In a recent signed article in People’s Daily Overseas Edition, Tan Tieniu, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Party Secretary of Nanjing University, offered a clear answer. Internationalization, he argued, must not slow down. It must deepen, expand, and evolve to a higher level.
China’s largest research institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has notified its internal researchers that, starting March 1, 2026, it will stop using institutional research funds to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) for certain high-cost open access (OA) journals.
Starting in 2026, all international students applying for undergraduate programs under the Chinese Government Scholarship will be required to submit results from the China Scholastic Competency Assessment (CSCA). This examination system, coordinated and promoted by the China Scholarship Council, is widely regarded as a key reform initiative in China’s higher education internationalization process in recent years.
Numerous faculty members and students stated that Purdue has an “informal policy” that, through university-level approval mechanisms, significantly reduces graduate admission opportunities for students from China and other countries perceived as security risks.
In recent years, China’s engineering doctoral education has undergone a milestone reform: students are no longer required to write and publish a traditional dissertation to obtain a PhD. Instead, they may defend substantial products, technological prototypes, or complete engineering solutions.
Confronted with the near “ground-up upheaval” that generative AI (GenAI) has brought to the foundations of traditional teaching, Stanford has not taken a defensive, conservative stance. Instead, through this costly, cross-disciplinary blueprint, the university is attempting to anchor new coordinates for global higher education at a moment when the technological singularity feels increasingly near.
Roughly half of the authors of social media–related research published in top academic journals have disclosable industry ties—most of which are not disclosed in the papers themselves.
How do we prove that a PhD is “qualified”? In China, the answer is increasingly tilted toward administrative authority, relying on a rigorous system of state-led audits to safeguard minimum quality standards. In the United States, by contrast, the answer is embedded within the internal reputation mechanisms of the academic community, relying on an “invisible hand” of peer evaluation and market selection.
Alex Shieh, a Chinese-American student journalist, recently testified before the House of Representatives, revealing a truth uncovered through big data mining: the skyrocketing tuition is not primarily being used to enhance the quality of instruction, but is instead being poured into an increasingly bloated, bureaucratized, and opaque administrative machine.
“Not having a job has been my lifelong dream. I never expected that this dream would actually come true. Today, I officially quit—without a backup plan,” she said calmly in the video. Her voice was soft but carried a quiet resolve. “Life is not a track. It’s a wilderness.”
