Essex Vice-Chancellor Professor Anthony Forster has visited China to celebrate research and education links while also looking to establish new partnerships.
Professor Forster visited leading universities and institutes in Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing and Nanjing. He also met senior officials at the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education to discuss future partnerships. Alongside this he discussed potential economic opportunities with Nanjing business leaders at a dinner organised in partnership with the China Jiangsu Provincial Economic and Trade Office.
During his visit Professor Forster welcomed Chinese alumni to special receptions at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beijing and Le Royal Méridien in Shanghai.
Professor Forster said: “We are incredibly proud of our links with China. We have a large community of talented students from China who make a really important contribution to our University community. Several leading scholars at Essex are also from China.
”We want to strengthen our links with key Chinese partners to share knowledge, develop research partnerships and identify new business opportunities including around our world-leading work on analytics and data science.”
Professor Forster visited the following universities:
- Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), Beijing
- Sichuan International Studies University (SISU), Chongqing
- South Western University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE), Chengdu
- Nanjing University
- Nanjing Normal University
The county of Essex has longstanding links with China. For more than 25 years Essex County Council has worked in partnership with Jiangsu province on cultural, educational and business links.
The University of Essex, based just an hour outside London, has helped support these links. The University has more than 3,000 Chinese alumni and more than 1,000 Chinese students studying at its three UK campuses.
Essex Business School, which is ranked in the top 25 in the UK for research excellence in business and management and has just opened a state-of-the-art £21 million new building, is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese students. Other departments seeing strong Chinese application numbers include the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, the Department of Economics and the Department of Language and Linguistics.
The University of Essex Students' Union enthusiastically supports the University's Chinese community. There is a very popular Chinese Student Scholars Society and each year the SU organises Chinese New Year celebrations and a Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.
Essex has a reputation for offering an outstanding student experience and delivering high-quality research. It was ranked second in the UK out of mainstream universities in the National Student Survey and this success was further highlighted by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide which ranked the University of Essex in the top 10 for student experience, top 20 for teaching quality, and in the top 25 for quality of research.
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) in December 2014 re-confirmed Essex’s position as one of the UK’s top research universities, with Essex ranked 4th for social science and the quality of its research in politics once again being rated the best in Britain.
Essex is truly global - in this year’s QS World University Rankings it is the 5th most international university for staff and 11th most international for students. In the QS rankings Essex rose 67 places to 303rd - confirming its place in the top 2 per cent of universities in the world. It is recognised as one of the leading global universities for social sciences with strengths in business and the humanities. In the QS rankings Essex was ranked in the top 150 universities for the social sciences and in the top 250 for the arts and humanities.