Chinese President Xi Jinping tells university sector not to copy foreign standards

There are good reasons for raising a finger to the much criticised rankings assessments, but there can be no coincidence in the unis doing so just after President Xi Jinping told the sector not to copy foreign standards.

And three months ago the government said it wanted world class universities "with Chinese characteristics", a phrase that means "putting the Chinese Communist Party first."

Beyond this, we have to wonder when China will eventually begin discouraging its people from going abroad for education - to Australia, for example.

The various ranking lists, assembled annually by mostly non-Chinese organisations, supposedly tell us, for example, that a uni is the 80th best in the world or maybe the 800th best.

Two of the institutions that will no longer cooperate with these assessments are quite notable. They are Renmin University, which is one of the most prestigious in Beijing, and Nanjing University, in the prosperous eastern city that it's named after. The third is Lanzhou University, in the capital of Gansu, a somewhat remote province.

Nanjing Uni has actually done reasonably well in the rankings, so it shouldn't have had any selfish motivation for rejecting them.

The other two might argue (though they haven't) that the rankings have little value, because, for example, the assessments put more emphasis on publication of academic research than on raising students' knowledge, thinking skills and job prospects. Or they might say the rankings are biased towards universities in English-speaking countries.

Both criticisms are common.

But the timing of the universities' rejection of the rankings tells us that politics is driving this.

Visiting Renmin University on April 25, Xi warned against following foreign standards and called for the sector to blaze a new path.

That would be the party's path, we can assume.

The CCP cannot stand any competition in wielding power. It never wants an independent authority, still less a foreign one, influencing anything in China.

Yet in education it sees mostly foreign organisations telling Chinese how good their universities are - and, in general, rating them rather poorly.

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Promoting a domestic rankings process that the party can control, or taking over one that's already being done in Shanghai, wouldn't work. Chinese would still pay a lot of attention to the foreign assessments, most of which can be calculated without cooperation if necessary.

So officials have probably decided that the whole idea of rankings must be rejected.

The decision of the three unis "conforms with the overall direction of China's education development and will become a trend," a source told state radio, which first reported the moves.

Chinese policy in many areas, especially economics, is increasingly aimed at insulating the country from the rest of the world. Measures to reduce reliance on foreign technology and markets have been most obvious lately.

The CCP is no doubt dissatisfied with the low scores that Chinese universities are getting. Yet the party is part of the problem.

Achieving high standards in education doesn't fit well with using it for brainwashing.

History students in China are fed history that glorifies the party and damns its opponents. Just about any humanities course will highlight national achievement and therefore the idea that the party is doing a good job.

Journalism students are taught that they must serve the party and that foreign news organisations are routinely corrupt and dishonest. One trick is to stuff courses with material from Western critics of Western media, the US academic Noam Chomsky being a favourite.

Science, mathematics and engineering are not distorted for propaganda purposes, or not much. The CCP doesn't need teachers to alter the laws of physics, for example.

But all students must study CCP political theory, typically writing out essays with standard party-worshipping paragraphs. Almost no one takes this seriously, but it must be done, occupies time and displaces other learning.

Actually, Chinese universities' problems are deeper than that. Most are lazy institutions in which teachers shirk work and in which few students fail to graduate - because letting them pass is no hassle and because failing many would discourage enrolments and revenue.

This column last year mentioned a young couple from a poor rural background who lived separately as they worked in tough jobs while the husband's mother looked after their daughter. He lacked a high school certificate but was determined to get ahead, so he studied part-time for a diploma in English, a good multi-purpose qualification.

Once he got that, he went for a bachelor's degree in accounting from a pretty well known uni in Beijing. In both education programs, he told me, he learned little from his teachers, who frequently cancelled classes, as Chinese teachers do. Instead he worked like a demon in studying his textbooks.

So it isn't hard to see why Chinese people value foreign education - or, more importantly, why Chinese hiring managers value it.

The party cannot be comfortable with this. It does what it can to supervise Chinese students while they're abroad, including getting some to act as snitches, reporting on those who say politically unacceptable things in foreign classrooms.

But it can have full control over students and reinforce their brainwashing only by keeping them in China. Sooner or later, it will surely begin disparaging foreign education, restricting promotion of it in China and ultimately preventing all but a few people from studying abroad.

Our universities had better think about when that might happen.