In early July 2018, China’s Ministry of Education issued a document titled “A notice on the cancellation of some Sino-foreign cooperative institutes and programmes”. The notice listed 234 transnational education (TNE) partnerships for termination, including five joint institutes and 229 joint programmes, representing a little over one in six of the country’s formally approved TNE partnerships at the bachelor’s degree level and above.

The terminations include 62 programmes with UK universities, accounting for 26 per cent of all cancellations. The provinces with the largest numbers of cancelled programmes was in Heilongjiang province, where 100 programmes were terminated, followed by Beijing with 32 terminations (one institute and 31 programmes) and Shanghai with 28 terminated programmes.

However, this should not be interpreted as the government terminating active TNE partnerships. According to the British Council’s understanding, none of the terminated programmes had any current students. Most cancelled programmes had already seen their approval period expire, while others had voluntarily stopped recruiting new students and had already “taught out” their existing cohorts.

A full list of all terminated programmes can be found on the MoE’s website, while a translated list of terminated UK programmes is attached to this post.

Analysis

Rather than marking any major shift in the Ministry of Education’s transnational education policy, this announcement instead represents a clean-up of the MoE’s database of approved programmes, getting rid of those that are no longer active. However, this does illustrate a move towards clearer processes, in line with some of the goals stated for upcoming revisions to China’s TNE regulations. These upcoming regulations will also include clearly-defined processes for cancelling a TNE partnership.

If you have any queries on this, please contact cathy.he@britishcouncil.org.cn.  

Sources

MoE announcement on the terminations (in Chinese): http://www.moe.edu.cn/jyb_xwfb/gzdt_gzdt/s5987/201807/t20180704_341980.html

List of cancelled programmes and institutes (in Chinese): http://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn/index.php/default/approval/termination