00:00China has assembled the world's largest single unit floating wind turbine.
00:05The area of its blades is the same as seven football pitches.
00:09Once operational, it's expected to generate enough power each year to run more than 4,000 average American homes.
00:18Chinese universities are catching up with American institutions in computer science
00:24when measured on United States based ranking systems
00:27and it marks a major improvement in a field dominated by American colleges.
00:32In the CS rankings list, Xinhua has been top since 2021 ahead of Carnegie Mellon
00:39and this year, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Zhejiang and Peking University round off the top five.
00:45The top ten is now evenly split between China and the United States.
00:50Xinhua also tops the U.S. News Best Global Universities Index for Computer Science.
00:56Six of the top ten are Chinese institutions.
00:59Stanford in this listing is highest ranked American university at number eight.
01:04In another set of rankings based on publications and patents,
01:08Chinese universities take all top ten spots. Stanford is ranked at 11th.
01:13However, U.S. universities still lead in areas such as algorithms and cryptography.
01:20And in reputation based lists like those compiled by the Times Higher Education Supplements
01:25and QS, Peking and Xinhua rank 12th and 13th in computer science.
01:32Zhang Jui is President and Chief Economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.
01:36Welcome back to the program. Great to see you.
01:39There are many university rankings tables to be had with many differing league tables.
01:44But broadly, what is the significance of this rise in Chinese institutions?
01:51Yeah, you're right. I think, you know, across all these sort of academic league tables,
01:59I think there has been a consistent trend in recent years.
02:03In the past maybe five, ten years, the trend has been developing that the Chinese universities ranking,
02:10particularly in some of these science and technology subjects, have been rising pretty fast.
02:16And I think the perception that, you know, the Chinese universities are lagging behind with a pretty wide gap,
02:24with, you know, compared to the U.S. institutions.
02:27I think that perception is increasingly clear that that is misleading.
02:33It is a very important message for developers, for investors as well as policy makers.
02:39I wonder how is China's tech boom in things like artificial intelligence, big data and hardware even,
02:46influence this trajectory of its rising success of its universities.
02:53Yeah, it's very interesting. I think, you know, particularly this year, there are examples like, for instance,
02:59after DeepSeq was released, people realized, oh, such a powerful tool could be developed by, you know, local students and researchers.
03:10Most of the research team, I think, at DeepSeq, they were, you know, educated locally by Zhejiang University that you mentioned earlier,
03:19so that, you know, people started to realize that they should, I mean, the educators, they want to allocate more resources to those tech-related topics.
03:31And we've seen, you know, top universities in China are doing exactly that.
03:35They increase the budgets for tech-related topics.
03:40And the best students, they want to go to study tech instead of finance, like, you know, five, ten years ago.
03:46I wonder if more international students will consider China as a study destination.
03:51There's still a language barrier to deal with, isn't there, for so many people?
03:55Right. Right. But, you know, there are some universities, particularly along the coast.
04:02Certainly, you know, Hong Kong University have been very popular for international students in the past,
04:07and I think that popularity is rising in recent years.
04:11And there are also some universities, like in Shenzhen, in Shanghai.
04:15I understand increasingly they are very, you know, open and very friendly with international students.
04:23And we've seen, you know, more international students applying to those schools as well.
04:28Zhang Jiuwei, great to see you, and thanks so much for coming back on the program again.
04:32Zhang Jiuwei, President and Chief Economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.
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