Even as India’s Foreign Education Providers (Regulation of Entry and Operations Bill 2010) has been stalled in the country’s unparliamentary Parliament for several years, whether for the narrow purpose of generating revenue or the broader goal of engaging more deeply with a rapidly emerging and ever more important nation, foreign universities are scrambling to recruit in China, as well as to establish or expand their presence there.

Britain’s Lancaster University, New York’s Juilliard School, which specialises in music, and Duke University in North Carolina, are the latest foreign institutions to pile into an already crowded marketplace. Other co-operative and exchange programmes in higher education are being announced almost every month. Some recruit Chinese students to foreign universities, or foreign students to Chinese ones. Others take the form of research facilities or academic-exchange centres. Some offer dual degrees. The most ambitious involve building, staffing and operating satellite campuses in China.

None of them finds it easy to work within an academic system whose standards and values are so different from the West. Not least of the hurdles is maintaining scholarly independence in China’s restrictive political environment. The Communist Party sees universities partly as training grounds for loyalists who will one day be leaders in government and business. The study of Marxism is compulsory for all except foreigners.

The collapse of a Beijing-based undergraduate programme jointly run by two elite institutions — Yale University in America and Peking University — has highlighted some of the difficulties foreigners face. Yale’s administrators pulled the plug last July, citing high expenses, low enrolment and weaknesses in its Chinese-language programme.

In 2007, less than a year after the programme was launched, a visiting Yale faculty member, Stephen Stearns, wrote an open letter complaining about the rampant plagiarism he claimed was being committed by many of his Chinese students. “When a student I am teaching steals words and ideas from an author without acknowledgement, I feel cheated,” said Stearns. He added that such practices appeared to be widely tolerated by Chinese academics, and suggested that the nation has lost its way.

However, Yale’s experience has not deterred others from coming in, with strong encouragement from the Chinese government. Officials hope such ventures will prevent academic talent from moving abroad, and push Chinese universities to improve. But plagiarism, false credentials and research, and cheating in tests, remain obstacles for foreign universities in China. “Academic culture in China is such that the kind of value system we have in place is not part of the woodwork here,” says Denis Simon, who oversees Arizona State University’s engagement with China.

In November Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University in New York, said his institution’s academic centre in Beijing, which opened in 2009, would uphold academic “freedom and openness”. He added that if anything threatened to compromise its “fundamental values”, Columbia would have to leave China.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)