When people talk about the world's great universities, they still instinctively reach for the same names: Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT. Yet the most consequential university-building story of the last three decades happened elsewhere.
In 2003, when the first Shanghai Rankings were published, no Chinese university appeared among the world's top 200. Today, Peking University and Tsinghua University sit among the global top twenty. China has overtaken the United States in output across many of the world's highest-impact scientific journals. More than seventy Chinese universities now appear in the QS World University Rankings.
In May 1998, at Peking University's centenary celebrations, Jiang Zemin declared that China needed universities with world-leading standards. What followed was not a broad-based reform effort. It was a sequence of increasingly concentrated bets.
The first effort, Project 211, spread investment across roughly one hundred universities. The objective was broad: raise the overall quality of the system. But policymakers soon concluded that improving the average was not the same as creating excellence.
The next phase, Project 985, embraced a different logic. Select fewer institutions. Invest more heavily in each. Hold those choices over time.
Thirty-nine universities were selected. Peking University and Tsinghua University each received 1.8 billion yuan in the first phase alone. The top tier received a disproportionate share of the investment. In any system, choosing some institutions means not choosing others. Project 985 accepted that political friction as the price of excellence.
Project 985 selected thirty-nine universities, but even within that group, investment was uneven. Over time, a smaller cluster of institutions—including Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan, Zhejiang and Shanghai Jiao Tong—emerged as what became known as the C9 League, receiving a disproportionate share of attention and resources. China's pursuit of excellence became progressively more concentrated over time.
The most striking thing about the universities selected, however, was not the money they received. It was their age. Wuhan University was founded in 1893. Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1896. Zhejiang University in 1897. Nanjing University in 1902. By the time the Chinese state selected them in 1998, many were already close to a century old.
China did not build world-class universities from scratch. It identified institutions that already possessed depth: history, faculty, intellectual traditions, research cultures and legitimacy. Then it placed the weight of the state behind them.
The rise of Chinese universities is therefore not a story of creation as much as acceleration. The founding moment and the moment of global recognition were often separated by a century. Great universities are not simply collections of buildings, budgets and rankings. They are accumulations of culture, talent, reputation and intellectual ambition that compound over decades.
By 2016, China had become sufficiently confident in its progress to abandon the very programs that had produced it. Projects 211 and 985 were formally discontinued. Their labels had hardened into permanent prestige markers, and policymakers concluded that entitlement was not the same thing as excellence.
What replaced them was even more ambitious. The Double First-Class Initiative shifted attention from institutions to disciplines. Funding could now target a chemistry department without funding the entire university. The goal was explicit: build world-class universities and world-class disciplines by 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic.
Tsinghua University now ranks 17th globally. Peking University ranks 14th. China's scientific publication output increased more than fifteen-fold between 2000 and 2019. In 2022, Chinese institutions overtook their American counterparts in output across the highest-impact journals tracked by the Nature Index. The Thousand Talents Program recruited thousands of overseas researchers back to China, triggering competition so intense that universities were formally warned against poaching one another's faculty.
What China sustained was not simply investment, but commitment. The same institutions remained priorities across decades. The same choices survived leadership transitions, budget cycles and changing economic conditions.
India experimented with a similar approach, but never sustained it. The Institutions of Eminence Scheme, launched in 2018, sought to identify forty universities for concentrated investment and greater regulatory freedom. Twelve ultimately received the designation. India's public Institutions of Eminence received approximately $750 million in support. The oversight committee expired in 2021 and was not reconstituted. China's investments have been many multiples larger. But the deeper difference is structural, not financial.
China's model required naming specific institutions that would carry national academic ambition, sustaining those choices across decades and resisting the pressure to continually expand the list.
Higher education in India sits within a federal system shaped by regional aspirations, linguistic identities and competing claims on public investment. Choosing a handful of institutions inevitably means not choosing others. Excellence, in this sense, is as much a political decision as an academic one.
India also spent decades pursuing a different and entirely legitimate objective: expanding access. That project transformed millions of lives. But access and excellence follow different logics. One requires distribution, the other requires concentration. Today, IIT Delhi remains India's highest-ranked institution globally, at 118 in the latest QS rankings.
If China's experience offers one lesson, it is that excellence rarely emerges without concentration. Countries that aspire to build world-class universities eventually have to choose which institutions they will back—and sustain those choices across decades. But concentration is only the beginning. Elite institutions ultimately justify that concentration by the capabilities they create beyond their own campuses: the research ecosystems, faculty communities, technologies and institutions that emerge because they exist.
India has become increasingly comfortable discussing excellence. It is less clear whether we are comfortable choosing it—and, having chosen it, increasingly expecting excellence to extend beyond the institutions themselves.
