Comment by Riaz Haq on February 19, 2018 at 10:46am

Spotlight: Chinese universities becoming major attraction for Pakistani students
Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-07 13:21:34|Editor: Liangyu

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-02/07/c_136955849.htm


by Misbah Saba Malik

ISLAMABAD, Feb. 7 (Xinhua) -- Rubab Batool, a student from an underdeveloped village of Nawab Shah district in Pakistan's southern Sindh Province, recently left for China to pursue a master's degree of management sciences.

Talking to Xinhua upon her departure, Batool said that she chose China for higher studies because the launch of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has opened up a huge demand for Pakistani graduates from Chinese universities.

Batool is only one of 22,000 Pakistani students who have chosen China for their higher education. In 2017 alone, about 2,500 new students were enrolled in China to pursue their degrees in various fields, according to a recent statistics released by the Pakistani embassy in China.

Muhammad Shaheen, Batool's father said that he belongs to a conservative family and many of his relatives stopped him from sending his daughter to a foreign country for education, but he has faith in Batool and the Chinese education system.

"I am sure she will achieve her dreams by acquiring quality education from China," Shaheen said.

Last month, the first batch of Pakistani students who were enrolled in a two-year program of Chinese language learning program at Beijing Language and Culture University returned home after successfully completing their course.

The students, who left for China in 2016, said that they not only learnt the Chinese language but also got a clearer idea of the Chinese culture and the people.

An official with the country's Higher Education Commission said that they provide merit-based doctorate scholarships annually to brilliant students to five top-rated Chinese universities.

"The students showed great interest in studying in China as Chinese universities are among the best universities of the world so students from different faculties including science and technology and arts chose China for pursuing their degrees," the official said.

According to latest statistics of Pakistani embassy in Beijing, currently, 2,700 Pakistani students are pursuing masters and doctorate degrees in top Chinese universities on fully funded scholarships sponsored by the Chinese Government.

Kalsoom Sumra, a doctorate degree holder in policy sciences from Peking University, is working as an associate professor in Pakistan's top-ranked university Comsats University of Information Technology in Islamabad.

Sumra told Xinhua that as a Pakistani, it was a good experience for her to know the culture of China and the deep ties of Pakistan with China.

She said that China is becoming a destination for students from Pakistan and other Asian countries as the country is competing with higher education in developed countries and Chinese higher education institutes have introduced advanced teaching resources.

Usman Ali, a 28-year-old Pakistani who got a Bachelors degree in medical sciences from China, is now serving at a well reputed government hospital in Pakistan. He said Chinese universities provide medical studies to Pakistani students at affordable rates.

In Pakistan, private medical colleges charge 0.6 to 1 million rupees (about 6,000 to 10,000 U.S. dollars) from a student a year, whereas Chinese universities provide much better education at a cost as low as 3,000 dollars a year.

"I have had a great learning experience from my practical work in Chinese hospitals. Pakistan has a long way to go to get to the level of China in health sector and I hope that I and other graduates from China will use our experience to improve the situation of medical health care in Pakistan."

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 1, 2018 at 10:55am

#China backs $15 billion #technology #startup investment fund to compete with #Japan’s #SoftBank. #venturecapital

https://www.ft.com/content/9cdd3098-7d3c-11e8-bc55-50daf11b720d … via @financialtimes

Fund to look at global deals even amid concern over inflated tech valuations

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 1, 2018 at 8:28pm

#Foreign #students continue to turn away from #US #universities. #Trump https://qz.com/1267351 via @qz

Last year wasn’t a fluke. The US has lost its appeal to international students.

The US issued visas to less than 400,000 international students in fiscal year 2017. That’s a 17% decline from 2016, and a 40% drop from 2015.

The decline in student visas issued makes it seem like there’s a dramatic decline in international students in the US. That’s a bit misleading. A US policy change in 2014 allowed Chinese nationals to renew student visas once every five years instead of every year. The result has been fewer annual applications from Chinese students, who make up about a third of the foreign-student population in the US.

Enrollment figures give a clearer picture than do numbers of student visas issued—but the decline is there, too. According to a survey conducted by the Institute of International Education, enrollment of first-time international students fell an average of 7% in fall 2017 from a year ago across 522 US institutions.

One contributing factor to the decline is the drop in Saudi Arabian students. The Saudi government cut funding for international-education scholarships in 2016 after a year of low oil prices, resulting in a 14% drop in the number of incoming students from the prior year. Saudi nationals were the fourth-largest group of foreign students in the US in 2017.

Another factor: US universities are getting more expensive. Facing deep state budget cuts and legislative protection for local students, some major public universities increased tuition for international students to raise revenue.

The current US political climate makes the situation even worse. A number of policies instituted by the Trump Administration, ostensibly aimed at protecting Americans, have barred international students from entering the country. A majority of US academic institutions cited visa issues as the top reason for enrolling fewer international students in fall 2017.

As of March 2018, there were 0.5% fewer F-1 and M-1 visa holders–a measure for the number of foreign students enrolled in academic and vocational programs–in the US than a year ago. Though slight, it’s the first decline since the 2008 recession.

The international demand for higher education hasn’t gone away. It moved elsewhere. Other English-speaking countries saw their numbers of international higher-ed students rise. More international students applied to universities in Canada, Ireland, Australia, and the UK—despite Brexit—in 2017 than in 2016. The US is the outlier.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 1, 2018 at 8:47pm

52% of new Silicon Valley companies are founded by immigrant CEOs. Some of the most iconic American brands—Microsoft, Google, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, and U.S. Steel, for example—are today led by foreign-born CEOs. It all starts with foreign student enrollment in US universities. Trump is destroying America's future.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 25, 2018 at 8:54am

A billionaire known as '#China's Elon Musk' is suspected of spying while he was a Duke student (in #America) and stealing a professor's invisibility #technology https://read.bi/2LiA7vK via @businessinsider

Liu Ruopeng — known as China's Elon Musk — studied at Duke University from 2006 to 2009 under David Smith, one of the world's leading experts on metamaterials.
Smith has accused Liu of taking his research and replicating it in China for his own gain.
Some observers, including a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI, believe that Liu was sent to Smith's lab by the Chinese government.
A Chinese billionaire who studied at Duke University allegedly stole a professor's ideas behind special invisibility technology — and then developed his own prototype back in China.

Liu Ruopeng, known as China's Elon Musk, is just 35 years old and is believed to be worth $2.7 billion, according to the "Today" show.

But before he created his money-making "Future Studio" in China, Liu studied at Duke University from 2006 to 2009 under David Smith, one of the world's experts on metamaterials, or "some weird material that doesn't exist in nature," as the professor describes it.

Some observers, including a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI, believe that Liu was sent to Smith's lab by the Chinese government to steal intellectual property.

Smith had been working on a prototype for an invisibility cloak, and the US military had poured millions into his research.


The invisibility cloak doesn't necessarily make a person disappear, but it makes objects invisible to microwave signals.

At one point while at Duke, Liu convinced Smith to allow him to bring his old colleagues into the lab to work on projects for the professor.

When Smith was out of the lab, the Chinese researchers took photos of the lab and its contents, and also took measurements of Smith's equipment.

Much to Smith's surprise, an exact replica of his invisibility cloak prototype was built in Liu's former lab when the Chinese researchers returned home.

"It sounds like theft," Smith said. "If we were a company you might think so."

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 23, 2018 at 4:19pm

The #US cannot halt #China’s march to global tech supremacy. President Xi has "proclaimed that China would blaze its own trail to become a "technology superpower". #technology https://www.ft.com/content/cd681f3e-a5ff-11e8-926a-7342fe5e173f

“In the past, we tightened our belts, gritted our teeth and built the two bombs [atomic and hydrogen] and a satellite,” Mr Xi said. “In the next step of tackling technology, we must cast aside illusions and rely on ourselves.”

Such rhetoric from the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong carries crucial weight. But, as a visual metaphor, the Three Gorges dam is more revealing than Mr Xi was prepared to acknowledge. Although the dam walls were built by Chinese companies, the turbines that generate its electric power were supplied — at least initially — by foreign companies.

The contradiction encapsulates China’s dilemma as it ramps up a techno-nationalist agenda. Its official “ Made in China 2025” programme calls for global leadership in various technological sectors by 2025, but its progress up the value added ladder has — to a significant degree — relied upon foreign technologies and intellectual property.

Thus, China’s response to the trade war is set to be carefully calibrated. Chinese companies are being told by Beijing to cut reliance on US technology and intellectual property in their supply chains, replacing them where possible with alternatives from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere.

“The US is fundamentally an unreliable economic partner,” said one senior official at the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, the Chinese state-holding company with combined revenues last year of Rmb26.4tn ($3.8tn). “It is just too risky to rely on them.”

Can China really live without America? The answer supplied by financial markets appears to be “no”, as reflected in the slide in the renminbi’s value against the dollar and a concurrent fall in Shanghai stock prices. But over the longer term, China looks likely to prevail in two important ways. It may be able to de-risk its supply chain by reducing reliance on US imports, notwithstanding difficulties in key areas such as semiconductors. It may also attain its goal of global excellence in tech sectors including artificial intelligence, 5G telecoms, the internet of things, self-driving cars and battery technology by 2025.

One point in China’s favour is that its de-risking activities may be applied only to imports from the US and not to components made by US companies in China. This is a significant factor: the value of products that US companies made and sold in China was about $250bn last year, almost double the $130bn in products imported from America.

The other consideration is the ready availability of alternatives to US tech products. Research by Haitong, a Chinese securities company, finds that in eight of 11 technology sectors the sales in Asia of products made in the EU, Japan, Korea and Taiwan outstrip those of products made in the US. The three sectors in which the US has clear dominance are semiconductors, semiconductor equipment and aerospace.

The semiconductor industry, therefore, is the lightning rod for US-China tech rivalry. China’s vulnerability was laid bare in April when the US banned ZTE Corp, a Chinese telecoms company, from buying American semiconductors and other technology for seven years. The sanction brought ZTE to its knees, before Washington offered a reprieve.

Yet semiconductors are also the area in which China’s ambitions are clearest. Of some $300bn committed to help deliver Made in China 2025, some $150bn is earmarked to upgrade China’s capacity in semiconductors, according to Dan Wang of the research group Gavekal.

And even in semiconductors, the US chokehold is far from total. If the sanctions on ZTE had been applied to its Chinese competitor, Huawei, the damage would have been easily contained. Huawei designs its own chips through a wholly owned subsidiary called HiSilicon, which ranks as the world’s seventh largest chip design company.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 8, 2018 at 8:11am

INTERNATIONALS IN EINDHOVEN: TUFAIL FROM PAKISTAN
Posted by Sabine te Braake | Dec 8, 2018 |

https://innovationorigins.com/tufail-from-pakistan/

Name: Tufail Shahzad
Country of origin: Pakistan
Work: Naval architect and innovation manager at MasterShip Netherlands

We meet Tufail at restaurant De Restauratie at the Eindhoven train station. He lives in Helmond and takes the train to Eindhoven daily and on the day of the interview, he has to attend a lecture at the Technical University of Eindhoven. “Next to my job, I’m also studying Artificial Intelligence & Innovation Management at the university because I need more information about it for my current project at MasterShip.” Tufail’s curiosity in all kinds of subjects prevails in the stories he tells about his journey of the last couple of years. “I like to be challenged and always want to try new things.”

-------------

Tufail was raised in a small Pakistani village called Dajal: a small union council of one of the most underdeveloped districts in Pakistan. His older brothers studied elsewhere in Pakistan and his parents hoped Tufail would stay home with them. “But that didn’t happen. When I was 17 years old I wanted to move to China to enroll in a program in Aerospace Engineering at Northwestern Polytechnical University. My parents and grandfather were against it. They were afraid I wouldn’t return home any more. Once you know how to fly, you don’t go back in the cage again. In the end, they let me leave to after they understood I really wanted to study there. I had never spent a night without my parents and was kind of lazy because as the youngest I didn’t have to do a lot at home. So that was an excellent base to live on my own in a different country,” Tufail says with a grin.

--------------

Those first months I had a hard time connecting to my new surroundings. The turning point was a family homestay in JiuJiang JiangXi. I was welcomed in a Chinese family where I learned more about the culture and learned to speak Chinese. I stayed with them for 40 days. I also got lots of love from the family and they treated me as their own son. Today, I’m still in contact with them.”


-----------
“I graduated this year in February and I tried to find a job. I got a lot of rejections due to having no work experience in the industry. I went back to Pakistan because when you get rejected all the time, it’s better to be with your family. I kept applying for jobs. I found a wonderful job opening at MasterShip, but they were looking for someone with 5 to 10 years of work experience. I wasn’t on that level yet but I got in contact with them. They liked my resume and we had a Skype conversation. Later they told me there wasn’t a position for me yet, but they would like to stay in touch for some future openings. Later I went to Dubai for a job interview, which went well, and when I was waiting on the airport to go home, I got an email from the CEO of MasterShip: he wanted me to lead an artificial intelligence project, a very big challenge for me and the company. Everything about it was new to me and again a new challenge even in the shipbuilding industry. When I came home, my family asked how Dubai was. ‘Good, but I’m going to Europe again’ was my answer. And that’s how I ended up in Eindhoven.”

After the all the arrangements were made, Tufail moved to Eindhoven in October 2018. “I recently moved to Helmond, but eventually I would like to live in Eindhoven again. I’m still settling in at my apartment. I also want to get to know Eindhoven better and also have more of a social life. I have to manage my time well so I can go to events of the Hub for expats or something. I also want to learn Dutch so I can make contact more easily and I also think it shows respect for the country where you live when you speak the language. Eindhoven is the place I once dreamed about but didn’t know yet. I’m really happy here.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 8, 2019 at 11:35am

“Over 22,000 Pakistani students, making them the third largest group of overseas students in China, are currently studying in different fields, including studies of China’s history and culture, medicine, information technology, environmental science, Chinese language teaching and international economic and trade,” according to official sources here on Thursday.

At least 7,000 Pakistani students were studying on scholarships in China in last year.
A senior Chinese official commented that these students have become the pride of their family and for the country and they feel like home in China because the Chinese government and society both are ready to welcome and facilitate them during their stay for studies in China.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1818424/1-1000-pakistani-students-enro...

China has become the most popular destination for overseas studies in Pakistan as the number of Pakistani students has risen from 5,000 to existing 22,000 during the last five years.

The Chinese government is providing more scholarships to Pakistani students than the students of other Asian countries.

Pakistani students belonging to almost all parts of the country are taking advantage of scholarships offered by the Chinese government under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), according to some educationists.

For a Pakistani student who is studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the all-weather friendship between Pakistan and China encourages our students to come and study in China.

“Pakistan and China are now strategic partners and closest friends and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is flagship project of President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative,” he added.

Pakistani students are not just coming for the affordable education and job prospects but also for the general experience and quality of life possible in China’s big cities.

22,000 Pakistanis now studying in China

According to data released by the Chinese Ministry of Education, around 489,200 students from 204 countries and regions studied in 935 higher institutions across China last year.

The top five source countries were Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, the United States and India.

The number of students studying liberal arts subjects remained the highest, accounting for 48.45 per cent of the total.

The number of those studying engineering, management, science, art and agriculture increased significantly, with a year-on-year growth of over 20 per cent.

Moreover, 58,600 Chinese government scholarship students from 180 countries including Pakistan studied in the country in 2017, accounting for 11.97 per cent.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 17, 2019 at 9:32am

How China is redrawing the map of world science
The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s mega-plan for global infrastructure, will transform the lives and work of tens of thousands of researchers. By Ehsan Masood


https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-01124-7/index.html


In Pakistan, it is co-sponsoring a range of research centres that are studying topics from rice agriculture to artificial intelligence and railway engineering. In the heart of the European Union, a Chinese–Belgian science park provides homes for companies trying to expand trade in medical devices, solar power and other technologies. And in South America, China has partnered with Chile and Argentina on astronomical centres and has gained access to some of the best observatories in the world. In total, the scientific side of the BRI involves tens of thousands of researchers and students, and hundreds of universities. There are few regions of the developing world where China’s scientific outreach does not have a footprint.

--------------------

As one component of this massive initiative, China is creating what it calls a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, a giant oceanic loop that links the country’s shipping to the nations bordering each of the great oceans, including some in Africa and South America. Then there’s the Silk Road Economic Belt, a complicated network of six overland corridors that connect China to some of Asia and Europe’s major cities through railways, roads and maritime paths.

The signs of a scientific BRI emerged soon after Xi visited central Asia in September 2013. The following year, CAS funded an upgrade to a 1-metre telescope at Uzbekistan’s Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute. The improvement paved the way for the Uzbekistan institute to survey the northern sky in collaboration with China’s Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory. Uzbekistan has no experience in telescope making, observatory director Shuhrat Ehgamberdiev told the CAS Bulletin, so the most important technological part was done by China’s engineers. This was the beginning of much grander plans by CAS.

The BRI’s scientific component is being masterminded by Bai. Trained in China as an X-ray crystallographer, Bai worked with John Baldeschwieler at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in the mid-1980s on scanning tunnelling microscopy.

Even early in Bai’s career, it was clear he would go far, says Baldeschwieler, who remembers predicting that Bai would one day become president of CAS. During a visit to Beijing in 1995, Baldeschwieler was amazed to find that Bai had arranged a meeting with China’s then-president Jiang Zemin. “We were picked up in a small bus and taken by police escort with flashing lights through Tiananmen Square to the Great Hall of the People.” Young boys and girls were lining the stairs on a red carpet, he recalls.

Under Bai, the science BRI has been running on three parallel tracks. In China, CAS has established five centres of excellence at its institutes, and these host the 200 PhD students that the academy trains every year.

Outside China, it has opened nine research and training centres, in Africa, central Asia, South America and south and southeast Asia — often co-funded by their host countries. The China–Brazil Joint Laboratory for Space Weather in São José dos Campos, for example, is monitoring space weather changes and developing forecast models. In Bangkok, the CAS Innovation Cooperation Center helps Thailand’s universities and technology companies to work with Chinese counterparts, and at the same time gives China a foothold in the region. And then there are hundreds of individual collaborations between CAS and universities in China and elsewhere.

The third track is what CAS is calling the Digital Belt and Road, a platform for participating countries to share the data obtained as part of their collaborative projects with each other and with China. These data include satellite images as well as quantitative data on natural hazards, water resources and cultural heritage sites.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 10, 2020 at 9:39pm

Number of Pakistani students studying in US increased by 5.6 percent during 2018-19.
Pakistan sent 7,957 students to USA in 2018-19, as compared to 7,537 students sent last year.

https://www.brecorder.com/2019/11/20/546027/pakistan-among-fastest-...

The numbers showed a slight increase in total international enrollment, 0.05% from the previous year, but a decrease in new international student enrollment, -0.9%.

Decreases were seen in undergraduate (-2.4%), graduate (-1.3%) and non-degree (-5.0%) trends, as well.

China sent the most students -- 369,548 -- comprising 33.7 percent of all foreign students, a 1.7 percent increase from the previous year.

India sent the second-largest number -- 202,014 -- or 18.4% of all college and university students, a 2.9% increase from the previous year.

But several other countries, in descending order of number of students sent to the U.S., showed declines: South Korea (-4.2%), Saudi Arabia (-16.5%), Canada (0.8%), Vietnam (0.3%), Taiwan (4.1%), Japan (-3.5%), Brazil (9.8%), Mexico (-1.5%), Nigeria (5.8%), Nepal (-0.3%), Iran (-5.0%), the United Kingdom (-2.7%), Turkey (-3.4%), Kuwait (-9.8%), Germany (-8.5%), France (-1.0%), Indonesia (-3.4%), Bangladesh (10%), Colombia (1.1%), Pakistan (5.6%), Venezuela (-7.3%), Malaysia (-6.8%) and Spain (-3.0%).

https://www.voanews.com/student-union/fewer-foreign-students-enroll...

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