How China’s universities joined the global elite?

A few days ago, the Financial Times published a report addressing the question in the title. The authors rely on global university rankings to define what the “global elite” is and to argue that Chinese institutions have indeed joined it. Because I wrote my doctoral thesis on university rankings, and because I think the report overlooks several key points, I feel compelled to offer a few comments.

On the idea of “quality”

In the report, the authors cite Denis Simon, who clarifies that “[r]ising rank is a strong signal of research capacity and visibility but not a complete verdict on overall institutional quality”. Well then, what the hell is quality?

Quality, like excellence, world-class, and similar adjectives, is an empty container. That is not a bug; it is a feature. It means whatever the official metrics say it means. At times, academics or administrators will echo Simon’s point, insisting that no single indicator defines quality as a whole. Often, this happens when they want to soften the blow of a disappointing ranking result.

In short, quality is a vibe. We now have metrics that claim to quantify it, but the way those metrics operate proves the point. Imagine a new global university ranking that does not place Ivy League or Oxbridge institutions at the very top. Who would take it seriously? We all know that those institutions are the best, so of course they should be at the top; we do not need metrics to confirm it.¹ That is because these institutions have become the template of quality in higher education, largely due to geopolitical and historical factors rather than any purely “neutral” or “objective” academic benchmark.

Moreover, the way we measure something always depends on what can be measured and how it can be measured. In other words, it depends on the availability of quantifiable indicators. In an academic setting, research output, citations, prestigious awards, and similar metrics are the obvious candidates, but they do not indicate intrinsic quality by themselves, they only do so if we believe they do.

Rephrasing Simon’s sentence, I would say that rank is indeed a strong signal of research capacity and visibility, but it is more a verdict on how effectively an institution has adopted an Anglo-Saxon model of higher education than a measure of an abstract concept of quality.

China is not just another player

Although the authors highlight the large sums of money that the Chinese government has invested in its higher education system since the 1980s, they fail to acknowledge that China also produced the first global university ranking in 2003: the well-known Shanghai Ranking. Arguably, this is the most “objective” of the major rankings, in the sense that it relies exclulsively on third-party indicators rather than institutional self-reporting or reputation surveys (as in the QS and Times Higher Education rankings).

China therefore helped set a significant part of the rules of the game at a very early stage. From that perspective, its rise appears even less surprising. It has been playing extremely well in a game it helped to launch, and doing so at the expense of US institutions. There is nothing scandalous about this; it reflects structural probabilities. The United States has the largest number of higher education institutions in the world, so the likelihood that a substantial share of ranked institutions would be USeñas is correspondingly high.

On cheating the system

The authors hint that China’s strong performance may partly reflect manipulation. They cite a few cases, only to conclude that overall quality has nevertheless improved. But this is not uniquely Chinese. There are numerous documented cases especially in rankings such as QS (and also in national rankings) where gaming the system is relatively straightforward. Universities self-report their data, and sometimes there are “mistakes”. It happens in the East and in the West alike.

But let us return to rankings themselves. One could argue that rankings are a form of institutionalised cheating. How can we meaningfully rank culturally diverse institutions, each composed of multiple semi-autonomous units (faculties, departments, research centres)? When one department builds on Durkheim and another on Weber, what exactly are we comparing? We already know that output does not guarantee “quality”. Citations do not guarantee it either; a paper can be widely cited because it is deeply flawed. That happens too. However, despite these obvious flaws, we play dumb and accept rankings.

---

Global university rankings are, bluntly put, nonsense. Analytically, they function as tools for comparing institutions against an Anglo-Saxon model exemplified by Oxbridge and the Ivy League, and that is being generous. Socially, they are mobilised for far more purposes, and their influence rests on the belief that they are objective and fair. They are neither. They cannot be. For a more detailed argument, see my thesis.