Advanced Learners in China's Top UniversitiesAndrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor wh

Advanced Learners in China's Top Universities

Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor who is recognized as one of the United States's top computer scientists, was approached by Tsinghua University in Beijing last year to lead an advanced computer studies program, he did not hesitate.

Why would a leading scientist at one of America's top universities leave a prestigious program for a university that is little known outside of China？ One reason is loyalty to the country where he was born, although he spent his academic career in the United States and was raised in Taiwan, China.

"Patriotism does have something to do with it, because I just cannot imagine going anywhere else, even if the conditions were equal," he said.

China wants to transform. its top universities into the world's best within a decade, and is spending billions of dollars to woo big-name scholars like Yao and to build first-class research laboratories.

China has already pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees five folded in 10 years.

"First-class universities increasingly reflect a nation's overall power," Wu Bangguo, China's second-ranking leader, said recently in a speech here marking the 100th anniversary of Fudan University, the country's first modern post-secondary institution.

China's model is simple: recruit top foreign-trained Chinese and overseas-born ethnic Chinese to well-equipped labs, surround them with the brightest students and give them tremendous leeway.

The new confidence about entering the world's educational elite is heard among politicians and university administrators, students and professors. Young Chinese visit the top campuses as if on a pilgrimage, posing for photographs before the arching stone gates they dream of entering as students.

"Maybe in 20 years, MIT will be studying Tsinghua's example," says Rao Zihe, director of the Institute of Biophysics at Tsinghua, University, an institution that is renowned for its sciences and is regarded by many as China's finest university. "How long it will take to catch up can't be predicted, but in some respects we are already better than the Harvard today."

In only a generation, since 1978, China has roughly 20 percent of its college-age population in higher education, up from 1.4 percent. In engineering alone, it is producing 442,000 undergraduates a year, along with 48,000 graduates with master's degrees and 8,000 doctorates.

But only Peking University and a few other top Chinese institutions have been internationally recognized as superior. Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then China's leader, officially started the effort to transform. Chinese universities, state financing for higher education has more than doubled, reaching $ 10. 4 billion in 2003, the last two years for which an official figure are unavailable.

Xu Tian, a leading geneticist who was trained and still teaches at Yale, runs a laboratory at Fudan University that performs innovative work on the transposition of genes. On Aug. 12, his breakthrough research was featured on the cover of the prestigious journal, Cell, a first for a Chinese scientist.

Peking University drew on the talents of Tian Gang, a leading mathematician from MIT, in setting up an international research center for advanced mathematics, among other high-level research centers.

Officials at Peking University estimate that as much as 40 percent of its faculty is trained overseas, most often in the United States.

The president of Yale University, Richard Levin, was interviewed in Shanghai, where he was the featured guest in late September. "China has 20 percent of the world's population, and it is safe to say it has more than 20 pe

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