Translating the following article into Chinese
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/feb/02/chinese-universities-will-rival-oxbridge
China's top universities will rival
Oxbridge, says Yale president
China is spending billions of yuan to propel its best
institutions into the top 10, says visiting US academic 10:14 20/05/2016
China's top universities could soon rival Oxford,
Cambridge and the Ivy League, the president of Yale University has warned.
Professor Richard Levin, speaking to the Guardian on a trip to the UK, said
Chinese institutions would rank in the world's top 10 universities in 25 years'
time, squeezing out some of the west's elite campuses.
At the moment, British universities dominate the top 10 rankings, with Cambridge
coming second to Harvard, University College London fourth and Oxford and
Imperial College London joint fifth. The rest of the top 15 are US universities.
China's highest-ranking institution is Tsinghua, at 49.
But the Chinese government now spends billions of yuan – at least 1.5% of its
gross domestic product – on higher education with the aim of propelling its best
institutions, such as the universities of Tsinghua and Peking, into the top
slots, Levin said.
"In 25 years, only a generation's time, these universities could rival the Ivy
League," said Levin, the Ivy League's longest-tenured president. He was speaking
before giving a lecture on the rise of Asia's universities to the Royal Society
in London on Monday evening.
Levin said: "China and India ... seek to expand the capacity of their systems of
higher education ... and aspire simultaneously to create a limited number of
world-class universities to take their places among the best. This is an
audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make
it feasible. It has built the largest higher education sector in the world in
merely a decade."
China has more than doubled the number of its higher education institutions in
the last decade from 1,022 to 2,263. More than 5 million Chinese students enrol
on degree courses now, compared to 1 million in 1997.
Chinese scholars are increasingly leaving their posts in US and UK universities
to return home, Levin said.
The growth of Chinese higher education comes as English university leaders fear
they may not be able to maintain their world-class reputation for higher
education, with savage government cuts of £950m over the next three years.
Commenting on the cuts, Levin said it would be "a shame if the British
government didn't recognise the status of Oxford and Cambridge as global
leaders".
He pointed out that it had taken centuries for Harvard and Yale to match Oxford
and Cambridge. And while China had a large pool of talent to draw on, it was
currently seen as less attractive to scholars from across the world than the US
and the UK, he said. China's universities lack "multidisciplinary breadth" and
"the cultivation of critical thinking".
Levin said: "I don't see the rise of Asia's universities as threatening.
Competition in education is a positive sum game. Increasing the quality of
education around the world translates into better informed and more productive
citizens."
He said Oxford and Cambridge's esteemed tutorial system, whereby one or two
students have a private class with a lecturer, was "almost unthinkably
labour-intensive in an Asian context". Too many academic grants were still given
to Chinese scholars because of their political affiliations, Levin hinted.
"To create world-class capacity in research, resources must not only be
abundant, they must also be allocated on the basis of scholarly and scientific
merit, rather than on the basis of seniority or political influence. To create
world-class capacity in education, [China's] curriculum must be broadened and
pedagogy transformed." But, he said, these were problems that could be solved
with sufficient leadership and political will.
*This article has been corrected so that references to yen have been changed to
yuan