'A $250 billion push in higher education'

Keith Bradsheer reports from Sanya, China, that 'China pushes for degrees for the masses' (International Herald Tribune, 18th January 2013, p. 1 & 15).

Poor families in China are putting all resources into education for their children, while government and private investors make efforts to provide places for education. Li Shufu, chairman of the automaker Geely, has founded two universities: Beijing Geely University and Sanya University. In 2011 alone, the local, provincial and national governments spent $250 billion on education, up from around $30 billion in 2001. In the same decade, the number of colleges and universities doubled to 2,409. By the end of the present decade, China expects to have around 195 million higher-education graduates.

The new universities are full with students, but they struggle to find experienced teachers (professors and instructors). Recent graduates readily find employment as teachers for the students that follow.

Much of the article is concerned with how all this might translate into economic and technical innovation. My own interest here is with how all this might translate into an expansion in academic publishing, in Chinese, English, and other languages.

Presumably every new university will produce multiple newsletters, books, and academic journals. For each of publication, there must be a need for a team of editors, reviewers, and so on. At a minimum, there might have been an increase of such teams to around 2,409 (the number of universities), assuming one publication per institution. The real number must be many thousands more.

How much attention has been given to the development and expansion of academic publishing inside China, for Chinese readers? For the non-Chinese speaking research world, academic publishing in China is largely unknown, though it is topic that can be explored online.

For example, the website Publishers Global lists just 35 publishing houses in China, and just 12 that use Chinese language (Internet, 18th January 2013). Many but not all of these are academic. These numbers are undoubtedly a tiny fraction of the actual number of academic publishers. Better sources are websites based in China:

http://www.periodicals.net.cn, http://www.tydata.com, http://www.cnki.net/, and the Chinese Medical Association.

Wikipedia has a useful introduction to the subject ('Academic Publishing in the Peoples Republic of China', Wikipedia, 18th Jan. 2013). The article reports that there are now more than 8,000 academic journals in China (suggesting perhaps an average of 3-4 journals per university). The most recent article cited in the article:

Wang, Shuhua; Weldon, Paul R. Chinese academic journals: quality, issues and solutions Learned Publishing, Volume 19, Number 2, April 2006, pp.97-105(9)

Presumably a lot has happened in the years since that article appeared. I look forward to exploring this subject further.

Comments and suggestions are welcome here.