Chen zhili  Minister of Education
July 22, 2002

In the picturesque city of Beijing, the Chinese-Foreign University Presidents Forum is declared open after a long period of preparations. We feel very honored to have invited presidents from well-known Chinese and foreign universities who have on their shoulders the important mission of jointly discussing the major issues and exchanging experiences concerning higher education. On behalf of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, I would like to extend a warm welcome and sincere gratitude to all the guests from afar and both Chinese and foreign educational colleagues present here today. 

Education, a symbol of progress and prosperity of human civilization, provides a strong motive force for socio-economic development, shouldering an irreplaceable mission and function and playing a major part in human history characterized by unremitting struggle for progress. According to "The Great Learning", a classic written prior to the Qin Dynasty over 2000 years ago, "The purpose of the great learning is to acquire the universal truth and disseminate it among the people until the best result is achieved." This educational thinking coincides with the spirit of unleashing human intelligence, promoting cultural development and spreading knowledge advocated by the modern higher education originated from Europe more than a thousand years later. Emerging fresh and vigorous from the test of history, this tradition has been like a torch being passed on from generation to generation over the years. As institutions of higher learning, universities have turned from a place providing special training to a small number of people to one popularizing higher education, from an academic ivory tower to an integral part of the society and from a closed shop to the center of social life, not only serving as the basis for knowledge generation and dissemination, but also providing the governments and the society with all kinds of consulting services and research results, thus becoming the "braintrust" driving social progress and the "incubator" cultivating knowledge-based enterprises. The form, function and mission of the universities have been enriched, developed and expanded with the above historical changes and the ever-growing role they play. 

The footstep of history has marched into the 21st century when human society is facing profound changes as science and technology are evolving fast and knowledge economy is approaching with a vengeance. Our era has bestowed new mission and rich meaning on universities and also posed unprecedented challenges and reform demand.

The universities of the future will bear greater responsibilities in knowledge renewal and dissemination and talent upbringing and become a cradle for nurturing and training people of high quality and creative capability, standing in the forefront of discovering the unknown and objective truth and providing the scientific basis for addressing the major issues faced by mankind, driving knowledge innovation and translation of R&D results into real productivity and building a bridge between the splendid national cultural heritage and advanced achievements from other civilizations in the world. 

The universities of the future will be more diversified and keep pushing back the boundaries of space and form to satisfy the varied needs of people at all levels, in different categories and in varying forms. As education receivers come from more diverse backgrounds, institutions of higher learning should be focusing on the all-round development of a person and offer distinct and colorful features in running schools. 

In the future, the universities will be more extensively and closely tied with the society, having a growing influence on society and taking heavier responsibility for the development of the countries, ethnic groups and individuals. The universities will take advantage of their strengths in knowledge and talents to get directly involved in the socio-economic life and act as an inexhaustible powerhouse for the national development. Such trend will inevitably turn universities into a key political, economic and cultural component of the areas in which they reside and an indispensable link in the all-round human development.

The universities in the future will put in place a more flexible and lively learning system to comply with the growing trend of life-long education. They will reorganize their teaching and courses according to the new student-centric educational concept and mode and create a freer learning environment, in order to lay the basis for offering all types of life-long education opportunities to the public at large and provide them with more flexible choices and opportunities for receiving education. 

The universities of the future will move along with the deluge of economic globalization and technological development and seek self-improvement in an environment of faster technological innovation, more rapid knowledge flow and more intense competition for talents, which will lead to more frequent educational exchanges and cooperation on a global basis. Modern information technology has immensely extended the scope of education, enabling the university resources to transcend time and space and be shared by more schools and learners.

This new trend of university development has posed more stringent requirements on school management. That modern universities should be placed under modern management and top-notch universities should be supported by top-notch management has placed a huge responsibility on university presidents who are requested by our times to acquire strategic way of thinking and foresight as well as global vision and forward-looking mindset and be good at harmonizing the relationship between universities and the society and mobilizing and deploying various resources. The universities all over the world share the common origins of human civilization and are deeply rooted in the social, historical and cultural soil of their own countries, thus giving rise to their unique educational traditions and styles. It is therefore of special significance for Chinese and foreign university presidents to exchange views and discuss issues at this meeting. 

Since China is a developing country, the Chinese universities in a modern sense have just turned over their 100 year chapter in history. In over century or so, the higher education in China has grown from scratch to a large-scale undertaking and has made tremendous progress. 

Since the turn of the century, the Chinese government, under the guiding thinking that "the human resources are the No.1 resources", has placed higher importance on the role played by higher education in boosting socio-economic growth. To give better play to the basic, overall and leading role of science, technology and education in advancing the modernization drive in China, the Chinese government has formulated the strategy of "invigorating the country with science, technology and education" and further increased input in education to quicken its pace of reform and development in the hope of adapting it to the momentum of socio-economic development of China in the 21st century. The Chinese higher education is undergoing the most profound reform since its birth and is faced with the best ever development opportunities in history. By 2001, the number of students studying in regular institutions of higher learning had increased 89% from 6.43 million in 1998 to 12.14 million and gross higher education enrollment gone up from 9.8% in 1998 to 13.2%.

By adopting such measures as "joint facility building, cooperation, readjustment and merger", we have consolidated educational resources on a grand scale, broken the traditional segmentation by regions and sectors, introduced historic changes to the structure and distribution of higher education and cleared institutional barriers to higher education development. By changing some universities offering limited courses to ones providing full courses, we are more capable of bringing up people with interdisciplinary knowledge and have enhanced the overall strength of the universities by improving university management and helping update educational concept. It is fair to claim that solid structural groundwork has been laid for the development of the Chinese higher education in the 21st century. 

We are in the process of adjusting the structures for talent training and specialty teaching to ensure supply of human resources for the strategic economic restructuring and industrial upgrading in China. We have always given priority to quality improvement in higher education development, paying particular attention to the teachers' educational concept renewal, the marriage between natural science and humane and social sciences, the development of students' overall quality and the education of students with the latest knowledge, educational means and methodology. 

Computer network and multimedia technology have had a profound impact on university education. Conforming to the tide, 67 Chinese universities have offered courses on-line. Our government will seize the opportunity brought by the new technological revolution to vigorously promote on-line education and modern distance learning in order to provide diversified learning media and training opportunities to the public. 

We stress the important role of the institutions of higher learning in developing hi-tech industry and look hard for effective means to turn hi-tech into real productivity. In recent years, a number of hi-tech companies such as Founder of Beijing University, Tsinghua Ziguang and Alpine of the Northeast University have emerged in China. So far, 22 national university science parks have been established in areas of high university concentration. The hi-tech spin-offs from universities have become the new growth points of our economy. 

These new developments have led to in-depth changes in the organization, scale, development strategies, competition policies, etc. of the Chinese universities. It is crucial to learn from the managerial expertise of other countries and effect breakthroughs and innovations in university management. 

It is our wish that the common concerns arising from university development today be thoroughly addressed at this forum. We especially hope to help university leaders broaden their horizon internationally, improve their strategic way of thinking and the level of leadership and management, enhance their spirit and capability of innovation and facilitate international cooperation and exchanges by summing up the factors contributing to the success in university leadership and management, adjusting the development goals and strategies of universities, introducing new talent training modes, building up disciplines and faculties and studying issues such as university resource development and deployment as well as modes of modern university management, etc. 

The Chinese-Foreign University Presidents Forum, which has been conducted after China's entry to WTO, will extremely facilitate the further open policy of Chinese Higher Education. It is helpful for Chinese and foreign university presidents to promote mutual understanding via the forum, and to establish friendship and a broad relationship of cooperation.

Finally, I wish this Chinese-foreign University Presidents Forum full success.