called third world countries.

Similarly, China uses higher education to increase its impact of soft power in the world, especially in countries stretching along the One Belt One Road initiative.

Education for some countries is considered an industry, while for others it is seen more as a political tool. While in developed countries such as the UK, US or Australia, foreign students are welcomed because universities, by offering them study opportunities, charge them with tuition fees that usually are much higher than payments of domestic students, in China foreign students enjoy generous financial support through scholarships and advanced study conditions. For this reason, in 2018, the Chinese Foreign Ministry increased the budget by 16 percent compared to 2017.

This is a well-planned strategic move. As the British weekly The Economistpoints out, rich countries sell their education and China is using it to buy influence.

 

Source of the article: https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/education-as-an-instrument-for-china-s-soft-power-25699

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