By Wei Liu
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a unique Chinese approach to international development with a focus on infrastructure development in the global south.
Chinese universities have been involved in BRI through collaborative education programs in partnership with governments and industries to train technical and managerial talents for key infrastructure projects in the global south.
Reflecting on past practices of global higher education, many critical internationalization scholars have advocated the concept of knowledge diplomacy in the new century as “a new approach to understanding the role of international higher education in strengthening relations among countries and addressing common global challenges.” (Knight, 2020, p 38).
Do Chinese universities’ involvement in China’s BRI constitute contributions to the goal of knowledge diplomacy? Should Chinese universities' work through BRI be included as an important case from the Global South in our future discussions of knowledge diplomacy?
For answers, please check out this recently published work by Wei Liu and colleagues:
Liu, W., Yan, T., Li, Y., & Lv, W. (2024). International higher education as knowledge diplomacy: The role of Chinese universities in China’s belt and road initiative. Industry and Higher Education, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09504222241271659
The following is one of the three narrative case studies in this paper to show the detailed ways in which such programs are funded, structured and implemented:
The Republic of Tajikistan is located in the Pamira foothills, a land-locked state. It borders Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the north and west, China and Afghanistan to the east and south.
Tajikistan is rich in natural resources, with 183 millions of barrels of proven oil reserves as of 2020, ranking 92nd in the world, and 300 billion cubic meters of proven gas reserves, ranking 88th in the world. But as 93% of the Republic's territory is covered by mountains, extracting these natural resources is extremely difficult and complicated.
In September 2013, the Chinese government signed intergovernmental agreements with the governments of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan on the Central Asian Gas Pipeline Line D project.
In March 2014, “TAPLINE”, a branch company of China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) and Tajikistan Gas Transmission Company (TGTC) signed an agreement on the establishment of Trans-Tajikistan Gas Pipeline Company Limited (TTGP), with each side contributing $ 300 million US dollars.
After the completion of the TAPLINE lines A, B, C, D and domestic supporting projects, the annual natural gas exported from Central Asia to China will reach 80 billion cubic meters, accounting for more than 40% of the current natural gas imports of China.
In 2014, the construction of Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D, an energy artery jointly built by China and Tajikistan, was started, and TTGP was responsible for the construction and operation.
In 2016, SY University, one of the Chinese universities with strong petroleum engineering programs, successfully won the bid for TTGP foreign staff training project.
In 2017, the China-Tajikistan university-industry cooperative talent training program was launched, and the first batch of 30 Tajik TTGP-sponsored students were selected from the top 1,000 students in the country’s national college entrance examination.
Adopting the model of university-industry cooperation and targeted training, these 30 outstanding high school graduates from Tajikistan were sent to study petroleum engineering, oil and gas storage and transportation and other undergraduate majors in SY University, China.
The program was five years long, with the first year devoted to Chinese language instruction and the following four years for degree courses in Mandarin. After graduation, these students were expected to return to work on the construction of "China-Central Asia Natural Gas Pipeline Line D".
As for funding, SY University applied to the Ministry of Education of China for Chinese government scholarships to support the program, and 15 students, half of the cohort, were entered in the Chinese government scholarship queue for full funding. The other 15 were fully sponsored by TTGP with the same level of funding as the Chinese government scholarship, including tuition and living expenses.
By July 2022, the project students completed the five-year training cycle of language plus major studies successfully. Except for 14 Tajik students who have been approved by TTGP to continue studying in the same university for their Master's programs, all the other students have returned to work and serve the project company in their home country where the pipeline project Line D is constructed.
The China-Tajikistan program has successfully trained a group of skilled professionals urgently needed in joint engineering projects between the two countries.
The project also serves to build bridges for people-to-people exchanges between China and Tajikistan, with 30 professionals fully proficient in Mandarin Chinese.
In 2021, the project was listed as "Classic Case of International Talent Training" by the China-Mongolia Bureau of the International Labor Organization, and nominated as a case of "University-Industry Cooperation Double Hundred Plan" by the Chinese Society of Higher Education in 2022.
The project model was recognized by the International Labor Organization, the Ministry of Social Security and the Ministry of Education of China.
SY University has taken advantage of its strong oil and gas programs in actively working with international companies in the oil and gas industry among the "Belt and Road” countries since 2013 when China first launched the Belt and Road Initiative.
In 2018, SY University signed a cooperation agreement with Trans-Kyrgyzstan Gas Pipeline Company Limited (TKGP) to train 30 high school graduates selected from villages along the Line D pipeline for Kyrgyzstan, using the same training model.
Subsequently, XSYU also jointly carried out the Master’s programs in petroleum engineering with the Central African Republic PTIAL Petroleum Company and the Nigeria Petroleum Science and Technology Foundation.
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