YANG XIAOGUANG has hardly taken a day off all summer. The vice-president of Zhongshan University has been working frantically on two big projects: the imminent opening of his university's second campus and its expected merger with Zhongshan Medical Sciences University. The new campus in Zhuhai is due to open today, and the merger could be formally announced at any moment.
Both projects symbolise the status of Zhongshan University, based in Guangzhou and founded by Dr Sun Yat-sen in 1924, as one of 100 mainland education institutions officially designated as 'key'. Resources are being concentrated on these schools, and it is hoped 10 of them will achieve world-class status by 2005.
All of this is part of a massive shake-up of higher education on the mainland that will see the emergence of a few giant universities. No fewer than 612 smaller mainland colleges have merged into 250 bigger institutions over the past seven years, and nearly 260 have done so this year. Similar bigger-is-better reforms are attracting attention in Hong Kong.
Mr Yang is optimistic about his university's merger plans. 'Our merger with Zhongshan Medical Sciences University will lead to resource sharing,' he says. 'We are strong in sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology but relatively weak in applied studies. So the merger will be mutually beneficial.'
Zhongshan's new campus is also part of the plan to build bigger universities. Located in Tang Jia Wan in the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone north of Macau, it covers 3.4 square kilometres and is probably the largest university campus on the mainland. The new campus, which cost about 600 million yuan (about HK$565 million) to build, will accommodate 4,000 students this year and 12,000 by 2005. It opens to great fanfare today, with top officials from the Ministry of Education and the provincial government on hand.
The aim of the mainland's education reforms is to achieve economies of scale, essential if the country is to educate more people more efficiently. Not only does the national government want to increase university enrolment in preparation for the Information Age, but it also faces a student boom, an echo of the years before strict family-planning policies took hold. A bulge is working its way through the education system: the primary-school population has already peaked, and the lower-secondary-school population should peak next year, according to a government report prepared for the World Education Forum in Senegal in April. Demographic pressure on the nation's universities can be expected to increase.
