Asia 2009 Trade and Investment Mission Blog

Today, we visited Zhejiang University and met with the president of the university, Yang Wei.  Zhejiang University has over 40,000 full time students at its five campuses.  In comparison, Indiana University (IU) has about 101,700 students on all 8 campuses; including 42,500 on the Bloomington campus.  There really isn't a school in China that's the size of our large universities, which is surprising considering their population.  We were at the largest campus and all of the campuses have names related to water.

Twenty-five percent of the people in China attend universities or technical colleges.  The government only spends money to educate the best and the brightest traditionally, although they're moving more toward private money paying for education.  Considering China has 1.3 billion people, the U.S. is behind in the number of students attending college.

Someone asked how students are accepted to these schools and we learned that students take a national entrance exam they must pass.  Students spend their entire last year of high school to prepare for this exam.  Zhejiang University gets a large portion of the top performing students.  The 2,700 students admitted this year to Zhejiang University were from the top 4,500 ranked students who applied to all colleges in China.  Meaning, of the top 4,500 students taking the national entrance exam, 2,700 of them went to Zhejiang University.

There are certain instances in which you can bypass this entrance exam to get into college.   They, for instance, can pick 500 students in specialty areas with special talents, such as students who are really excelling in language.  Also, high schools can recommend some of their very top students.

There were a lot of new buildings at Zhejiang University, including a new school for agriculture and life sciences.  This demonstrates their commitment to renewed energy and agriculture.  They also built a new indoor-outdoor stadium which was pretty fantastic. 

Yang, who has visited IU, spoke about the economics of the country and how its impacting the school.  He stated that Zhejiang University is looking at three main ingredients for economic growth: investment (which is doing well - it grew almost 30 percent in the last year); consumption (which is also doing well – it has increased about 15 percent); and import/export (which unfortunately has decreased about 15-20 percent over the last year).  The university wants to do more "internationalization," and by that they mean more international collaboration and also recruiting more international faculty. 

The research grants have increased dramatically since 1998 to 2008.  And patents have also greatly increased since 1998.  For the last three to fours years Zhejiang University has been the leader in the application of patents.  They have two different types of patents: invention patents and progress patents.  An important component of growing the number of patents is to train faculty on the importance of patents, and also the respect of having patents.

There are major reforms in place at Zhejiang University.   The first is dealing with their undergrad program.  In the past, they had 112 undergrad programs in 24 schools, and now they've put everything into just 6 categories.  They believe this allows students more time to develop their interests.  For the first two years they are exposed to a variety of classes because they take what we would consider "general studies" and in the last two years they focus on a specific area.  Each of the six different categories have different color t-shirts that the students wear so they can be easily identified.  This is obviously more ritualistic than in the U.S.

Another major reform in the university is that they've signed an agreement with the Hangzhou government to bring more investment and to grow the university in other regions.  They've added a national park and another university, and they're working to build campuses about the same size as the existing campus that we visited today in another location within the city. 

The university has a river on the main campus, and they're trying to connect the river to the main river locally, and then to the main river in Zhejiang.  This would allow a continual flow of water from the campus all the way up to Beijing. 

The university has a hospital system and a medical school on the main campus, which consists of seven affiliated hospitals and a staff of over 7,000.  The amount of money generated from the hospital system is significant; about $750 million in U.S. dollars.  This is approximately the same amount of revenue generated by the total university.  The university has joint research centers with other international universities, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and the University of California. 

Important new initiatives the university is focusing on include sustainable energy, water pollution, e-service (which is a collaboration they have with IBM), social entrepreneurship (which includes a law school supported by a Taiwanese foundation), as well as a digital library which includes over 20 universities. 

Zhejiang University is in close collaboration with both Purdue and IU.  In fact, Zhejiang University has 16 students attending Purdue this year and they also have administrative staff that are going for training.  The Zhejiang University intends to double its student exchange in the next three years.  The majority of overseas students are language students.

In the afternoon, we attended a seminar dealing with investment and cooperation opportunities in Indiana for representatives of Chinese companies seeking to invest in the state.  There were over 84 participants at this seminar.

We also visited a "vineyard" for tea.  Tea is such a traditional drink in China that I'm going to go into more specifics in a later posting.

We ended the day at a banquet hosted by the governor of Zhejiang, Lu Zushan.

Tomorrow we are traveling to Japan and I look forward to learning about these very different Asian business and social cultures.