International education

At 7.15 every morning, Professor Wen Shuming and eight Chinese colleagues share a breakfast prepared by two local maids, who have been taught how to cater to the tastes of alien educators.

The group then leave their shared home and head for the office: two tube-shaped rooms with bare walls and fluorescent lights in a one-storey building on a busy road, next to a cash machine, a sportswear store and a deserted private school.

They are employed by Soochow University, but this office isn’t in Jiangsu province, nor even in China. It is on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

Wen’s life is about to get a lot busier. After years of preparation and lobbying, the university campus he has been setting up will open its doors to undergraduate students in a couple of weeks. Little has been made of the undertaking, but as well as being Laos’ first foreign campus, it marks the first time a Chinese university (as opposed to the government-linked Confucius Institute) has opened a branch abroad.

One of two billboards at the gate of Vientiane airport advertises the university. The other one promotes the Vientiane Industrial and Trade Park (known locally as Vita Park), the free-trade zone to which the campus is scheduled to move next year.

Wen’s campus – which currently inhabits eight classrooms behind his office, rented from Kavin College, the deserted private school – is one of many signs that Laos’ neighbours are recognising the potential of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations member. The country, with a population of seven million, is widely expected to join the World Trade Organisation this year, 15 years after applying for membership. On August 30, Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming reiterated Beijing’s “firm support” for that accession.