Chinese students who were sent to the United States in 1978 Photo: FILE

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Turn back the clock to 1978.

“I propose sending more students to foreign universities and study the natural sciences,” said Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping at a meeting attended by Fang Yi, the deputy premier; Jiang Nanxiang, the education minister; and Liu Da, president of Tsinghua University.

Deng’s instruction received immediate praise from education circles. At that time, there was a real lack of talent in universities and research institutes. The country was short-handed in its efforts to push reform and development.

The chief architect of China’s reform and opening up, Deng had a keen sense of the importance of talent cultivation. There was an urgent need to learn from foreign countries’ advanced sciences, technology, management and culture to aid the construction of the Four Modernizations, the goals to strengthen China’s agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology. “When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, you will see how China will transform itself,” Deng said.

Soon, the Ministry of Education drafted the “Report on Sending More Students to Foreign Universities” as a response to Deng’s decision. The expected number of students was 3,000. Earlier in July that year, the United States sent a scientific and technological delegation to China. During the meeting with the delegation, Fang expressed the hope to exchange students between the two countries. They agreed to discuss details later in the United States. Yong Wentao, the vice education minister, also led delegations to Japan and Canada while selected Chinese embassies in Western Europe also started to engage in the cause.

China and the United States hadn’t established official diplomatic relations back then, making student exchange difficult. On Oct. 7, a delegation led by Zhou Peiyuan, then president of Peking University, started their visit to the United States. That was the first delegation sent by China after the issuance of the Shanghai Communique.

After an arduous negotiation, the two sides entered an agreement on eleven verbal understandings. Of the terms, the United States would receive 500 to 700 Chinese students and visiting scholars in the 1978–1979 school year, while China would host 60 American students and visiting scholars. The two countries were to pay the education fees for their own students. And the international students were to follow local customs and abide by the laws and regulations of the other country.

On Dec. 26, a total of 52 Chinese students started their journey to the United States. The first batch of American students arrived in China in 1979. The China-US student exchange ushered in the proliferation of Chinese students around the world. In 2017, more than 600,000 Chinese students went abroad for study.

For Chinese education, 1993 was a big year. On Feb. 13, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council jointly issued the Plan for Education Reform and Development, proposing to promote a more open education system and to strengthen associated exchange and cooperation. In November, the committee for the first time issued policies in its official documents advocating for students to attend foreign universities and afterward return to China. Students could make decisions without any intervention.

Favorable policies led to a great leap in education. In 2004, the world’s first overseas Confucius Institute opened in Seoul, Republic of Korea. In 2005, the University of Nottingham opened its overseas campus in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, which was the first China-foreign university since the reform and opening up. In 2013, Xiamen University Malaysia was established as the first overseas campus set up by a renowned Chinese university.

In the past four decades, the most evident achievement of a more open education was a bigger and better talent pool. Of the first 52 Chinese students sent abroad in 1978, 17 became academicians upon their return. Also, 81 percent of the academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 54 percent of the academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and 72 percent of the chief scientists of the State High-Tech Development Plan have overseas educational backgrounds. Returnees have made great contributions to significant projects in manned space flight, high-temperature superconductivity and other major breakthroughs.

Today, China is seeing the biggest wave of overseas returnees since 1949. The annual number of overseas students returning to China has reached 480,900, according to the latest statistics by the Ministry of Education.

The ministry released an action plan within the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative. To date, China has formed a worldwide academic exchange mechanism in which active participants include Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Indonesia, South Africa and Germany. It has formed education partnerships with 188 countries and 46 leading global organizations.

Looking back over the 40 years of reform and opening up, more and more foreign students have chosen China, a nation filled with traditions, mysteries and creativity, as their destination for further study. China has become the third largest destination for overseas students in the world and the first choice in Asia.

In February 2017, Zhan Tao was appointed as director of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. Prior to that, he worked as director-general of the Educational Management Information Center under the Ministry of Education in China. He became the institute’s first Chinese leader since its foundation some twenty years ago. Before that, Hao Ping, vice education minister, was elected as president of UNESCO General Conference in 2013. Chinese universities, experts and scholars are taking center stage in global education.

Shanghai students frequently come out at top in PISA education tests. Two groups of British math experts and teachers have flown to Shanghai in the hope to learn from teaching methods there. Also, 61 English-speaking mathematics teachers from Shanghai were invited to the United Kingdom to give presentations. Since this January, a total of about 8,400 British primary schools have adopted Chinese mathematics textbooks.

Meanwhile, China’s higher education is gaining currency around the world. Since the construction of the B&R, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Egypt and over 10 other countries have invited China to open overseas campuses on their land.

China has been an active participant in and huge beneficiary of an open education system over the past four decades. In the future, the Chinese education circle will no doubt open its doors wider to its counterparts around the world.

 

This article was translated from China Education Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)