This year, Beijing’s Tsinghua University is up two spots to be just outside the top 10.
Peking University and Zhejiang University have also moved up the list, climbing to 25th and 45th respectively.
The rankings are the latest list of the Best Global Universities compiled by American media company US News and World Report, which looks at 2,250 top institutions from 105 countries.
The assessment focuses exclusively on the overall academic research and reputations of the universities, weighing up 13 factors, from publications to citation impact.
This year’s results show just how far Chinese universities have come in a few short years. In 2018, Tsinghua University was 50th and Peking University 68th, the only two in the top 100. Now they are among 15 Chinese universities in the top 100, with Tsinghua leading the pack at 11th.

今年，北京的清华大学排名上升两位，位列第11名。
北京大学和浙江大学的排名也有所提升，分别升至第25位和第45位。
这些排名来自美国媒体公司《美国新闻与世界报道》最新发布的“全球最佳大学”榜单，该榜单涵盖了来自105个国家的2250所顶尖高校。
该评估专注于大学的整体学术研究和声誉，从出版物到论文引用影响力等13项指标进行权衡。
今年的结果显示，中国大学在短短几年里取得了巨大的进步。2018年，清华大学排名第50，北京大学排名第68，是唯二进入前百的中国高校。如今，已有15所中国大学跻身世界前100，清华大学以第11位领跑。

It has been a steady rise for Chinese institutions up these kinds of ladders in recent decades, one built on sustained investment in education, students and recruitment of overseas staff.
That brain gain is growing in momentum, as the administration of US President Donald Trump flip-flops on visas for international students and cuts research funding, deterring more of China’s best and brightest from study and research in the United States.
The decline in Chinese students heading to the US has been particularly stark over the past five years.
In the 2019-20 academic year, China accounted for the largest group of international students in the United States, with 372,532 crossing the Pacific for further studies. By the 2023-24 school year, that number had fallen to 277,398, a decline of more than a quarter over that period.

过去几十年里，中国高校在这类排名中的稳步提升，得益于对教育、学生以及海外人才引进的持续投入。
随着美国总统特朗普政府在国际学生签证政策上反复无常并削减科研经费，这种“人才回流”趋势愈发明显，令更多中国顶尖人才望而却步，不再赴美留学和科研。
过去五年，中国学生赴美人数的下降尤为明显。
2019-20学年，中国是美国最大国际学生群体，共有372,532人赴美深造。但到了2023-24学年，这一数字下降到277,398人，五年间减少了四分之一以上。

So much so that India now sends more students to the US than China.
Similarly, almost 20,000 scientists of Chinese descent left the US for other countries between 2010 and 2021, according to a study by Princeton University sociologist Yu xie.
The rate jumped after 2018 when the US government launched the “China Initiative” in what it frxd as an effort to uncover “Chinese economic espionage” threatening US national security.
The China Initiative was launched during Trump’s first term and reportedly involved US Department of Justice investigations of thousands of scientists suspected of hiding Chinese connections. Most cases were quickly dropped due to lack of evidence, and the programme was scrapped in 2022 under Trump’s successor, Joe Biden.
However, the academic chill between China and the US is still apparent at the institutional level. In January, the University of Michigan ended a two-decade partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University over what it said were national security risks.

如今，印度赴美留学生人数已经超过中国。
同样，根据普林斯顿大学社会学家谢宇的一项研究，2010年至2021年间，约有2万名华裔科学家离开美国，前往其他国家。
自2018年美国政府启动“中国行动计划”后，这一数字激增。该计划被美国政府包装成揭露威胁美国国家安全的“中国经济间谍活动”的行动。
“中国行动计划”是在特朗普第一任期内启动的，据报道，美国司法部调查了成千上万涉嫌隐瞒与中国关系的科学家。但由于缺乏证据，大多数案件很快被撤销，该项目最终于拜登上任后于2022年被废止。
然而，中美之间在学术机构层面的寒意依然明显。今年1月，密歇根大学以所谓“国家安全风险”为由，结束了与上海交通大学长达二十年的合作关系。

The University of California, Berkeley, recently announced it was decoupling from the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute after the US government began investigating millions of undisclosed dollars given to the institute by the Chinese government.
And in September 2024, the Georgia Institute of Technology announced the end of its participation at the China-based Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, also due to national security concerns.
The effect could be lasting.
While the most popular American universities – Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford – continue to dominate the top spots in the US News university rankings, “visa challenges and government scrutiny could deter talented Chinese students and researchers from choosing to study in the US in the future”, according to Rick Carew, adjunct professor of finance and economics at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business in New York.

加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校最近宣布，与清华-伯克利深圳学院解除合作关系，此前美国政府开始调查该学院从中国政府获得的数百万未披露资金。
2024年9月，佐治亚理工学院也宣布，出于国家安全考虑，终止参与位于中国的佐治亚理工深圳学院。
这种影响可能是持久的。
尽管哈佛大学、麻省理工学院和斯坦福大学等最受欢迎的美国高校仍然在《美国新闻与世界报道》的大学排名中位居前列，但福特汉姆大学加贝利商学院金融与经济学兼职教授里克·卡鲁表示，“签证难题和政府审查可能会阻止有才华的中国学生和研究人员未来选择到美国留学。”

“China-born scholars contribute immensely to academic research in the US. The heightened US-China political tensions have made them a target for scrutiny,” Carew said.
“Generous funding and the opportunity to teach the next generation of top Chinese students in their native language have made offers to return to Chinese universities attractive for some top scholars more interested in conducting research than geopolitics.”
One of the major pull factors for returning to China – the increase in funding – stems from Beijing’s efforts to ramp up domestic innovation and development. China is seeking to move up the industrial value chain and is counting on investment in high technology to help get it there. At the National Science and Technology Conference in the capital last year, Chinese *** set a 2035 goal to develop the country’s science and technology sectors into world-leading research hubs.

“出生在中国的学者为美国的学术研究做出了巨大贡献。美中之间日益紧张的政治局势使他们成为审查的对象。”卡鲁表示。
“丰厚的资金以及有机会用母语教授下一代顶尖中国学生，让那些更专注于科研而非地缘政治的顶级学者，对回国任教感到更有吸引力。”
促使学者回国的一大因素是资金投入增加，这源于北京加大推动国内创新和发展的努力。中国正寻求提升产业价值链，并寄望于对高科技领域的投资来实现这一目标。在去年于首都召开的全国科技大会上，中国提出，到2035年要将中国的科技领域发展成为世界领先的科研中心。

That involves a bigger emphasis on research. According to a report released in March by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, China spent more than US$780 billion on research and development in 2023, reaching 96 per cent of US R&D spending, measured in terms of gross domestic expenditure. That compared with just 72 per cent 10 years earlier.
In 2017, China surpassed the US in terms of research output, and since then has generated an increasing number of cited publications, a sign that Chinese research is attracting more attention from the international research community, according to the Springer Nature 2024 China Impact Report.

这意味着对科研的更大重视。根据经济合作与发展组织（OECD）今年三月发布的一份报告，2023年中国在研发上的支出超过7800亿美元，按国内研发总支出来算，已达到美国研发支出的96%。而十年前，这一比例仅为72%。
2017年，中国在科研产出方面超过了美国，自那以后，中国发表的被引用论文数量不断增加。根据施普林格·自然2024中国影响力报告，这表明中国的科研越来越受到国际学术界的关注。

xiong Bingqi, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, said conditions for researchers had improved over the past five years, with incentives such as higher salaries, better research funding, and benefits like housing subsidies and healthcare.
“The good scientific research environment has attracted a large number of foreign academic talent to teach in China, and the talent attraction policies are also quite helpful,” xiong said.
Zhejiang University, a cradle of tech start-ups in China, has been on the receiving end of some of the research funding and has attracted notable scientists from the US. That reputation was burnished this year when university engineering graduate Liang Wenfeng made the world sit up with his AI start-up DeepSeek and its cost-effective, open-source and competitive approach to large language models.
Notably, many of the people at DeepSeek were young and educated wholly in China. In an interview with The China Academy, an academic networking hub, Liang said his hiring practice was to pick and nourish fresh young graduates from the very top Chinese universities but with little to no work experience.

北京21世纪教育研究院院长熊丙奇表示，过去五年来，科研人员的工作条件有所改善，包括更高的薪资、更好的科研经费以及住房补贴和医疗等福利激励措施。
“良好的科研环境吸引了大量海外学术人才来中国任教，人才引进政策也非常有帮助，”熊丙奇说。
作为中国科技创业的摇篮之一，浙江大学获得了部分科研资金，并吸引了来自美国的知名科学家。今年，这一声誉进一步提升，该校工科毕业生梁文锋凭借其人工智能初创公司DeepSeek及其具有性价比、开源和强大竞争力的大模型方案，让世界为之瞩目。
值得注意的是，DeepSeek的许多员工都是年轻人，并且完全在中国接受教育。在接受学术交流平台《中国学术》的采访时，梁文锋表示，他的招聘原则是从中国顶尖高校挑选并培养刚毕业、几乎没有工作经验的年轻人。

Apart from DeepSeek, Zhejiang University graduates have been at the forefront of other innovative tech start-ups such as Deep Robotics, known for specialising in robot dogs and pioneering autonomous inspections of electrical substations and dangerous high-voltage environments. Both companies are part of the “Six Little Dragons”, the Hangzhou-based tech firms whose successes have come to embody China’s tech aspirations.
“China produces an estimated 1.4 million engineering graduates each year, providing fresh talent to technology firms like Huawei and BYD competing with Silicon Valley,” Carew said.
“Chinese tech innovation has benefited from a combination of engineering talent, China’s advanced manufacturing ecosystem in Zhejiang and Shenzhen, and government policies supporting investment in hard tech industries.”

除了DeepSeek之外，浙江大学毕业生还在其他创新科技初创公司中处于前沿，比如专注于机器狗、并开创性地实现对变电站和高压危险环境自主巡检的宇树科技。这两家公司都是“六小龙”之一，这些总部位于杭州的科技企业的成功已经成为中国科技抱负的象征。
卡鲁表示：“中国每年大约培养出140万名工程毕业生，为像华为、比亚迪这样与硅谷竞争的科技公司提供了新鲜人才。”
“中国的科技创新受益于工程人才的储备、浙江和深圳发达的先进制造业生态系统，以及政府支持硬科技产业投资的相关政策。”

In addition, US controls on technology exports to China, such as a ban on sales of some advanced chips, introduced in 2022 were supposed to help secure technological leadership, but they ended up costing US companies billions of dollars in market capitalisation while boosting Chinese domestic innovation and self-reliance, according to a 2024 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
But this has not always been the case. China-US relations, arguably one of the world’s most important sets of bilateral ties, boast decades of strategic academic cooperation and competition.
In 1979, the two countries signed the US-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement. That agreement was renewed late last year after much delay and some changes but the extension signalled a continued willingness to cooperate.
And in May, Beijing’s Tsinghua University opened four new residential colleges aimed at developing talent in science, engineering and AI, with one of them designed specifically for international students. The colleges were part of a global strategy launched in 2021 to boost worldwide competitiveness.

此外，根据纽约联邦储备银行2024年的一份报告，美国对华技术出口的管控措施，比如2022年出台的部分高端芯片销售禁令，本意是为了巩固美国的技术领先地位，但最终却导致美国公司市值损失数十亿美元，同时推动了中国国内的创新和自立。
但情况并非总是如此。中美关系可以说是世界上最重要的双边关系之一，几十年来一直存在着战略性的学术合作与竞争。
1979年，两国签署了《中美科技合作协定》。该协定在去年底经过多次拖延和部分修改后得以续签，这一延期也表明双方依然有合作的意愿。
今年5月，北京清华大学新设立了四所新书院，旨在培养科学、工程和人工智能等领域的人才，其中一所专门面向国际学生。这些书院是清华2021年启动的全球战略的一部分，旨在提升其全球竞争力。

xiong, from 21st Century Education, said that maintaining a global education push was “a strategic step in building a strong country”.
And university rankings may not be the best way of measuring that success.
xiong said that rating systems could have a negative influence on university operations, leading to more pressure for quantity over quality and more frequent cases of fraudulent research papers.
“Ranking universities by using indicators such as the number of papers published and the number of citations is a simplistic and quantitative approach, but the spiritual qualities and traditions of a university cannot be quantified,” xiong said.
“Talent development is the key to competitiveness. We cannot have first-class scientific research without first-class talent.”

来自21世纪教育研究院的熊丙奇表示，持续推动全球教育发展是“建设强国的战略举措”。
而大学排名可能不是衡量这种成功的最佳方式。
熊丙奇称，排名体系可能对大学运营产生负面影响，导致高校更注重数量而非质量，科研论文造假现象也会更频繁。
熊丙奇表示“用发表论文数量和被引用次数等指标来排名大学，是一种简单化、量化的做法，但大学的精神品质和传统是无法量化的。”
“人才培养是竞争力的关键。没有一流的人才，就没有一流的科研。”