A bachelor’s degree from Chinese universities is no longer the great stepping-stone it once was, due to the US-China trade dispute and growing espionage concerns, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said in response to Beijing’s annual effort to recruit Taiwanese students for its universities.
China has stepped up its efforts to attract Taiwanese degree-seekers over the past few years.
Last month, the Chinese Ministry of Education relaxed its requirements for Taiwanese high-school graduates, allowing them to apply for a Chinese university if they achieve average scores for any of the three subjects of the college entrance exam — Mandarin, mathematics and English.
Photo: Chung Li-hua, Taipei Times
The requirements previously stated that only students with a total score equal to or exceeding the average would be considered.
In response, the MAC in a document detailed the potential risks and problems associated with pursuing higher education in China.
In the section about the possibility of Taiwanese students using a Chinese bachelor’s degree to pursui a master’s degree in the US or Europe, the document quoted unnamed academics as saying that the chance of doing that has dropped significantly, given escalating tensions between the US and China over trade issues, as well as US President Donald Trump’s claim last year that Chinese students in the US might be spies.
It also quoted a former student in China as saying that due to growing restrictions that the US has imposed on certain disciplines and subjects in China, even a bachelor’s degree from a top-ranked Chinese university might not be as useful as one from a Taiwanese institution.
Another problem facing Taiwanese graduates in China is the increasing difficulty of finding a job in Beijing, where the number of college graduates hit a record 8 million last year, according to political observers.
Chinese media reported that the number of positions on popular Chinese job hunting Web site www.51job.com dropped from 2.85 million in April last year to 830,000 in September.
Even graduates from top universities under Beijing’s Project 985 might receive only three to four invitations for a written test out of 20 job applications, the reports said.
In addition, Chinese institutions’ restriction on free speech and academic freedom could also pose a problem.
CNN in November last year reported that Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on campuses, citing the arrest of a Peking University graduate who was involved in a labor rights movement.
In a memo, “the Peking University committee of China’s ruling Communist Party declared the establishment of an ‘internal control and management’ office to enforce discipline on campus, including day-to-day inspections and patrols on school grounds,” the CNN report said.
In October last year, the Chinese Communist Party appointed an official with experience at the Beijing State Security Bureau, Qiu Shuiping (邱水平), as party secretary at Peking University.
In similar development at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, its academic committee in January last year in a notice asked master students’ advisers to censor their political stances and ideologies in their dissertations and other graduation projects.
The same rule also applied to undergraduate students at the university, the notice said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching