The decoupling with the West will be hard on China’s HE

On 19 July, we wrote an article for University World News titled “The US has an instability problem and it’s affecting HE”.

Just as important, China’s current tightening and increasingly assertive geopolitical direction will have dramatic implications for China’s own universities, scientific development, intellectual life and for global higher education as well. It is worth summarising these realities and then reflecting on their almost inevitable implications for global higher education.

Geopolitical trends and national realities

China’s internal realities and geopolitical posture have significantly changed in recent years. Since Xi Jinping rose to power in 2013, China’s foreign relations have become more assertive in the Asian region and globally, and its internal governance more controlling.

Most recently, the perennial ‘Taiwan problem’ has been exacerbated by the visits of United States congressional leader Nancy Pelosi and other US officials. Additionally, China’s posture relating to its immediate neighbours (Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and others) has changed the views of many countries from a willingness to accept China’s commercial – and political – leadership to significant scepticism and growing opposition.

Of great importance is the mainland’s ‘takeover’ of Hong Kong in violation of the ‘one country, two systems’ commitment. The reaction in Taiwan, where support for collaboration with the mainland has largely disappeared and has been replaced by fear and opposition, was conspicuous in this respect.

Repression of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang is widely criticised and sanctions, which have significance, have been imposed by several countries. Many now consider China’s multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative as a kind of neocolonialism, linking partner countries to China through huge debt and questionable infrastructure projects.

China’s draconian, and in the long-run unsustainable, COVID-19 policies have created problems for the economy, the global supply chain and for China’s population.

Mainland Chinese public opinion, if one can gauge this by social media, has moved in a nationalist direction – with many demanding an invasion of Taiwan. Even the government’s ever-efficient censors have had to tamp down the internet.

A surprising opinion article in August in the New York Times, “Why China’s people no longer look up to America”, by Wang Wen, formerly an editor of the nationalist Communist Party’s Global Times, is indeed a sign of the times.

On Chinese campuses, students regularly report professors who seem too ‘liberal’. Anti-Asian incidents that have taken place in Western countries are widely reported in Chinese media. Universities have been significantly affected, with increased surveillance, limitations on access to information from abroad and tighter control by Communist Party authorities.

China scepticism

‘China scepticism’ has been significant for some time in the United States and increasingly in other Western countries, and it is growing dramatically.

Most of China’s Confucius Institutes, once 118 in the United States at their peak and now only 14 as of June 2021, have disappeared from much of the US and Europe – in the US more for reasons of geopolitics and assumed espionage, and elsewhere more for concerns about academic freedom.

Government restrictions and legal actions relating to intellectual property theft are increasingly evident. A few prominent researchers with ties to China (both ethnic Chinese and others) have been put on trial.

The CHIPS Act, recently passed by the US Congress, which provided US$280 billion to strengthen the US technology industry, has an openly anti-Chinese focus. Collaboration with China will be banned from the US$52 billion allocation to research, much of which will go to US universities, making them even more cautious about working with Chinese partners.

In Europe and Australia, governments and higher education institutions are increasingly concerned about China connections. In the Netherlands, for instance, the minister of education, culture and science has declared that national security stands above academic freedom and that the country will impose strict regulations on how higher education institutions guarantee and carefully monitor compliance.

In March 2022 in Australia, a parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security published a report titled Report of the Inquiry into National Security Risks Affecting the Australian Higher Education and Research Sector, with recommendations for more control and oversight. Other countries and the European Commission have followed suit.

The academic impact

Universities, perhaps especially in the United States, but increasingly in the Anglosphere and in Europe as well, will be significantly affected. Without question, current geopolitical realities, which will only deteriorate in the immediate future, create unprecedented problems.

Fundamentally, there is already a ‘decoupling’ of the deep links forged over a half-century between Chinese science and higher education and the Western system, and particularly the United States.

The future of student mobility from China to the West is somewhat hard to predict, but it is quite likely that numbers will decline. Even prior to the current crisis, it was clear that the boom of recent decades was coming to an end, at least in the United States.

The decline will be gradual and the impact will be different by country and by (type of) institution. This will have perverse positive effects by making countries and institutions less dependent on the income from Chinese students and creating more diversity.

The negative impact will be felt at the graduate and in particular at the doctoral level, where Chinese students have been present in large numbers and excelled in almost all disciplines, and when it comes to research collaboration and innovation. There will be less university-to-university collaboration and a reduction of research work with Chinese colleagues. As noted, surveillance by government authorities will be ubiquitous.

The impact on China

For China, the impact will be significantly greater. China’s academic progress has been impressive and the quality of its top universities is world class, yet research, and especially the culture of innovation, lags behind Western institutions.

A decrease of academic contacts will be detrimental. Chinese students will have fewer opportunities for overseas study. The future of the many Western branch campuses operating in China will be called into question and the number of Western scholars and researchers willing to work in China will decrease.

Chinese universities have spent much effort to foster critical thinking skills, establishing some liberal arts programmes and in general stressing innovation. Now, with an increased emphasis on courses on political orthodoxy and greatly expanded external control, the atmosphere in Chinese academe will inevitably change.

Certainties and questions

We are in the midst of a sea-change in China’s relationship with the rest of the world. China’s internal policies are increasingly nationalistic and its foreign relations increasingly assertive. These realities will have an impact on both China’s higher education relations and on the quality of its education and research.

China has benefited enormously from its opening to the world, its research collaboration with Western partners, and the education that many of its students took abroad. In the years ahead, research and development will suffer a critical setback as a result of isolation and restrictions on academic freedom.

Some things remain unclear. Will there be a full-scale ‘academic cold war’ between the West and China, harking back to the years of minimal scientific and intellectual contacts between the West and the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period? Will Russia join a China-led scientific system?

How will the Global South react? Will the world’s second largest higher education system, India, step in to play a role? Will the situation improve after Xi Jinping achieves his third term as China’s leader in November?

There are many questions, but it is clear that China’s role in the world is at an inflection point, and higher education and science will be significantly affected, globally, and without doubt in China itself.

Philip G Altbach is research professor and distinguished fellow, Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, United States. Hans de Wit is professor emeritus and distinguished fellow at the same institution.