One of the great stories of higher education worldwide is the rise of China’s universities in global esteem. In 2004, only five mainland China universities were ranked in the Top 200 WUR (World University Rankings) when the London-based higher education rating and rankings agencies Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education published their first league table jointly. In the latest QS WUR 2019, China’s Tsinghua and Peking universities are ranked #17 and #30 respectively. Moreover another nine Chinese universities are ranked among the Top 100. Only two countries — the US (33) and UK (18) — have a greater number of universities in the QS WUR 2019 Top 100 league table. Similarly in the Times Higher Education (THE) WUR 2019, Tsinghua is ranked #22, above all Asian universities, and Peking University #31. Altogether 72 Chinese universities are ranked in THE’s league table of 1,250 world-class universities, the largest number among all Asian countries, with seven ranked in the prestigious Top 200. The seeds of the rapid rise in global esteem of China’s C9 (‘Ivy League’) universities were planted by a Central government initiative of May 1998 christened Project 985. According to data of the Central government’s ministry of education there are 2,914 colleges and universities in mainland China, with over 20 million students who have passed gaokao (National Higher Education Entrance Examination) — arguably the world’s most competitive school-leaving exam. School-leavers who top the annual gaokao are accepted by top-ranked universities. For example, of the 9.75 million school-leavers who wrote gaokao in 2018, only 160,000 entered Project 985 universities. Despite lip service to egalitarian higher education, China’s higher ed institutions are divided into three types: Project 985, Project 211 and others. The first group (39 universities) attract gaokao toppers, the largest amounts of funding and the biggest share of educational resources, including best faculty. Project 211 was launched three years earlier in 1995 to raise science research standards in 100 selected universities in the 21st century (211). Since then, the number of Project 211 varsities which have met prescribed software and hardware installation benchmarks and have crossed scientific research, education quality and management thresholds, has risen to 116. These universities host 80 percent of doctoral and 66 percent Masters students, 50 percent of overseas students and consume 70 percent of scientific research funding. Evidently dissatisfied with the inability of Project 211 universities to advance upward in the QS, THE World University Rankings league tables, in May 1998 — the centenary year of Peking University — the Central government launched Project 985 to create a more elite group of universities drawn from Project 211 members. Between 1998 and 2011 when Project 985 closed its doors, the government included only 39 institutions in this group. Under Project 985, enormous funding was canalised into these selected universities. Tsinghua and Peking, for example, each received around RMB 2 billion (Rs.2,108 crore) to improve their teaching facilities, build new scientific research centres, attract world-famous experts and visiting scholars, and send their faculty and students to conferences…
