“The rise of China in the last ten years is something that no one has ever seen in the history of academia,” said a university ranking authority we interviewed. If you attend academic conferences now, there are no presentations on the global research landscape that don’t talk about the emergence of China. But how much do we really know about what’s happening within Chinese universities that are behind this trend?

Many believe that China’s growth is a result of the power the country has come to yield, and associate it with the large funding and vast human resources available in the country. As a result, the stories of people actually responsible for changes don’t get much attention. In the course of our research, we realized that Chinese universities are working hard to ride the big wave of academic internationalization.

We featured Zhejiang University that is a prominent force in internationalization of Chinese universities. Opening a campus to international students and faculties is a burning, yet, extremely tough issue for universities in Asia particularly because of the language barriers. Zhejiang University demonstrates how much one university can do to overcome this fundamental challenge if the goal is shared and inspires the executors who are on the ground.