China's Ministry of Education, responding to Xi Jinping's call for an "autonomous knowledge system," elevated area studies to a first-level discipline in 2022, aiming to address a lack of country-specific expertise for its international relations, particularly concerning One Belt One Road partner countries. This expansion has led to 453 research centers across 186 universities, with new doctoral and master’s programs.
However, the buildout has followed a campaign-style logic, establishing programs at institutions without relevant expertise and reassigning students from weak foreign-language majors, leading to a national minimum admission score drop from 275 to 266 in one year. This approach risks an oversupply of low-quality policy outputs, as the policy apparatus in Beijing and Shanghai cannot absorb the volume of graduates, and established entities still recruit from a few elite programs. The resulting Sino-centric diplomatic knowledge base may be less useful for long-term international engagement and less legible to external audiences, featuring fewer English-language citations and limited dialogue with Western academia.
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