The Malaysian Insider

HANGZHOU, Nov 13 — Seven decades after Zhejiang University embarked on a 2,600km “Long March of the Scholar Army” to escape the invading Japanese army, it is taking an even longer journey.

This time, it is to forge a three-way alliance overseas — with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SU), to open in 2011, and America’s world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

To Zhejiang University’s president Yang Wei, the tie-up is no less momentous than its historic trek in the 1930s.

“It is an exploration of a new education frontier,” he told Singapore journalists last week in Hangzhou.

The partnership with Singapore’s fourth public university offers Zheda, as Zhejiang University is popularly known in China, a chance to build on a brand name which it first carved out in the first half of the 20th century.

Founded in 1897 during the Qing Dynasty, Zheda was already one of China’s top institutions of higher education when it undertook its audacious journey, which mirrored the Chinese Communist Party’s famous Long March.

Some 500 Zheda faculty and students left their Hangzhou campus in 1937 and embarked on a three-year westward march through six provinces before settling in mountainous Zunyi in Guizhou province.

The group trekked for as long as 25 days at a stretch, and the wife of Zheda’s then president Zhu Kezhen died during the journey.

The university returned to Hangzhou in 1946. In many ways, that spirited and imaginative response during the war years has stayed with Zheda, whose strengths led British historian Joseph Needham to nickname it the Oriental Cambridge.

Zheda has been constantly looking for ways to break new ground and live up to its motto of “Truth and Innovation” (qiushi chuangxing).

“We were among the fastest to reform our system in China,” said Professor Yang, who obtained his PhD in engineering from Brown University in the United States.

“We moved towards research as early as the 1980s, when the emphasis in Chinese universities was still on teaching.”

Backed by its traditional strengths in engineering, science and medicine, it has been consistently ranked third in China in the last decade, behind Beijing University and Qinghua University.

It is part of the C9 grouping, a “Chinese Ivy League” of the top nine universities, and is widely regarded as the best college in southern China.

To ramp up its research capabilities, Zheda takes in more graduate students each year than undergraduates, with 6,000 new master’s and PhD candidates compared with 5,500 studying for a first degree.

But research is just one “wing” of the university’s plan to take the school forward. The other, said director Lu Guodong of the educational research office, is to go international.

Hence, the tripartite tie up with SU and MIT.

“The Singapore Education Minister visited our campus in April this year and told us of Singapore’s plans for a research-intensive university with concrete partnerships with an American university and a Chinese university,” said Prof Yang. “We liked the ideas. It is very in tune with the new ideas which we are testing here.”

Among the new ideas for the SU: Inter-disciplinary teaching and research.

Instead of traditional faculties, staff and students could be grouped into clusters according to the type of technology and science involved. And instead of large lectures, students will attend classes in small groups of 50.

“It is very difficult to have such new ways of learning in an old university like Zheda,’ said Prof Yang. “The new Singapore university gives us this opportunity for an exciting exploration.”

Zheda also believes that its location in one of China’s fastest-growing regions will be a bonus to SU students eager to test their designs and technologies in the world’s third largest economy.

Zhejiang province’s economy is primarily driven by private enterprises, offering SU students the chance to be exposed to Chinese companies and doing business in China.

“Through the vast market of Zhejiang, Singapore students can quickly find out if their designs can take off in the real world,” said Associate Professor Ying Fangtian, who takes charge of product design in the university.

Or, in the words of undergraduate school deputy dean Chen Jin, Zheda can provide a “Chinese context”.

“MIT is able to give the Western context. We can provide the Chinese and Asian context,” he said. “And Singapore is the bridge.” — The Straits Times