Chinese universities abandon or repurpose regional campuses

Growing numbers of Chinese universities are abandoning or repurposing planned satellite campuses in response to a government ban on interprovincial expansion.

Branch campuses first appeared in China as early as the 1980s and, as of 2020, 53 of the institutions involved in the Double First Class excellence initiative had set up 166 outposts outside their home bases. However, the practice became controversial when branch campuses began concentrating in the country’s prosperous eastern regions, running counter to Beijing’s goal of developing its vast but economically lagging mid-west.

In 2021, the Ministry of Education said it would not “support or encourage” higher education institutions running branch campuses in provinces other than the one in which they are based.

Many universities are now curtailing their expansion plans. Most recently, municipal authorities in the eastern city of Qingdao confirmed that the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics had cancelled plans to build a Qingdao International Campus.

When this project was announced in 2019, it was hoped that the 3.15 billion yuan (£339 million) campus would attract 10,000 students and, two years later, it was reported that the initial stages of construction had been completed, at a cost of 520 million yuan.

But the Qingdao municipal government said in a statement that the project was “currently affected by the Ministry of Education’s policy on higher education institutions running off-site branch campuses, therefore the original plan cannot be implemented”.

At least a dozen other institutions have taken similar steps. Wuhan University has cancelled plans for a regional campus in Shenzhen, while Xi’an Jiaotong University has withdrawn its graduate schools in Shenzhen, Qingdao and Tangshan.

Beijing Institute of Technology, the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Northwestern Polytechnical University are among a large group of providers that have renamed the branch campuses innovation centres or bases, focusing on research and knowledge transfer. This reflects their changed nature, with these outposts not permitted to recruit students.

“The policy changes since 2021 aimed at reducing regional disparities in higher education resources have effectively curbed these institutions’ revenue generation from merely expanding and establishing more campuses in the eastern coastal regions,” said Yuning Fang, a PhD researcher in economic geography at the University of Nottingham, who has investigated this issue with a case study in Shenzhen. “It is worth noting that the intentions are likely aligned with the broader direction of China’s higher education reform and modernisation efforts.”

At the time of the 2021 ban concerns were raised that universities from China’s poorer provinces had been setting up branch campuses in the country’s east, a move that may have offered benefits to the institutions involved but gave scant returns to their home regions.

“The moves [to rename campuses] are not surprising as the corresponding policies are turning more and more restrictive, and universities have invested a lot in these campuses,” added Wan-Hsin Liu, senior researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

“Establishing and running well-functioning innovation hubs and research centres will strategically help the universities to be again in line with the up-to-date policy direction and to thus enhance their probability to be considered for governmental funding or resource support in science and technology projects and on basic research activities.”

In addition to its distaste for the building of new branch campuses, China’s Ministry of Education has confirmed that existing regional campuses will be phased out “in principle”.

karen.liu@timeshighereducation.com