Keeping up with China: a shift from bilateral to multilateral education collaboration

Last week in Beijing the British Council and China’s Ministry of Education launched the UK-China-Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Countries Education Partnership Initiative. The new initiative will offer seed-funding to six partnerships between the UK, China and countries along the Belt and Road. In total, 28 universities across 12 countries will benefit from the funding, which will support education collaboration in areas including dental healthcare, food safety, intelligent manufacturing, renewable energy and global leadership.

This new initiative is the first multilateral collaboration between the British Council and China’s Ministry of Education, and is in fact the first that the Ministry of Education has partnered with a European country at such a scale with the BRI.

Whilst bilateral education collaboration is a staple of the higher education landscape, with endless success stories relating to enhanced student and staff experience, and greater research impact (to name just a couple), multilateral collaboration is a lesser explored model.

China’s stated desire to become a world leader in education has led to unprecedented levels of investment. China spent nearly 675 billion USD on education in 2017, an increase of over 9 percent from 2016.[1] China’s total R&D expenditure – including both government and non-government sources – was equivalent to 2.1 per cent of the country’s GDP in 2016. The country’s R&D spending has increased by an average of 14 per cent per year over the last decade, measured in real terms at purchasing power parity.[2]

China’s continued ambition in education can stretch the resources of bilateral partners. The sheer weight of people and resources that China can invest in a partnership often cannot be reciprocated by a single partner. Multilateral collaboration is one way in which parity in investment and resources can be achieved, evidenced in this new partnership by the number of universities and countries involved.

Multilateral collaboration also provides an opportunity for institutions to bring together leading experts from multiple countries to share best practice and differing perspectives. The winning proposals of the funding were those institutions who best demonstrated the mutual benefit initiatives would bring in key areas of global importance. Institutions were challenged to determine how multilateral collaboration could support innovation and problem solving of some of the world’s biggest challenges.

The UK and China have a long history of successful bilateral collaboration in education. Success has included working together to become leading partners in transnational education, developing systems for the mutual recognition of academic qualifications, quality assurance of collaborative higher education programmes, postgraduate research and scholarships, collaborative research in employability and entrepreneurship, as well as various other student and academic exchange programmes.

The UK-China-Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Countries Education Partnership Initiative is an opportunity for the UK and China to take this successful bilateral relationship and build on it. By bringing together China’s ambition along the Belt and Road and the UK’s growing international education agenda, the initiative aims to forge new multilateral partnerships that will continue to explore innovative ways to address some of the world’s most pressing issues.

This initiative is a return to a fundamental aspect of international education, supporting institutions from across the globe to come together to support wider academic collaborations that will boost knowledge sharing, be catalysts of innovation and, perhaps most importantly, equip the next generation with the global mindsets and cross-cultural understanding necessary to make a difference to global social and economic development.

More information on the UK-China-Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Countries Education Partnership Initiative can be found here:

https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/programmes/education/seeding

If you have any questions regarding the initiative, please contact:

partnershipfund@britishcouncil.org.cn