Southeast Asian Countries Are Seeking More Cooperation with Chinese Universities

Chinese colleges face foreign challenges

Southeast Asian countries are seeking more cooperation with Chinese universities, but challenges remain, as China Daily reporters find out in Guiyang, Guizhou province.

Chinese universities running branches and programs in Southeast Asian nations are facing some unexpected challenges.

Liu Ersi, head of the Bangkok Business School, said running a school overseas is much more difficult than he had expected.

"The costs, the teaching resources, the course design there are so many difficulties to be overcome, so many problems to be solved," he said.

The school was set up last year by China's Yunnan University of Finance and Economics in cooperation with Thailand's Rangsit University. Located in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, it now has six undergraduate and graduate programs on economics and administration, enrolling 60 students from Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Liu said he had been troubled by a series of headaches, a major one being competition from similar programs sponsored by Western universities.

The school applied to the Thai Education Ministry to set up an international business program a year ago, he said. The program is popular in China and it was expected to succeed in Thailand, too.

"However, when the program was finally approved, we found that universities from Western countries also have such programs at their Thai branches. Their programs are very strong, posing great competition to ours," he said, adding that the situation made it difficult for his school's program to recruit students.

Running branches or programs overseas has become a common practice for Chinese universities in recent years. The country now has four institutions and 98 programs overseas, according to Yan Bingchen, an official from the International Cooperation and Exchange Department of the Chinese Ministry of Education.

"A majority of these institutions and programs...