The Ministry of Education has set up a website to publicize both
excellent and substandard intermediary agencies that help
self-supporting students go abroad to study.
The website, www.jsj.edu.cn, will list Chinese
intermediary agencies that are officially authorized by provincial
and municipal-level education departments and also list qualified
foreign schools that receive Chinese students, said a ministry
spokesman, who did not give a specific timetable for when this
would happen.
Any illegal or misleading activities by intermediary agencies
will be disclosed through the website and the media, said the
spokesman, who refused to be named.
The move aims to improve the efficiency of intermediary agencies
as an increasing number of self-funding Chinese students go abroad,
with nearly 70 per cent of them using intermediary agencies.
China now has 270 authorized intermediary agencies, which employ
nearly 10,000 staff. Most of the agencies provide a good service
but some, driven by profits, have violated the rules, such as by
issuing misleading advertisements and forging documents.
The Beijing Yingzhiye Cultural Exchange Co, for example, forged
35 stamps of the Communist Party Central Committee School, banks,
public security and other government departments in May to recruit
students from Weihai in East China's Shandong Province. The company
has been suspended by the Beijing Education Committee.
The Ministry of Education suggested that self-supporting
students think carefully when choosing overseas schools because
some foreign schools do not issue academic degrees after students
graduate.
The so-called Finance University of Switzerland, a private
school that is not recognized by the Swiss Government and that
cannot issue higher degrees, started to recruit Chinese students in
Shanghai this year. The school misled potential students with an
advertisement that said it can issue master's degrees in
finance.
It even forged certificates purporting to be recognized by the
Chinese Embassy in Switzerland.
The ministry will set up an official centre to evaluate the
quality of overseas educational institutions. The centre will
determine whether the institutions have been legally established
and what kind of academic degrees they can issue.
Service standards will also be established to further discipline
intermediary agencies and get them to improve their work.
China has sent 580,000 self-supporting and government-funded
students to study abroad since the country started to implement its
reform and opening-up policies in 1978. More than 160,000 of them
have returned and the remaining 420,000 are still studying or
working abroad.
(China Daily July 28, 2003)