Foreign students may choose China over US within next 20 years, analyst says

China is expected to surpass the United States within the next 20 years to become the leading destination for foreign students worldwide, said a Kuala Lumpur-based political analyst.

Chin Yew Sin, president of China Strategy Research Centre, said that "China's political stability, social harmony, rapid economic development, advanced science and technology, and Chinese culture that values harmony and has become a builder of world peace will make Chinese education a world leader in the foreseeable future."

He pointed to DeepSeek as an example, which has recently stunned the world by producing a far more advanced artificial intelligence than the current ChatGPT, at a significantly lower cost.

With DeepSeek's unexpected emergence, many in the West have come to realize that China is far ahead of them in the research and development of the AI sector.

Chin said that it is interesting that DeepSeek's main founder, Liang Wenfeng, was entirely educated in China, having graduated from a local Chinese university.

"This clearly shows that China's universities are on par with, if not better than, those top universities in the US," he said.

"China's education system is far more superior in producing a large number of technologists like Liang Wenfeng in many technological sectors in times to come."

Chin noted that several research organizations publish global university rankings. Among them, three of the longest-established and most influential are produced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE), and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (the Academic Ranking of World Universities, ARWU).

The QS World University Rankings, for example, evaluate universities on five performance indicators: Research and Discovery; Employability; Global Engagement; Learning Experience; Sustainability.

Chin said, China scored very well in the major area of research and discovery, by beating the US to emerge as the world number one's contributor of research articles to top science journals for the first time in 2022, according to preliminary data released by Nature.

If this trend continues, China's universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University or Nanjing University could eventually surpass Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become the top-ranked universities in the world, said Chin.

He believes that it is not impossible that China's education system will overtake those of Western countries one day.

Chin noted that in the past, "China's imperial examination system was adopted by many Western countries", adding that China was the first country in the world to select its government officials through such a system.

China's imperial examination system was far ahead of those of the Western world at that time, he added. Western countries such as France, the United Kingdom and the United States had learned from the Chinese model to select their government officials.

In addition, countries in those ancient times — such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam — which had close relationships with China, were also deeply influenced by the imperial examination system.

In 2023, the US had the most international students, followed by the UK, Canada, France, Australia. Germany, Russia and China also become top study destinations. In China's case, a significant number of students primarily came from South Korea, Thailand and Pakistan, said Chin.

He stated that with predictions suggesting China's economy will surpass that of the US before 2035 to become the world's number one economy, an increasing number of foreign students — particularly from ASEAN, Middle East, South America, Africa and Europe — will come to China to study.