Han Ximin

    ximhan@126.com

    CULTIVATION of students with critical thinking and communication skills and collaborative spirits should be the target of Chinese universities, whose role and mission are facing revolutionary changes in the era of globalization.

    Li Ming, Party secretary and acting president of the South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC), made remarks of this nature at the forum marking the founding of the Shenzhen International Friendship City University League (SIFCUL).

    Amid the challenges brought by globalization, universities should provide better and more efficient education by innovating their operating mechanisms to be more adaptive to our Internet-based society, Li said.

    “Students with global horizons, adapting to multicultural backgrounds and having strong capabilities to solve problems are the natural choice of universities in cultivating talents in an era of transformation,” he said.

    The establishment of the league, which promotes exchanges among universities of Shenzhen’s friendship cities, is one of the important measures for SUSTC in developing international cooperation in student cultivation and training, according to Li.

    Li said the signing of a student exchange agreement with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston was a positive beginning for SUSTC’s internationalization.

    As an experimental school of China’s higher education reform, SUSTC introduces all-English courses in their small-sized classes and emphasizes students’ innovative capabilities through laboratory experiments and wide-ranging cooperation with local brand-name enterprises such as Tencent and Huawei Technologies.

    The university, which was approved in 2012, now has 150 teaching faculty members. Among them, 90 percent are Ph.D. holders and 90 percent of them have been educated abroad at some stage of their higher education. Sixty percent of them graduated from the world’s top 100 universities.