In the 1990s, Jeffrey
S. Lehman, then the dean of the University of Michigan Law School, began
visiting Beijing to help open a program for
members of his faculty to teach at Peking
University China Cornell
University
In 2007, the leaders
of Peking University
“It’s been deeply
gratifying,” Mr. Lehman said of his Chinese experience.
The number of
foreigners working at the law school has increased since it was established,
with Americans, Germans, British and South Korean academics. Of the nine
permanent faculty, seven are foreigners.
The rise in foreign
academics at the law school reflects a broader trend. As institutions in
Western countries continue to suffer from budget cuts, academics looking for
opportunities farther afield are finding that China is welcoming foreign
professors with open arms.
Individual Chinese
universities have been increasingly recruiting Western academics in recent
years, but the Chinese government is also enticing foreigners with a new
program that offers a range of incentives.
“We are going to see
more foreign professors coming to China ,”
said Wang Huiyao, director general of the Center for China
and Globalization in Beijing
Late last year, the
Chinese government started the Thousand Foreign Experts program, which is
designed to attract up to 1,000 foreign academics and entrepreneurs over the
next 10 years to help improve research and innovation.
It has already
attracted more than 200 applicants from countries like the United States , Japan
and Germany , according to a
report in February by Xinhua ,
China
The program is an
extension of the Thousand Talent program, which started in 2008 as a way to
attract experts, academics and entrepreneurs to China
While 1,600 experts —
more than half of them academics — came to China
Mr. Wang said the
government wanted to further lift its intake of overseas experts, which led to
the establishment of the latest program specifically aimed at foreigners.
Under the new program,
successful candidates receive a subsidy of up to one million renminbi, or
nearly $160,000, and scientific researchers can receive a research allowance
worth three million to five million renminbi.
Mr. Wang said the
program, run by the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs in Beijing
He said the program
was targeted at “people who have been recognized in the West, those who have a
good track record.”
Mr. Wang said that
while there were already many foreigners working in Chinese universities,
particularly top-tier schools like Peking
University and Tsinghua University
“They are sending a
big signal to all universities in China
With funding harder to
come by in many Western countries, China China
Mr. Idelson, who is
half French and half British, joined Peking
University ’s HSBC
Business School
in Shenzhen last August as an assistant professor after an interview with a
Peking representative at a business conference in Canada
Mr. Idelson, who
previously worked at the Essec Business School
in Paris
Mr. Idelson, whose
wife is Chinese, had not set his sights specifically on China
“The first criteria
was strategic alignment,” he said. “Would this job enable me to further my
research? The second criteria was, would I integrate socially? And the third
was financially, what was the package like?”
The position at Peking University
Li Jun, an assistant
professor at the Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning at
the Hong Kong Institute of Education, said mainland Chinese universities were
now well-funded by the government and able to offer foreigners lucrative
packages.
He said China
At the institutional
level, Chinese universities were increasingly competing with one another to
improve their status and employing foreigners helped their reputations, he
said.
“They can use that to
recruit students and to get recognition from the public,” Mr. Li said, adding
that top foreign academics also helped Chinese universities attract more
research funding and made it easier for them to connect with the international
academic community.
“Their papers will be
written in English, which is a big barrier to the local academics,” he said.
“In terms of international recognition of scholars, that will be a big help for
the universities.”
Mr. Li, who said that
Chinese universities preferred academics from highly developed Western
countries, especially the United States
and Canada
Alex Katsomitros, a
research analyst at the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education in London,
said Chinese institutions would most likely be more interested in attracting
academics who specialized in the so-called Stem subjects — science, technology,
engineering and mathematics — which lift economic growth through innovation and
are seen as “politically neutral.”
“Social science and
humanities academics are less willing to move to China
Mr. Katsomitros cited
the case of the French virologist Luc Montagnier, who received the Nobel
Prize in 2008 for his discovery of H.I.V. and joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University
In an interview with
the journal Science in 2010, Mr. Montagnier, then 78, explained China France because of the country’s retirement laws,
and spoke of the “intellectual terror” that made it difficult to obtain funding
for research related to homeopathy in France
Mr. Katsomitros said
Chinese universities may be “mainly interested in the status and publicity”
such “academia superstars” bring, rather than the results of their research.
Nevertheless, he says
that Western institutions should not fret about losing academics to China
“In general, the flee
of academics might have been an issue of concern in the past, but it shouldn’t
be that worrying today, as higher education and academic research are going
through a phase of rapid internationalization,” he said. “The fact that academics
go to China China
