Netherlands Seminar: China’s Belt and Road Gives It Ability To Lead in Higher Education

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Netherlands Seminar: China’s Belt and Road Gives It Ability To Lead in Higher Education

March 24, 2018 (EIRNS)—Addressing the international seminar on the Belt and Road Initiative and higher education at Utrecht University in the Netherlands on March 19, Prof. William Kirby, who teaches China studies at Harvard Business School, said: “In infrastructure [China] is leading the world, in higher education it surely has that capacity as well,” University World News reported yesterday. Kirby pointed out that

“from the beginning the research and innovation dimension of the Belt and Road initiative has been built into this process, in particular through a plan for international technology.”

Another academic, Wim van den Doel, an executive board member of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, was quoted as saying,

“It could be the building block for a global research area, because it includes countries not always included.... [The Belt and Road] can connect China to the world.”

Currently the Belt and Road Initiative’s main activity in higher education is providing scholarships for students in countries along the routes of its two components—the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road—to study in China. Some 10,000 scholarships were available for students from Belt and Road countries last year, most of them from developing countries. China has also stepped up language training courses within China for Southeast Asian and other languages where Belt and Road projects are being promoted.