Analysis of Strategies of the PRC's Government in Internationalization of Higher Education as an Instrument of China's ‘Soft Power’

During the existence of the concept of "soft power" in the academic community, a lot of research has been done on its study is various discourses. This work considers the approach to the state “soft power” in a narrower sense, namely in attractiveness of national educational systems. An example of such a review was the development of the PRC higher education system since 1949. Having absorbed the elements of the heritage of the educational systems of the Soviet Union and the existing trends in the educational policies of Western countries, over the past 30 years, China has been adhering to a new vector in the development of higher education aimed at internationalizing and improving the position of universities in the international education market. This emphasis can be traced by analyzing the main national strategies of the Chinese government in internationalizing universities, namely, Project 211, Project 985, and the Plan for the Creation of World-Class Universities and Academic Disciplines (“Double First Class”). An analysis was made of the dynamics of the positions of fifteen Chinese universities in the ratings of the best universities in the world QS and ARWU for the period from 2012 to 2019, which were also participants in the three above-mentioned projects. According to the results of such an analysis, universities showed stable growth. Using the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we also investigated the results of the three above-mentioned projects according to the following criteria: content, chronological framework, number of participants, funding and positioning results in world ratings. The comparison results showed approximately the same dynamics in average annual growth rates, where during the implementation of the Plan for the Creation of Universities and Academic Disciplines of the World Class (“Double First Class”) a higher rate of increase in positions was observed compared to previous government initiatives.