Mainland China's International University Expansion

Patrick Boehler:

At 7.15 every morning, Professor Wen Shuming and eight Chinese colleagues share a breakfast prepared by two local maids, who have been taught how to cater to the tastes of alien educators.

The group then leave their shared home and head for the office: two tube-shaped rooms with bare walls and fluorescent lights in a one-storey building on a busy road, next to a cash machine, a sportswear store and a deserted private school.

They are employed by Soochow University, but this office isn't in Jiangsu province, nor even in China. It is on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

Wen's life is about to get a lot busier. After years of preparation and lobbying, the university campus he has been setting up will open its doors to undergraduate students in a couple of weeks. Little has been made of the undertaking, but as well as being Laos' first foreign campus, it marks the first time a Chinese university (as opposed to the government-linked Confucius Institute) has opened a branch abroad.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 2, 2012 1:43 AM
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