Chinese universities including Renmin move away from international rankings while aiming for world class
- As President Xi calls on Chinese universities to ‘blaze a new path’, withdrawal from rankings decided by foreign bodies gains support within China
- Education experts say China’s institutions will not abandon all evaluations, and are ready to be measured against diverse and comprehensive criteria
News of the university’s plans to withdraw from the rankings first spread online in early May, with national broadcaster China National Radio (CNR) citing sources familiar with the matter confirming that the university’s administrators had reached a consensus.
“[It] conforms with the overall direction of China’s education development and will become a trend,” a source said in the CNR report, adding that the withdrawal reflected the autonomy and courage of Chinese universities, education and culture.
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RUC, a public research university known for humanities and social sciences, said there had been no official announcement yet and it declined to comment further.
This development comes days after a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the university on April 26, in which he called for Chinese universities to “blaze a new path” instead of “blindly following others or simply copying foreign standards and models”, according to a report by Xinhua.
Besides RUC, Chinese state media reported that two other universities – Nanjing University in eastern Jiangsu province and Lanzhou University in northwestern Gansu province – had also withdrawn from all international rankings. Nanjing University did not respond to calls and email requests from the South China Morning Post, while Lanzhou University declined to comment.
Nanjing University’s Communist Party committee said in a release in April that the university “no longer considers international rankings a development target”.
Different ideas of education
