Since 1995, the number of Chinese students travelling to study full-time in Britain has increased 75 times over, from just 1,510 to 115,435. During the same period, domestic places rose a mere 50%, meaning that in just 25 years Chinese students have gone from a rounding error in universities’ balance sheets to their second largest source of funding, after taxpayer-funded loans.
In the last four years alone, the number of Chinese students studying in Britain has risen by 36%, more than three times the 11% rate of growth for domestic students.
This means that more Chinese students travelled to study in the UK last year than from the entirety of the Commonwealth or from the rest of the G7. Indeed, fewer full-time places on UK campuses went to young people from the East Midlands or Yorkshire and the Humber than from the People’s Republic of China. Among postgraduates, this concentration is starker: for every two and a half UK postgrads, there is now one Chinese postgraduate studying in Britain.
Given the financial dependence of universities on Chinese students, then, the increasingly menacing language coming from Beijing should worry vice-chancellors deeply, especially at a time when they face a Covid-related financial squeeze. Beijing has threatened “devastating consequences” in response to recent decisions on Huawei and Hong Kong. If those consequences are targeted at UK university campuses, as is happening increasingly in Australia, they will have profound consequences for this country’s students, taxpayers and competitiveness.
With rising tensions over Hong Kong, it is no coincidence that the Chinese Ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, chose this month to remind Chinese students in Britain of their national duty. “Leverage your strength to extend the reach of China’s stories”, he told them, “serve your motherland”. Amid deterioriating relations with the West, he was sending a message that Beijing sees students not as free consumers of education exports but as propagandists and geopolitical pawns.
If China instructs its students to boycott Britain, it is almost certain that several institutions would fall over. New Onward research estimates that up to 16 universities rely on Chinese students for more than a fifth of their total fee income. The list includes many of the most prestigious and research-intensive institutions, including University College London, Imperial, Sheffield and Manchester, many of whom are already over-extended with debt and facing lower student flows due to the pandemic.
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