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On June 25, 1998, the National Science, Technology and Education Leading Group, led by then Premier Zhu, was officially launched. On October 28 of that year, the leading group held its second work conference and passed the Action Plan for Reinvigorating Education Facing the 21st Century initiated by the Ministry of Education. The focus of the plan was to support an elite group of universities in order to make them world class.
To achieve that goal, the Central Government promised to increase the educational allocation in the national budget by 1 percent a year for each of the five years following 1998.
In 2004, Xu Zhihong, then President of Peking University, expressed his ambition to have Peking University recognized as a world-class university by 2015.
But lack of funding had long been a main obstacle for Chinese universities as it prevented them from investing in world-class facilities and personnel.
"In 1994, we had only 15 offices and a 30-square-meter office that was shared by 16 teachers," said Chen Zhiqiang, Dean of the College of History at Tianjin-based Nankai University.
Actually, conditions in Peking University at the time were similar. "Sometimes a teacher had just one drawer in an office," said Wang Yiqiu, former Vice President of Peking University. "Besides, due to limited funding, the library of Peking University was unable to purchase foreign books for several years."
The establishment of Project 985 laid a solid foundation to solve the funding problem.
Central and local governments have allocated large amounts of funding to these universities to build new research centers, improve facilities, hold international conferences, attract world-renowned faculty and visiting scholars, and finance Chinese faculty's overseas academic exchanges.
Although the 39 universities included in Project 985 account for less than 2 percent of China's 2,000 full-time higher education institutions, they hold more than 50 percent of Ph.D. candidates, national key branches of learning and national key laboratories.
"Heavy investment will help push Chinese universities up the world rankings," said Ying Cheng, Executive Director of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Center for World-Class Universities.
The overall strength of Chinese universities, those listed in Project 211 and 985 in particular, has improved considerably in the past decade.
In April 2011, Gu Binglin, former President of Tsinghua University, announced at the university's centenary ceremony that Tsinghua University had become one of the highest ranked universities in the world, boasting a first-class education and world-leading facilities.
According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011, Peking and Tsinghua universities ranked at 167th and 178th respectively on the ARWU list.
Since 2003, the ARWU has been listing the world's top 500 universities annually, based on a set of indicators and third-party data. It is recognized as a reliable indicator of global university rankings.
Ying believes that China, despite weak ratings overall, is en route to creating world-class universities.
By the ARWU standards Peking and Tsinghua universities can already be considered world class. "Besides, between 2003 and 2010, 20 more Chinese universities had entered the top 500, dethroning just as many American ones," Ying said.
However, Chinese universities are still lagging behind world-class universities when it comes to cultivating leading researchers and fostering independent innovation.
Some experts argue, however, that more than just universities, the country's entire education system may be responsible for the weakness of China's tertiary education.
Zhou Zhong, a professor at Tsinghua University, said that Chinese students are put under tremendous pressure during their school years. They have to prepare for the national college entrance examination that requires huge amounts of memorization, and then at university they feel the pressure of finding a promising job after graduation.
"This reduces the quality of China's intellectual output. Students focus on getting a good job, and earning enough to buy a house. During their college years, they tend to place too much practical value on their choice of subjects and do not focus on quality academic output," Zhou said.
Ultimately building world-class universities is a long-term project. "World-class universities cannot be built overnight, not even in a generation or two," Peking University's former President Xu said.
In July 2010, the Central Government set out its educational goals in the National Outline for Medium- and Long-term Educational Reform and Development (2010-20), also known as the 2020 Blueprint. It stated that one of the chief priorities was to raise the global competitiveness of higher education through the creation of world-leading innovative talents, internationally renowned flagship disciplines and world-class universities.
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