Plans by a Russian research institute to establish a campus in China send a strong message about the two countries’ intentions to strengthen their research and higher education ties, scholars have said.
This month, regional media reported that the National Research University Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) will set up a branch campus on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, specialising in aviation and aerospace teaching and research, with an opening scheduled for mid-2025.
Researchers said that plans by the university, which will be among the few foreign ventures in China to develop without the help of a local partner, marked a new step in Sino-Russian collaboration. The announcement came as relations between Russian and Western universities have frayed because of the Ukraine war.
Futao Huang, a professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University, said he believed the timing of the move – two weeks after Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia – was not coincidental.
“It clearly suggests that China has adopted a different strategy to undertake academic collaborations with Russia, which appears to be more important [to it] than any other countries,” he said.
“You cannot overestimate the significance of the establishment of this Russian university in China.”
Other recent signs also point to strengthened ties. Student mobility between the two nations has increased over the decade, picking up pace last year when the number of Russian students learning Chinese doubled to 17,000 compared with 2021.
But Russia has not so far established any stand-alone branch campuses – developed without the cooperation of a local university – in China.
China already has a strong tradition of university partnerships, being the largest importer of international branch campuses, with 47 such institutions currently, according to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) hub, which measures trends in offshore education.
Though such “branches” tend to be based on foreign university curricula and award degrees that name the foreign institution, most of these are set up in affiliation with local universities, said Jason Lane, C-BERT co-director and dean of the College of Education, Health and Society at Miami University in Ohio.
He said it was “very rare” for an institution to establish itself in China without a local partner. He said he believed that the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus was the first example of a foreign university doing this.
The C-BERT database lists one other Russian university with a campus in China: the Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, a branch of Moscow State University (MSU) and the Beijing Institution of Technology. Though the “curriculum and faculty appear to be entirely tied to MSU”, Professor Lane said, it is a joint venture.
He agreed about the significance of the MPEI campus plans. “This is a clear indication of the strengthened ties between the two nations,” he said.
“A branch campus, among all forms of international education, serves as a sort of academic embassy that both sends a symbolic message of the relationship and creates a meaningful foothold on which to build stronger partnerships.”
He said he believed that the university would meet its planned opening in 2025, despite needing to build a 137-acre campus from scratch and negotiate complicated logistics.
“Setting up the operations, recruiting students and offering a select array of courses in two years is aggressive,” he said. “But with enough resources, nearly anything is possible.”
