China’s prestigious Peking University recently acquired a new campus — not in its eponymous capital Beijing, nor in another bustling Chinese metropolis, but in Oxford. Home to the oldest university in the English speaking world and certainly one of its most quintessentially academic. The site will host Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS), giving students the opportunity to study one year at the Oxford campus and one at PHBS’s main campus in Shenzhen, in south China’s Guangdong Province. 

The £8.8 million (10.9 million US dollars) investment in the campus known as Foxcombe Hall is a monumental development in Chinese higher education’s  internationalization — not for its scale per se, but for what it symbolizes and could mean for the future of university education across the world. 

With student fees, the Oxford campus will obviously be a source of income for Peking University but chalking this up to a purely pecuniary investment would glaze over much more interesting depths and miss what this augurs for the future. 

While top Chinese universities have been on course for years to boost their international standing by attracting top professors and research talent, a rapidly expanding urban upper-middle class has been eager to send their children overseas for what is perceived as an education that will prepare them for the modern, globalized world. The numbers are staggering. England’s Higher Education Funding Council reported recently in their Global Demand for English Higher Education report that there were almost as many Chinese students as British nationals entering full-time taught master’s programs in the UK, and Chinese representation in higher education in other popular destinations like the US, Canada, and Australia is equally impressive. 

Massive investments in Chinese higher education over the past couple of decades are keeping pace with the equally massive growth in demand for quality. China’s “Project 985,” launched in 1998, earmarked dozens of universities for improvement to bring them up to world-class status, and more recent initiatives like the “Thousand Talents Program,” created in 2008 to attract international university professors and researchers to China, continue to pay off. Peking University, for example, now ranks 29th worldwide compared to 42nd the year before, according to Times Higher Education magazine. 

However, it’s becoming clear that the simple strategy of either improving Chinese universities or sending Chinese students to study abroad will not suffice in the ever more interconnected 21st century. Hence an innovative way to keep top Chinese students in Chinese higher education, while satiating demand for a prized international experience: Set up Chinese campuses on foreign soil. 

Peking University’s Oxford campus highlights a new development of a Chinese educational institution setting up overseas to welcome foreign students who may otherwise not be exposed to China. China’s miraculous economic growth since its opening up in 1978 has attracted many international students to global metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai. However, there’s a vast pool of overseas students who, despite the allure of Chinese cultural and economic offers, are not ready to jump in at the deep end, so to speak. The sort of “China lite” experience offered by an international campus is a core goal of the project. 

“The University would like to see more students from England and the rest of Europe come to China,” China Daily quoted Peking University Council Vice Chairman Hai Wen as saying. “Students can study at our Oxford campus as a preparation for their studies in China.” Despite setbacks to globalization, such as Brexit and certain Trump policies, Hai said he is confident China’s role in globalization is cemented. International students “are now interested in China, not just to study the culture, but [also its] economy, financial sector and so on,” he says. 

Predisposing this promising cohort to understanding China on a personal level beyond the headlines is vital, and this experience will pay off at the national level as these students lead the future of business, science/technology, and politics. This sponsoring of cross-cultural education is more important than ever in the divisive political climate developing around the world — former US President Obama realized as much, seeking the number of Americans learning Chinese to quintuple to 1 million by 2020.   

Imagine buying an ice-cream cone on a warm summer’s day. Does the vendor’s brand name mean much to you? Sure, a Häagen-Dazs might have a certain ring to it over another, but the core value is that it’s cold and sweet and tasty. Not so with higher education: Reputation and prestige are themselves the product. Anyone can buy the textbooks used at Harvard; this doesn’t confer the value of the title “Harvard graduate”. That’s why it should surprise no one that when speaking of their investments, schools turn to their unique bottom line. "It is our hope that the new initiative in Oxford will further strengthen the school's international reputation,” Peking University President Lin Jianhua said in a statement. “Oxford’s global reputation as a hub for educational excellence and its historic and cultural cachet” make it very attractive. 

For Peking University, this reputational boost comes at an opportune time. Overseas education institutions are massively stepping up their game in China. Many UK universities have already created branches on the Chinese mainland, with the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus, established in 2003, being the first such foreign university. Since then, the wave of international branch campuses (IBCs) has grown significantly, but is still a small enough club for membership to be elite. Despite roughly an 11-fold increase in such IBCs since 1996, there are barely more than 150 such outposts worldwide. 

"Universities are looking to expand abroad in order to enhance their global prestige, their ability to compete for new students and resources and to enhance their international experience of students and faculty," says education professor Jason Lane, a co-founder of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York-Albany. Chinese education institutions have been slower than international rivals to get into the game, but now see immense value in this sector. We can call this politics, brand reputation, or any other moniker. The conclusion is the same. China’s universities will inevitably internationalize, and overseas purchases such as Foxcombe Hall are just the beginning of this exciting era. ‍

(Patrick Musgrave is an independent journalist based in Beijing. He previously worked as Senior Technical Editor and Content Manager with CSOFT International. The article reflects the author's opinion, not necessarily the view of CGTN.)