Written evidence submitted by the British
Council
SUMMARY
The British Council has already submitted to
the Committee a written brief containing an overview of the Council's
work in China. This supplementary memorandum draws the Committee's
attention to a number of factors in the areas of education, culture
and social reform, which have bearing on the first of the issues
addressed by the Inquiry ("The growing political and economic
prominence of the PRC in international affairs") and the
last ("The roles of the United Kingdom and the European Union
in the region").
1. The growing prominence of the PRC—education
and culture
China's new international prominence is reflected
in its growing success in attracting foreign students to its university
campuses. For the Chinese Government this is a stated priority,
for much the same reasons that the UK welcomes foreign students:
to promote understanding of China, its language and culture and
make long term friends; to contribute to the international quality
and reputation of higher education institutions; and to improve
the economic well-being of receiving institutions. For several
years, China has seen 20% growth in its international student
population, which now stands at about 86,000, of whom some 10,000
are supported by Chinese government scholarships. While both these
figures are still less than half the corresponding figures for
international students in the UK, it is in the East Asia region
that China's role as an overseas study destination, as with its
growing influence in many other fields, is most marked.
This is most striking in the case of the Republic
of Korea, a country with which China had no diplomatic relations
prior to 1992, but which has since become a major trading and
investment partner. Some 43,000 South Koreans study in China each
year (about half of all international students in China), and
many say that they do so in order to become conversant in the
language and culture of an increasingly important neighbour. Only
the USA attracts more South Korean students. Conversely, a majority
of foreign students in Korea (58% or 13,000) are from China, attracted
by affordable courses and scholarships. All the major East Asian
countries receive growing numbers of Chinese students, typically
accounting for 30-50% of their international student enrolment
(Japan: 81,000; Singapore: 33,000; Malaysia: 17,000; in the latter
two cases most teaching is carried out in English).
The Taiwan case is interesting. Despite difficult
cross-Straits relations, some 5,000 Taiwanese are pursuing studies
on the Mainland: many, it would appear, with the intention of
pursuing careers there when they graduate. It remains very difficult
for Chinese students to go to Taiwan. Academic co-operation and
the two-way traffic of academic visitors are permitted (by Taiwan—they
are actively encouraged by China); there are some 31 university
co-operation programmes at present.
The growing number of East Asian students choosing
to study in China, where most acquire Chinese language skills
either as the main reason for their stay, or in order to follow
other programmes taught in Chinese, is just one factor driving
the growth of Chinese as regional and international language.
Despite having had more native speakers than any other language
since, probably, the beginning of human history, the role of Chinese
beyond Chinese territories and Chinese diaspora communities has
until recently been limited by a number of factors which are now
changing fundamentally:
— Fragmentation. Chinese has
many mutually incomprehensible dialects, some of which, such as
Cantonese and the Wu dialect of Shanghai, qualify as major languages
in their own right. After two generations of policies requiring
the use of standard Mandarin (putonghua) as the medium of instruction
in education, and the main language of broadcasting, Mandarin
is now universally understood and spoken (albeit often as second
language) through Mainland China. In Chinese diaspora communities,
teaching of Chinese, and Chinese-medium instruction in community
schools, increasingly focuses on Mandarin, with the result that
in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore the use of other Chinese
dialects is reducing, as the younger generation switches to Mandarin.
In Hong Kong, where Cantonese remains the first language of most
of the population, much of the population appears to be intent
on gaining Mandarin language skills, whether through formal education,
study visits to the Mainland or self-tuition. For domestic political
reasons, Taiwan goes against the trend, with increased emphasis
on the local dialect driven by those who favour a separate identity:
wherever that may ultimately lead, the growing dominance of Mandarin
in the Chinese-speaking world, and hence the emergence of Chinese
as a standardized international language, is obvious.
— Script: It is sometimes said,
erroneously, that the Chinese language, while diverse in its spoken
forms, is always written in the same way. In fact, since the Chinese
government set about simplifying many of the written characters
from the 1960s, to support a literacy drive and foster a sense
of cultural radicalism, there has been both a "simplified"
form of written Chinese (used in Mainland China), and a "traditional
form" (used everywhere else). The recent trend is the growing
adoption of the simplified form, for example in Chinese programmes
taught in Singapore schools, as in most teaching of Chinese in
the education systems of other countries. China is seeking UN
recognition of the simplified script as the global norm for written
Chinese.
— Technology: until the development
of the personal computer and word-processing software, the production
of the written Chinese language, with its thousands of multi-stroke
characters—whether by hand or mechanically—was a labour
requiring much study and patience, in comparison with alphabetic
scripts. So great were the economic inefficiencies of such a tool,
that in the 1960s China considered abolishing the script in favour
of an alphabetic system. The IT revolution has changed all that.
Chinese is now no more difficult to produce, using a key board
or other inputting techniques, than other written languages. Its
conciseness may even give it an edge in some areas of applied
technology (for example, it takes much less time to send a Chinese
SMS text message from a mobile phone that an equivalent message
in English!)
These linguistic developments, but above all
China's emergence as a major economic and political power, have
positioned the Chinese language for unprecedented (in the case
of Chinese) global reach. Chinese is already the second language
(after English) of the internet, and is growing fastest. It is
the fastest growing foreign language (admittedly growing from
a low base) in many western countries' education systems. Supporting
this trend and seeking to gain influence from it, the Chinese
Government has allocated resources since 2004 for the establishment
of "Confucius Institutes" in partnership with overseas
universities, where Chinese language is taught and information
on China and Chinese education offered to students and the public.
Many of a targeted 100 institutes in the first phase of this project
have already been opened, including three in the UK.
As the teaching of Chinese in the United Kingdom
has widened to include well over 100 schools, the British Council
has serviced a growing demand for recruitment of Chinese native-speaker
teachers from China (60 new teachers are required by UK secondary
schools this year, up from 35 in 2005). Since 2001, the British
Council has facilitated the creation of about 240 exchange and
co-operation links between schools in the UK and China. In 2005-06
alone, some 122 UK schools teachers or senior managers visited
China with a view to establishing links, and a majority (75) of
these were the first visitors from their school to China.
2. The roles of the United Kingdom and the
European Union in the region
(i)Education
In the late 1990s, as China became a significant
source of self-financed international students, the UK, initially
trailing well behind the USA and facing strong and sometimes more
dynamic competition from Australia and other destination countries,
sought to develop a share of this market. Initial results were
modest, reflecting the difficulty of matching US institutions'
provision of scholarships, and the lower fees and living costs
offered by other competitors, mainly Commonwealth countries.
By the time the UK Prime Minister launched the
"Prime Minister's Initiative" in 1999, with the aim
of increasing the number of international students in the UK,
it was clear that China was the market most capable of contributing
a significant increase in students. The British Council shifted
resources to this work in China, concentrating on developing allegiances
and knowledge amongst Chinese education agents (through whom about
half of Chinese students arrange their study abroad); creating
through media and on-line work a distinct UK education brand,
emphasizing quality and international reputation, affordability
(our fees are not low, but many of our courses are shorter than
elsewhere) and diversity in choice of programme; and encouraging
UK institutions to promote themselves and form relationships in
China, supporting them in this with market intelligence and logistical
services.
This sustained effort has paid off. The UK is
now clearly established as the second most popular study abroad
destination after the USA, and the difference is small: last year
the UK enjoyed a 16% market share compared to the USA's 17%. For
two years following 9/11 and the US immigration restrictions which
followed, the UK was in fact the number one destination for Chinese
students. Approaching 60,000 PRC students are now studying in
the UK—23% of all non-EU students. The market remains however
highly competitive, with the main current trends being (a) the
resurgence of the US as a popular destination; (b) the growing
number of countries recruiting students from China; (c) the increasing
provision of courses taught in English by countries where English
is not the first language, eg Germany, Netherlands—which
tends to reduce the UK's linguistic advantage. Consequently, the
British Council and UK education institutions are gearing themselves
up for a competitive struggle for market share. While the total
number of Chinese students going abroad fell in the last two years,
this seems to reflect a possibly one-off market correction, driven
by the rapid expansion of university places in China itself (from
1 million to 5 million from 1998 to 2005) and the high volume
of returning graduates from overseas impacting negatively on these
graduates' immediate prospects in the jobs market. China, provided
high economic growth is sustained, is likely to remain the pre-eminent
source of international students in the UK and many other countries
for some years to come, and promotional efforts will need to be
focused accordingly.
For a brief period in the early 2000s, before
the realities of growing competition and reduced market growth
became evident, many UK education institutions became concerned
at the consequences of their own success in attracting Chinese
students. Their worry was that a preponderance of Chinese students
would undermine the international character of study programmes,
or that the demand from China would soon become insatiable. Exaggerated
though this alarm proved to be, it had the beneficial effect of
encouraging more UK education institutions to seek to deliver
their study programmes partly or wholly in China (part of the
growing international phenomenon known as "Trans-national
Education" or "TNE"). This was an area where the
UK had previously been relatively cautious, compared with bullish
competitors such as Australia, whose further and higher educations
sectors moved fastest to set up off-shore operations in China
in the 1990s—often, it must be said, at the expense of effective
quality control.
TNE is permitted in China under strict regulatory
and licensing control by the Ministry of Education. For the Chinese
government, the impetus to permit the development of this sector
is two-fold: to build capacity and quality in China's own education
system through international collaboration; and to encourage more
Chinese students to remain in China and spend their funds at home
(this despite China having the world's largest foreign exchange
reserves). In these senses the education sector is being developed
in much the same way as the Chinese car industry: the desirables
are partnership, import substitution and technology transfer.
Spurred on by the capacity challenges of the
early 2000s and a strategic sense of TNE's growing importance,
the UK's institutions have quickly established a lead in this
area. Some 200 joint programmes operate in China as partnerships
between UK and Chinese institutions: typically they allow students
to prepare for, and/or undertake the first part of, a degree course
which is then completed in the UK. The market trend is also encouraging:
in the period March-September 2005, the Ministry of Education
received 114 applications for approval for new UK-China programmes,
by far the largest number from any country. The USA and Australia
trailed with 59 and 47 respectively.
The only full joint-venture universities which
have been permitted to operate by the Chinese authorities so far
are British: the University of Nottingham-Ningbo, which first
enrolled local students in 2005, will recruit from across China
this year, and has ambitions to recruit 25% of its intake internationally
in the future; and Liverpool's joint venture university with Xi'an
Jiaotong University, to be based in Suzhou, has received approval.
In the further education sector, the UK's Higher
National Diploma (HND) programmes, delivered both by the Scottish
Qualifications Agency (SQA) and Edexcel (formerly University of
London External), have expanded rapidly in the last two years
through franchising of courses taught in Chinese colleges. Some
7,000 students are now enrolled on these programmes, making it
probably the largest such international programme delivered in
China.
Yet the Ministry of Education remains as cautious
as ever towards the approval of new TNE programmes. The approval
of two Sino-British joint universities as test cases in part reflects
Chinese Government confidence in the academic quality and service
standards of the UK education system, nurtured carefully by the
British Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for England
and others for many years, through strategic co-operation in higher
education and career training opportunities for Chinese academic
leaders in the UK. The British Council was also instrumental in
brokering the first approved audit of TNE in China: in May 2006
the UK's Quality Assurance Agency for higher education carried
out a quality audit of UK TNE operations in China (report awaited)
with the support of the Ministry of Education.
These confidence-building measures, and the
relationships on which they depend, will need to be sustained
if the UK is continue its success in a very competitive but highly
regulated market, where the Chinese Government remains unsure
about how much TNE, and what types of programme, it should permit
in the longer term. The fully independent operation of foreign
education providers in China remains a cultural and political
taboo. The market potential is nevertheless encouraging, particularly
because the government's new 11th 5-year Plan focuses on "software
stability" (including education) instead of large infrastructure
projects. Education funding is being channelled into three domestic
priorities: improving the quality of higher education; improving
the lifelong learning system; and universalising nine-year compulsory
education. Recent concerns at the increasing bank debts of Chinese
higher education institutions are likely to reduce the availability
of this source of funding for autonomous growth and quality improvement
in China's universities. Therefore, these institutions can be
expected to more often seek international partners to assist with
their expansion plans. China for the first time has begun to encourage
injections of funds from private foreign investors into Education
for the first time.
One of the UK's advantages in China's education
market is English—though diminishing as a competitive edge
for the UK as it becomes more widely used in countries whose first
language is not English. English is the major foreign language
in China, studied by an estimated 200 million students at all
levels of the education system. All school children start learning
English from Grade 3 (age 9). In major cities such as Beijing,
Guangzhou and Shanghai and in some of the richer coastal provinces,
English has been introduced at Grade 1. In such places, kindergartens
too are beginning to use English on the curriculum as a marketing
tool to boost enrolment. There is even a market for audio materials
and equipment which purport to give the pre-natal child an invaluable
acquaintance with English phonetics (untestable as such precocious
achievement seems likely to be). The domestic market for English
learning and teaching materials is estimated by the Chinese Government
at 150 billion RMB per annum, or 11 billion pounds.
While the major mass-market examinations and
tests used to assess English ability are and will remain domestic
Chinese products, a considerable market (600,000 tests per year)
has opened up for international tests. The market leader is the
UK's Cambridge Exams with a currently dominant market share. For
several years, Cambridge and the British Council have worked together
to position their jointly owned IELTS test of English, in the
previously US-dominated (in China) market for testing students
going abroad and labour migrants. In 2005, this test overtook
its US competitor (85,000 as against 70,000 tests). As one official
in the Ministry of Education commented, the rise of IELTS—now
a household term in its Chinese translation—has caused a
revision of many people's assumption that American English would
become the standard form of the language used in China.
In addition to a growing market for the testing
of English, there has been rapid growth in the numbers of Chinese
studying for and taking international professional qualifications,
such MBAs and accountancy qualifications, through the medium of
English. This is now a market of 130,000 tests a year—growing
at 30-40% per annum, with US, UK and Australian qualifications
the most popular. A similar high rate of growth is evident in
the market for educational books including textbooks, and all
the major UK publishers in this sector (Longman, Cambridge, Oxford
etc) are extensively involved in rights deals and other co-operation
with Chinese publishers.
David Graddol's recent English Next research,
commissioned by the British Council, confirmed the high level
of demand in China for English. In Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou,
English is now taught in Primary Year 1 and it is taught in Primary
year 3 in other cities, while it is fair to say that in rural
areas the situation is a lot worse. This is one of the reasons
why President Hu Jintao has launched a rural support programme
for children in the western regions of China, away from the richer
coastal regions, to ensure that they receive 9 years of free compulsory
education.
As for English medium education: the following
extract from a study funded by Research Grants Council of HKSAR
(Project No. HKU7175/98H) is useful:
" . . . . . . . . . . English has been
the most important foreign language in China for at least 40 years
. . . . . . . . . . The only constraints to the development of
English language teaching in China as practised internationally
as well as teaching and learning of other foreign languages in
China are the inadequacy of library resources, the need to have
sustainable research practice, more funding for better teaching
and learning conditions and the propagation of teacher training
across educational levels, across languages and across the vast
land." (Lam & Chow: English Language Education in China:
An update)
(ii) Culture and creative industries
The creative industries, as classified by the
Chinese Government, currently account for about 7.5% of China's
GDP. This is large and diverse sector in which the UK and the
British Council are extensively involved. The following illustrates
the British Council's work with two case studies from Mainland
China's largest and most international city, Shanghai.
The government of Shanghai has identified the
development of creative industries as one of the main planks of
its economic strategy over the next five years. As in other sectors,
the government seeks to lead and even manage the development of
market, not just to enable and regulate it. By 2005 the Shanghai
government had identified 18 creative industry development "parks"
in the city and it plans to establish many more. Last year the
Shanghai government also set up a Creative Industries Centre (SCIC).
It exists to support the development of creative industries and
inform policy making, eg through publicity, training, events organization
and academic research. SCIC also aims to be the first port of
call for any company that wishes to set up or develop business
linked to the creative industries in Shanghai, including advising
on which of the districts to work in: there are 19 districts in
Shanghai, each with its own local authority keen to attract investment
in the creative industries, particularly digital technologies.
The British Council has developed a close working
relationship with SCIC, enabling its leadership to visit the UK
last year and learn from UK models of creative industry development.
As a results of this visit, we have now agreed to work together
on a mapping of the Creative Industries in Shanghai, the first
project of its kind in China. By assisting Shanghai in this way,
the UK will gain unrivalled understanding of strategies and opportunities
in this sector in Shanghai, and will have built a fund of trust
and understanding towards of own creative industries sector, facilitating
the development of joint commercial projects in the future.
The Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF)
is China's only major international film festival, reflecting
Shanghai's status as the original home of the cinema in China.
Given the tight government-imposed quota on foreign films shown
in Chinese cinemas, the Festival represents the only regular opportunity
to show UK films on the big screen to a Chinese audience. It is
also increasingly an important networking event for industry professionals
and is developing a training component too. The Festival enjoys
huge media coverage in Shanghai and in some national press too.
The British Council has worked with the Shanghai
Film Festival over many years to bring UK films to the festival
and project messages about UK creativity in film to a wider audience.
This year we have helped Film London to build a strong link with
the Festival. While the market for foreign films will remain restricted
for some years, there is growing interest on both sides in co-production
and co-operation in areas where the UK has world-class technology
and creative skills (e.g. animation). By ensuring the UK is represented
at the Festival by industry leaders and high-profile talent, and
that UK cinema is well represented in the content of the Festival,
The British Council aims to help the UK maximise these opportunities.
(iii) Social and legal reform
It is increasingly the view both in China and
the international community that one of the greatest challenges
on which the sustainability of China's "peaceful rise"
will hinge, is success in the reform of legal, social and economic
institutions (views on political reform are by contrast polarized).
In the late 1970s. at the end of the cultural revolution, China
was a country with, to all intents and purposes, no legal code,
no lawyers. It was equipped with economic and social institutions
geared to the close management of a state-planned and state-led
economy based on a full-employment model, largely indifferent
to profit and productivity.
Great progress since then has most famously
embraced the economy, but also the relaxation of social controls
(such as those on travel and internal migration) and the establishment
of a basic criminal and civil legal framework, administered in
part by trained professionals, and, at least where powerful vested
interests are not at stake, with a degree of impartiality.
Nevertheless, the questions posed in China and
abroad about the sustainability of China's growth and new-found
international prominence, substantially revolve around the under-development
of institutions, in particular independent institutions such as
regulators and civil society institutions, and of a fully impartial
judicial system. Many of China's constitutional and legal rights
for its citizens, from access to education to mandatory holidays
for employees, are simply denied in practice to many people, though
the unchallenged behaviour or negligence of powerful local actors.
The need for progress in areas, from the independent enforcement
of labour regulations against local government-backed (or owned)
commercial interests, to the development of major NGOs able to
address social problems too great for government to tackle alone,
stands in conflict with the authorities' continued commitment
to one-Party rule, and is therefore discussed and addressed with
caution.
The British Council in China is both in its
own right, and as a delivery agency for EU and HMG programmes,
actively involved in supporting institutional reform. For example,
we are contracted to manage the EU's social security reform (unemployment
insurance) programme, having recently completed successfully under
contract both a DFID programme in the same field and what is perhaps
the EU's most successful support programme to China to date, the
EU-China Legal and Judicial Co-Operation Programme.
In its own project work in these fields, the
British Council works with reform-minded agencies and individuals,
in sensitive areas where our help and partnership is trusted and
welcomed. While the overt development of an independent NGO sector
remains anathema to many of China's leaders, we have identified
common ground under the heading of "social innovation":
creative and scaleable innovations at grass roots level by citizens
and groups of citizens acting on their own initiative within the
law . Our programme in this field provides opportunities to address
in a practical context both the issue of civil society development
and the improvement China's human rights record, particularly
in the areas of access to education, health and environmental
protection. Our partnership with the China Centre for Politics
and Economy (a Party think tank) and the UK's Young Foundation
is focused on the processes of developing positive models of social
innovations including the role of non government organisations.
Developing new institutions to promote social justice via "seed
funding" mechanisms supported by the government and private
sector is a clear agenda of the programme and allows us and reform-minded
Chinese experts to place "freedom of association" human
rights questions on the agenda.
In the legal field, we have moved on from an
emphasis on supporting legal training, to supporting legal innovation.
We have built an on-line and face-to-face network of young Chinese
lawyers with a growing interest in legal development as opposed
to being passive deliverers of the law, and we have linked them
to each other and to British and international counterparts. We
have helped them create a dialogue on such issues as the extension
of legal aid in China to provide access to justice for poorer
citizens; and the strengthening of environmental law through converting
some civil offences to criminal offences. We use contemporary
examples of legal development in the UK which are pertinent to
legal development in China, and leave it to the Chinese to draw
their own conclusions about reform implications.
The British Council's high degree of independence
allows it to occupy a position in China vis-a-vis the Chinese
government and non-government organisations which complements
but is different from that of HMG. Precisely because we are not
seen as the mouthpiece of HMG on issues where the UK needs to
exert formal pressure on China over non-compliance with international
norms, we are able to position as a trusted access route to UK
resources and ideas of value to Chinese reformers.
British Council
May 2006
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