China’s Real Universities

China’s top universities include Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, Zhejiang, SJTU, USTC, Sun Yat-sen, Nanjing, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Let me be blunt: most other universities were created simply because China’s huge population needed job placement. Without enough positions to absorb graduates, the government built schools as a social welfare measure to raise educational standards.

University expansion was essentially a policy to delay graduation. Only when manufacturing and tech sectors matured did that delayed-employment strategy truly convert the population burden into a demographic dividend.