News - Midlands
Enter the Dragon
As a Chinese proverb goes, the most important thing to plant for one year is rice. The most important thing to plant for 10 years is a tree. But the most important thing to plant for life is an education.
Planting that education seed is something the Chinese state is doing at a frantic pace. As in many corners of the developing world, the government is rapidly expanding its higher education system so that its economy can compete in more sophisticated, value added industries. The only difference is that in China this is being done on a simply mind-boggling scale. A decade ago just two to three per cent of school leavers went to university. Today the figure is touching one in five - and this in a country with more than 1.3 billion inhabitants.
But it isn't just into expanding existing Chinese universities (or building new ones) where countless billions of yuan are being spent, it's also going into joint ventures with universities like Nottingham.
In much the same way that the country is increasingly using joint ventures with foreign companies to gain toe-holds in new markets to learn about new methods of production, so it sees link-ups with Western educational establishments as a way of helping train its next generation of graduates in the workings of the modern global economy.
Nottingham is a trailblazer: the first Western institution to take advantage of legislation passed in 2003 that allowed foreign universities to set up campuses in China. The man behind it all is Sir Colin Campbell, Nottingham's vice-chancellor who has overseen a deliberate "internationalisation" of the university over the last decade, opening up Nottingham to ever more foreign students from ever more countries (at the last count 22 per cent of its students were from overseas and some 150 countries). The university has also opened a campus in Malaysia, a move often overlooked amid the hullabaloo that has surrounded the Chinese adventure.
Campbell has been particularly interested in China for many years and the whole Chinese project has been driven by his friendship with professor Fujia Yang, a nuclear physicist whom Campbell first met when Yang was president of Shanghai's Fudan University in the 1990s. The friendship was sealed when Yang became Nottingham's chancellor in 2001, the first time that a Chinese academic had become chancellor of a UK university.
As Campbell says: "We've shown a long, strong commitment to China over 10 years, we've chosen good partners and arrived at a time when the Chinese government has been opening doors and wanting to increase international collaboration. We are the first to come and we must be successful."
It is a venture not without considerable risk. On a purely financial level Nottingham will lose money at its Chinese campus for "three or four years", admits Campbell. Then there is the cultural divide to contend with, a divide which many sceptics see as a limiter on China's academic ambitions.
A world class university operating in a country without freedom of thought and expression is a contradiction in terms, they say.
Nottingham itself has had to make significant concessions as part of the whole deal, most notably by ensuring that the curriculum at its university in the city of Ningbo, south of Shanghai, leaves room for students to still leave the campus for their "political studies" course in the first year.
During my week in Ningbo the tentacles of the state never seemed far away too.
The delicacy of the whole venture was most pronounced during a press conference for Chinese journalists on the day that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott officially opened the campus in person. At the very end of a conference - full of tame questions - Xu Yafen from Nottingham's joint venture partner Wanli Education made clear, in no uncertain terms, that journalists were not to use the words "business plan" in their stories. This even though Sir Colin himself had outlined the university's business plan for the next few years during the conference.
The implication was clear. Just by using the words business and plan in the same breath, there could be a suggestion that the university was solely in existence to make a profit. Instead, wagging her finger vehemently, she told journalists to refer to the "plan for fiscal balance".
This even though Campbell had earlier made clear that Ningbo, like Nottingham, would be a not-for-profit organisation.
"What money we make we re-invest in the campus and students," he said. "For this new university we have a business plan where we lose money for three or four years but then start to make money. If we start making money in three years that is a very, very short time for a new university to start making a return."
But that all said, a gradual relaxation of freedoms was in evidence if you searched hard enough.
I popped in on a guest lecture by Douglas Tallack, Nottingham's pro-vice-chancellor. His theme was Arthur Miller's The Crucible, an allegory for the persecution of communists - and liberals. Tallack admitted afterwards: "A few years back I'd have had to have clearance for this."
Eavesdropping lectures elsewhere I witnessed students at Ningbo being encouraged to develop critical thinking.
One student at the Tallack lecture was 21-year-old Zhang Xian. Talking in the "Yummy' coffee bar he said the most significant thing he had learnt so far was: "Learning to be critical in thinking. It's difficult to have critical thinking in our schools."
That said, given the rather soulless feel to the campus at present (I was reliably told everyone was in bed by 11pm) I don't think we are going to start seeing mass demonstrations at Ningbo quite yet.
Zhang himself, like most of the 900 plus students presently at Ningbo, comes from the surrounding Zhejiang province which, to give an idea of the sheer potential of this project, has the same population as Britain. Ningbo itself, which is classed as one of dozens of third tier Chinese cities, has a population of seven million, boosted by a large immigrant population.
Nottingham Ningbo University sits on a site a few miles to the south of the city in an area once home to acres of paddy fields. Today it is at the edge of a massive educational zone, home to a major university, as well as several colleges geared to specific industries such as textiles. However if you look close enough while driving up the Nottingham university driveway and past its running track and staff hotel, you can still see paddy fields and shacks bordering the campus. Like elsewhere in this part of China the pace of development is such that, for the time being at least, old and new sit incongruously side by side.
As such there's clearly room to expand, and Campbell himself admits it's in his thinking: "At present we envisage a gradual build up of student numbers to 4,000, provided that we maintain the highest quality. When we have achieved that we will review whether to go to 10,000 students. Courses will be grown, and when we are satisfied with the quality we will probably expand further."
Campbell stresses that the growth plan will also aim to mirror Nottingham's in terms of the high proportion of postgraduate and international students. "We want to be bringing in students from 50 countries to Ningbo within three or four years.
The traffic must be two way. That is what international co-operation will be built upon."
Nottingham councillor and former council leader Graham Chapman was part of the East Midlands contingent that travelled to Ningbo for the opening. He believes the Chinese are being "very canny. If their own universities grow and become ever more successful, how many students will want to come and study in the UK? I think numbers to the UK will continue falling."
As the links between Ningbo and Shanghai become ever stronger and closer (especially once construction of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge is completed between the two cities - see side panel), Ningbo will become ever more prosperous and Western-looking as it is subsumed within Shanghai, creating more opportunities for Nottingham.
Campbell says that if Ningbo works it could lead to more campuses in China for Nottingham. "Perhaps if Ningbo is a great success we will have other campuses as clearly there is great demand for university education in this country."
Campbell sits on the UK taskforce chaired by Prescott promoting closer collaboration between Britain and China and says the potential trade spin-offs for the UK mustn't be overlooked either.
As he told me: "We're dealing with lots of sectors in China where I'd hope our investment will encourage other companies, both British and Chinese, to co-operate. Indeed the presence of the East Midlands Development Agency (see side panel) here at our official opening is significant in this regard. If you take specific areas such as design, I'd hope to see collaboration between British businesses and Chinese firms in this province and beyond. Ningbo and Nottingham have agreements that they'll look for commercial opportunities."
So in time Ningbo may indeed prove to be a canny choice for the university, although ironically it was not originally top of their list. As Tallack adds: "Ningbo was originally about our fifth or sixth choice but gradually moved up the list and became a more viable option as others fell away. We initially targeted link-ups with the more elite universities in region but we found they were far more restrictive in terms of what we could do there. Creating a totally new campus gave us much more flexibility."
Dr Chris Bayley, head of campus operations at Ningbo and an ex-Nottingham graduate himself before starting his own consulting business advising foreign companies coming to China, agrees that Ningbo has vast potential. "This is a real up and coming area of China. Our university can actually become a real centre for business research into this part of China. The East Midlands could definitely benefit because of the knowledge we will build up of the businesses that operate here."
Bayley was signed up by Nottingham last June and has been involved in virtually every aspect of the venture from finance, estates and administration through to recruiting other consultants. "We were often implementing and planning at the same time. It was real seat of the pants stuff."
Bayley adds that China desperately needs to develop technical skills so that workers can manage businesses rather than be at the sharp end. "It also needs to sort out its procurement practices and quality control. Both of these areas need foreign investment and control and the country effectively needs far more due diligence."
Bayley says a particular problem is the Chinese culture of guanxi: the old school tie network of family and friendships.
The view is echoed by Helen Brown, a manager in assurance and advisory business services for Ernst & Young in Shanghai who is on a global exchange from Birmingham. She says: "In the West we are very open. Here you still have a generation of business leaders brought up under Mao and not used to saying "I'm wrong". You are often told one thing by one party and see something different on the ground. People also use the guanxi network extensively. If you fall out with one person you fall out with a lot by default. Who you know is so important here. China is entrepreneurial and trying to be free-thinking, but it's led by a "you will do this, you will do that" culture.
But if China is to become a truly global economic powerhouse, then it will undoubtedly have to start changing its ways.
As Brown adds: "To take just one example, increasing global regulation has to start affecting the country. There is too much at stake now for everyone. A lot of people have invested big sums in China in the last few years and now it needs the regulation.
It needs the checks and balances."
Meantime China will continue learning as much as it can from the West in the broadest sense.
And Nottingham will continue learning too. As Tallack remarked at the close of his lecture: "We hope you think in similar ways to us but we should not assume you do.
We need to understand your society as we hope you'll understand our society"
Planting that education seed is something the Chinese state is doing at a frantic pace. As in many corners of the developing world, the government is rapidly expanding its higher education system so that its economy can compete in more sophisticated, value added industries. The only difference is that in China this is being done on a simply mind-boggling scale. A decade ago just two to three per cent of school leavers went to university. Today the figure is touching one in five - and this in a country with more than 1.3 billion inhabitants.
But it isn't just into expanding existing Chinese universities (or building new ones) where countless billions of yuan are being spent, it's also going into joint ventures with universities like Nottingham.
In much the same way that the country is increasingly using joint ventures with foreign companies to gain toe-holds in new markets to learn about new methods of production, so it sees link-ups with Western educational establishments as a way of helping train its next generation of graduates in the workings of the modern global economy.
Nottingham is a trailblazer: the first Western institution to take advantage of legislation passed in 2003 that allowed foreign universities to set up campuses in China. The man behind it all is Sir Colin Campbell, Nottingham's vice-chancellor who has overseen a deliberate "internationalisation" of the university over the last decade, opening up Nottingham to ever more foreign students from ever more countries (at the last count 22 per cent of its students were from overseas and some 150 countries). The university has also opened a campus in Malaysia, a move often overlooked amid the hullabaloo that has surrounded the Chinese adventure.
Campbell has been particularly interested in China for many years and the whole Chinese project has been driven by his friendship with professor Fujia Yang, a nuclear physicist whom Campbell first met when Yang was president of Shanghai's Fudan University in the 1990s. The friendship was sealed when Yang became Nottingham's chancellor in 2001, the first time that a Chinese academic had become chancellor of a UK university.
As Campbell says: "We've shown a long, strong commitment to China over 10 years, we've chosen good partners and arrived at a time when the Chinese government has been opening doors and wanting to increase international collaboration. We are the first to come and we must be successful."
It is a venture not without considerable risk. On a purely financial level Nottingham will lose money at its Chinese campus for "three or four years", admits Campbell. Then there is the cultural divide to contend with, a divide which many sceptics see as a limiter on China's academic ambitions.
A world class university operating in a country without freedom of thought and expression is a contradiction in terms, they say.
Nottingham itself has had to make significant concessions as part of the whole deal, most notably by ensuring that the curriculum at its university in the city of Ningbo, south of Shanghai, leaves room for students to still leave the campus for their "political studies" course in the first year.
During my week in Ningbo the tentacles of the state never seemed far away too.
The delicacy of the whole venture was most pronounced during a press conference for Chinese journalists on the day that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott officially opened the campus in person. At the very end of a conference - full of tame questions - Xu Yafen from Nottingham's joint venture partner Wanli Education made clear, in no uncertain terms, that journalists were not to use the words "business plan" in their stories. This even though Sir Colin himself had outlined the university's business plan for the next few years during the conference.
The implication was clear. Just by using the words business and plan in the same breath, there could be a suggestion that the university was solely in existence to make a profit. Instead, wagging her finger vehemently, she told journalists to refer to the "plan for fiscal balance".
This even though Campbell had earlier made clear that Ningbo, like Nottingham, would be a not-for-profit organisation.
"What money we make we re-invest in the campus and students," he said. "For this new university we have a business plan where we lose money for three or four years but then start to make money. If we start making money in three years that is a very, very short time for a new university to start making a return."
But that all said, a gradual relaxation of freedoms was in evidence if you searched hard enough.
I popped in on a guest lecture by Douglas Tallack, Nottingham's pro-vice-chancellor. His theme was Arthur Miller's The Crucible, an allegory for the persecution of communists - and liberals. Tallack admitted afterwards: "A few years back I'd have had to have clearance for this."
Eavesdropping lectures elsewhere I witnessed students at Ningbo being encouraged to develop critical thinking.
One student at the Tallack lecture was 21-year-old Zhang Xian. Talking in the "Yummy' coffee bar he said the most significant thing he had learnt so far was: "Learning to be critical in thinking. It's difficult to have critical thinking in our schools."
That said, given the rather soulless feel to the campus at present (I was reliably told everyone was in bed by 11pm) I don't think we are going to start seeing mass demonstrations at Ningbo quite yet.
Zhang himself, like most of the 900 plus students presently at Ningbo, comes from the surrounding Zhejiang province which, to give an idea of the sheer potential of this project, has the same population as Britain. Ningbo itself, which is classed as one of dozens of third tier Chinese cities, has a population of seven million, boosted by a large immigrant population.
Nottingham Ningbo University sits on a site a few miles to the south of the city in an area once home to acres of paddy fields. Today it is at the edge of a massive educational zone, home to a major university, as well as several colleges geared to specific industries such as textiles. However if you look close enough while driving up the Nottingham university driveway and past its running track and staff hotel, you can still see paddy fields and shacks bordering the campus. Like elsewhere in this part of China the pace of development is such that, for the time being at least, old and new sit incongruously side by side.
As such there's clearly room to expand, and Campbell himself admits it's in his thinking: "At present we envisage a gradual build up of student numbers to 4,000, provided that we maintain the highest quality. When we have achieved that we will review whether to go to 10,000 students. Courses will be grown, and when we are satisfied with the quality we will probably expand further."
Campbell stresses that the growth plan will also aim to mirror Nottingham's in terms of the high proportion of postgraduate and international students. "We want to be bringing in students from 50 countries to Ningbo within three or four years.
The traffic must be two way. That is what international co-operation will be built upon."
Nottingham councillor and former council leader Graham Chapman was part of the East Midlands contingent that travelled to Ningbo for the opening. He believes the Chinese are being "very canny. If their own universities grow and become ever more successful, how many students will want to come and study in the UK? I think numbers to the UK will continue falling."
As the links between Ningbo and Shanghai become ever stronger and closer (especially once construction of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge is completed between the two cities - see side panel), Ningbo will become ever more prosperous and Western-looking as it is subsumed within Shanghai, creating more opportunities for Nottingham.
Campbell says that if Ningbo works it could lead to more campuses in China for Nottingham. "Perhaps if Ningbo is a great success we will have other campuses as clearly there is great demand for university education in this country."
Campbell sits on the UK taskforce chaired by Prescott promoting closer collaboration between Britain and China and says the potential trade spin-offs for the UK mustn't be overlooked either.
As he told me: "We're dealing with lots of sectors in China where I'd hope our investment will encourage other companies, both British and Chinese, to co-operate. Indeed the presence of the East Midlands Development Agency (see side panel) here at our official opening is significant in this regard. If you take specific areas such as design, I'd hope to see collaboration between British businesses and Chinese firms in this province and beyond. Ningbo and Nottingham have agreements that they'll look for commercial opportunities."
So in time Ningbo may indeed prove to be a canny choice for the university, although ironically it was not originally top of their list. As Tallack adds: "Ningbo was originally about our fifth or sixth choice but gradually moved up the list and became a more viable option as others fell away. We initially targeted link-ups with the more elite universities in region but we found they were far more restrictive in terms of what we could do there. Creating a totally new campus gave us much more flexibility."
Dr Chris Bayley, head of campus operations at Ningbo and an ex-Nottingham graduate himself before starting his own consulting business advising foreign companies coming to China, agrees that Ningbo has vast potential. "This is a real up and coming area of China. Our university can actually become a real centre for business research into this part of China. The East Midlands could definitely benefit because of the knowledge we will build up of the businesses that operate here."
Bayley was signed up by Nottingham last June and has been involved in virtually every aspect of the venture from finance, estates and administration through to recruiting other consultants. "We were often implementing and planning at the same time. It was real seat of the pants stuff."
Bayley adds that China desperately needs to develop technical skills so that workers can manage businesses rather than be at the sharp end. "It also needs to sort out its procurement practices and quality control. Both of these areas need foreign investment and control and the country effectively needs far more due diligence."
Bayley says a particular problem is the Chinese culture of guanxi: the old school tie network of family and friendships.
The view is echoed by Helen Brown, a manager in assurance and advisory business services for Ernst & Young in Shanghai who is on a global exchange from Birmingham. She says: "In the West we are very open. Here you still have a generation of business leaders brought up under Mao and not used to saying "I'm wrong". You are often told one thing by one party and see something different on the ground. People also use the guanxi network extensively. If you fall out with one person you fall out with a lot by default. Who you know is so important here. China is entrepreneurial and trying to be free-thinking, but it's led by a "you will do this, you will do that" culture.
But if China is to become a truly global economic powerhouse, then it will undoubtedly have to start changing its ways.
As Brown adds: "To take just one example, increasing global regulation has to start affecting the country. There is too much at stake now for everyone. A lot of people have invested big sums in China in the last few years and now it needs the regulation.
It needs the checks and balances."
Meantime China will continue learning as much as it can from the West in the broadest sense.
And Nottingham will continue learning too. As Tallack remarked at the close of his lecture: "We hope you think in similar ways to us but we should not assume you do.
We need to understand your society as we hope you'll understand our society"