Lessons from higher-education sector

As China and the UK continue to exchange students, opportunities abound to learn about each other

Both China and the United Kingdom have a significant global presence, but the dialogue between these countries is sometimes less than full.

President Xi Jinping's state visit, coming quick on the heels of a visit to China by George Osborne, the British chancellor, provides a good opportunity to think about what the two sides might gain from each other.

Quite often, that question is answered in terms of the economy. And of course there are many areas, from financial services to pharmaceuticals, where British expertise is being taken to China, while Chinese investment is becoming increasingly important in the UK in sectors ranging from cars to nuclear power stations.

However, there is one area where the connections have the power to go beyond the purely commercial, even though it is a hugely important area economically: higher education. Last year, more than 58,000 Chinese university students came to study in Britain, more than from the whole of the rest of the European Union. More British students are also going to China to study and gain new experiences. What can the two countries learn from this intellectual exchange?

First, Britain might look at the many positive ways that China supports its higher education sector. Last year, it was projected that China would spend more than the United States on research and development by 2019, a clear commitment to top-level research and teaching.

In addition, China is seeking to internationalize its higher education sector in various ways, including more collaborations with foreign institutions, particularly in scientific fields, and sending more undergraduate and graduate students abroad. There are even new liberal arts programs at top universities, including the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University and the Yenching Academy at Peking University.

Meanwhile, there are alarming signals in the higher education sector in the UK.

Funding for the science budget was held flat during the coalition Conservative-Liberal Democrat government of 2010 to 2015, but the purely Conservative government elected in May has hinted at cuts of up to 40 percent to some areas, of which higher education spending on teaching and research is one.

Universities hoping to bring in more overseas students, from China and elsewhere, for educational and financial reasons are being hampered in their ability to do so by a desperate attempt to cut non-EU immigration, in which students are counted as "immigrants".

By cutting student visa numbers into the UK, the immigration figures appear to go down. There are rumors of disputes even within the British government over this shortsighted policy, as many ministers realize that shutting the door to the brightest, fee-paying young people from the world's fastest-growing economies is a bad idea.

Britain could learn from the financial and governmental support that China gives to its higher education sector.

Yet in the longer term, there is still a great deal that Britain's higher education sector can still take to China. Despite financial troubles over the past decade, the UK continues to host more top-class universities proportionate to its size than any other major country: Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics and Imperial College are just some of the institutions that regularly make the global top 10 lists. This is not accidental.

One key reason is that the university sector has traditionally nurtured a fierce and openly independent attitude toward research and teaching. The work of the sciences, social sciences and humanities in British universities has grown in quality because of the dedication of scholars to their own work, first and foremost, not because of top-down orders about what piece of work might fit with an official agenda.

Statistics, surveys and insights from British universities are sometimes embarrassing - and publicly so - to the governments that pay for them, revealing uncomfortable truths. That is just as it should be in a society where universities are part of the conversation society has with itself and where educators have a duty to speak truth to power.

Overall, Britain and China's scholars, researchers and students still have a great deal to say to one another. Let's hope that it will be a fruitful conversation in the years to come.

The author is director of the University of Oxford China Centre and a professor of the history and politics of modern China. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.