Chinese President Xi Jinping after an swearing-in ceremony to inaugurate the city’s new leader and government July 1, 2022 in Hong Kong. SELIM CHTAYTI / AFP
In the world of higher education and research, China blows hot and cold. Nineteen years after the invention of the Shanghai ranking, the country is preparing for a course correction, Xi Jinping pointed out on April 25 during a visit to the People’s University in Beijing. China no longer wants to measure its universities against others, especially Americans: it will now decide for itself what criteria of excellence to apply within the institutions, criteria inherited “from the red gene,” according to the president and general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Political party.
According to the Xinhuanet news agency, during his speech, Xi Jinping felt it was necessary to “set foot on Chinese soil to build world-class universities with Chinese characteristics, and [se] break new ground instead of imitating others or simply copying the standards and models of foreign universities.” The goal is assumed to be that it is necessary “that philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics can really take their place in the global academic environment”.
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A few days later, on May 9, People’s, Lanzhou and Nanjing Universities (ranked 101/150 in 2021, one of the top ten in China) announced their decision to withdraw from international rankings. Technically, the data from these three institutions should therefore not be collected, although it seems difficult to prohibit the private company Shanghai Ranking from processing public data.
This is confirmed by the ranking published on Monday, August 15, although the best of the three, Nanjing, no longer features in the list of the top 1,000. “What would be stronger would be for universities like Tsinghua or Peking University [les deux premières du pays] are also forced to go out,” says Alessia Lefébure, sociologist, author of the book Les Mandarins 2.0 (Presses de Science Po) in 2020.
“Strategy on the Edge of the Cold War”
This former representative of Sciences Po in China, director of Agro Rennes-Angers, recalls that until the 1990s, the Chinese universities at the top of the rankings were completely unknown in Europe to achieve the ability to conduct research and foreign Attracting students for something other than language and civilization courses, but also important scientific partners to contribute to China’s economic development, she explains. It is something of a miracle what China has achieved through its public policies in thirty years. »
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