Seeing is believing
Monday, 11 November 2013
Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell
Last week, I made my first visit to China. Ably accompanied and supported by a number of colleagues from across the University, I had a busy and varied programme.
The week began with a discussion at the China Britain Business Council (CBBC). It is there that our newly appointed staff member, Liu Ming, is based as part of the Launchpad scheme which enables British universities and businesses to have a member of staff based in China without the expense of setting up a separate office.
As well as visiting six universities with whom we have partnership arrangements - four in Beijing, two in Nanjing - I also met with senior officials in the Ministry of Education and the China Scholarship Council. Very well-attended receptions were held for our alumni in Beijing and Shanghai and a press conference was organised with representatives from leading newspapers and other media.
I came back with my impressions, not all of which I have room to share here. But four in particular struck me. Firstly, the visit reinforced the importance of China to Reading as a University. Overall, we work with 26 separate Chinese universities.
We have 689 Chinese students registered with us, based either in Reading or in China itself. As an example, it was very exciting to meet the first 54 BA Accounting students who will do their whole Reading degree in China - the 4+0 arrangement - at the Beijing University of Technology (BIT).
Secondly, Reading is very well regarded in China. That was a strong message that came from the Ministry of Education in Beijing. It is seen through the top-class universities with whom we are working such as Peking University, Renmin University and Nanjing Agricultural University.
The China Scholarship Council (CSC) sends more students, teaching and administrative staff to Reading than any other British university (the Deputy Director of the CSC will visit Reading later this month). The good news too is that the Ministry was encouraging us to go further and broaden and deepen our relationships in China. As we said, and we heard, there is mutual benefit if we do so.
Thirdly, and this is where the challenge emerges, the expansion of higher education in China really does need to be seen to be believed. It is not just the fact that there are now over 2,000 universities in China. It is the levels of investment that are staggering. BIT had built, as part of their development programme, a new 300 acre campus (the size of Whiteknights) in about six years.
Nanjing Institute of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) showed us their seven story Library, a building on a size and scale that was breathtaking. That university, very much a 'coming' university, had also built a massive teaching block, sports centre, new student accommodation and many other facilities, again in the last five or six years.
These were just examples of the buildings we saw. We also heard about - and saw - new investment in staff, in research platforms, in international collaborations.
Vice-Chancellor's China Scholarship Scheme
Finally, and perhaps the thing that struck me most, Chinese students have an insatiable desire to learn English. That is why studying abroad, particularly in an English-speaking nation, is so important. Of course, we can benefit from that but my concern is that so few British students want to travel in the other direction. For that reason, I am planning to establish the Vice-Chancellor's China Scholarship Scheme.
This Scheme, to be funded by gifts (with the first donations already secured) and non-hypothecated prize funds, will give up to ten students the opportunity to attend a summer study school in a leading Beijing University. The intention would be for the Scheme to cover all the costs of the trip so that no students would be disbarred from applying.
The International Office is now working up a proposal and I hope to announce the details to our students in January. All being well, the first Reading Scholars will be in China next summer.
On the trip home, I was reading Martin Jacques' highly-regarded, balanced and sympathetic but not uncritical book, ‘When China rules the world'. Some of Jacques' conclusions neatly summarise some of my first impressions of a country that I look forward very much to visiting again:
‘The fact that China is so large means that it exercises a gravitational pull on every other nation. The nearest parallel is the United States, but the latter is on a much smaller scale. Size will enable China to set the terms of its relationships with other countries: hitherto that has been limited by China's level of development, but its gravitational power will grow exponentially in the future. China's mass will oblige the rest of the world to largely acquiesce in China's way of doing things. Moreover, China's size, combined with its remorseless transformation, means that time is constantly on its side. It can afford to wait in the knowledge that the passage of time is steadily reconfiguring the world in its favour.'
Sir David Bell KCB
Vice-Chancellor