Building Chinese Harvards

The reverse brain-drain of Chinese science, business, and technical talent was identified in the mid 1990s, when China's economy began to pick up steam, and opportunities arose for native sons and daughters to return to China to work or start businesses.

There has been a similar trend taking place in Chinese universities, writes Howard French of the New York Times. Chinese universities want to become world class, and are making attractive offers to foreign-trained, Chinese-speaking scholars to come to China to teach and conduct research.

Chinese universities are very confident they are on the right track:

"Maybe in 20 years M.I.T. will be studying Qinghua's example," says Rao Zihe, director of the Institute of Biophysics at Qinghua University, an institution renowned for its sciences and regarded by many as China's finest university. "How long it will take to catch up can't be predicted, but in some respects we are already better than the Harvards today."

But there is a fly in the ointment, when it comes to the social sciences:

China is focusing on science and technology, areas that reflect the country's development needs but also reflect the preferences of an authoritarian system that restricts speech. The liberal arts often involve critical thinking about politics, economics and history, and China's government, which strictly limits public debate, has placed relatively little emphasis on achieving international status in those subjects.

In fact, Chinese say - most often euphemistically and indirectly - that those very restrictions on academic debate could hamper efforts to create world-class universities.

"Right now, I don't think any university in China has an atmosphere comparable to the older Western universities - Harvard or Oxford - in terms of freedom of expression," said Lin Jianhua, Beijing University's executive vice president. "We are trying to give the students a better environment, but in order to do these things we need time. Not 10 years, but maybe one or two generations."

Interesting to see how these issues and trends pan out in the future.