The received story about global higher education goes like this: for most of the 20th century, knowledge flowed outwards from a small number of research-intensive universities in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and the rest of the world received it. Then China arrived, the axis tilted, and now everyone must adapt.
That story is not wrong exactly. But it begins too late and ends too soon and in doing so it mistakes a disruption of Northern dominance for an inherently neutral prior order. Start earlier.
The institutions we call modern research universities did not begin as open systems of knowledge exchange. The Humboldtian model of 1810 fused teaching and research into a single enterprise – conceived, notably, within a national project, not as an abstract gift to humanity.
When the World Wars arrived, the relationship between universities and governments was formalised – MIT’s contributions to radar, the Manhattan Project, the US National Science Foundation’s establishment in 1950 – not as aberrations but as extensions of an existing logic.
The Cold War then made explicit what had always been latent. The British Council promoted English and liberal values globally. Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University offered free tuition, housing and stipends to students from the Global South – not from generosity alone but to build a socialist academic network.
The question is not whether knowledge production has ever been geopolitically entangled. It always has been. The question is whether the current realignment involves new actors performing familiar roles or something categorically different.
The honest answer is probably: both.
The rise of China
China’s ascent is real and documented. According to data from the Scopus database, China accounted for 27% of global scientific and engineering publications in 2022, compared to 14% from the United States.
A report from Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy found that Chinese research now comprises 27.2% of the world’s top 1% most-cited papers, surpassing the US figure of 24.9%. The 2025 World University Rankings by the Center for World University Rankings placed 346 mainland Chinese institutions in the top 2,000, surpassing the United States for the first time.
None of these numbers are accidental. They are the measurable result of the Double First-Class initiative, launched in 2015 to build Chinese universities into global research leaders by 2050, a policy that explicitly integrates education, science and technology into a single strategic planning framework for the first time in that country’s modern history.
What should university leaders do with these facts? The tempting answer is to reach immediately for strategic frameworks: diversify partnerships, invest in cultural competency, establish governance protocols for sensitive research areas.
These recommendations are not wrong. But they risk being mistaken for analysis rather than its product – which is what Donella Meadows meant when she warned against defining a problem as the absence of your preferred solution.
The prior question is harder: how did universities in the Global North accumulate the position they now feel threatened from?
Internationalisation with strings
The General Agreement on Trade in Services, signed in 1995, redefined higher education as a commercial enterprise and enabled Western universities to establish branch campuses globally, capitalising on demand in Asia and the Middle East. This was not a neutral facilitation of knowledge exchange; it was market expansion under rules largely written by the dominant players.
The institutions now worrying about intellectual property protection and research security were, for a generation, operating inside a system where knowledge and resources flowed predominantly from North to South. That flow was not purely extractive – the same period produced genuine development assistance, technical cooperation and capacity-building partnerships, however constrained by funding and infrastructure.
But it was structurally asymmetric and most internationalisation strategies of that era took the asymmetry for granted rather than naming it. That history is worth holding before prescribing its correction.
This is not an argument for inaction. It is an argument for precision about what is actually at stake: not the integrity of a neutral system but the reconfiguration of an always-contested one. The institutional responses to China’s rise illustrate the stakes.
Canada has barred federal funding for researchers who partner with selected Chinese universities and institutions – along with counterparts from Iran and Russia. Australia is encouraging diversification across partner nations.
The European Union restricts cooperation in fields deemed sensitive to intellectual property and national security while encouraging collaboration on climate and biodiversity. The United States renewed its Science and Technology Agreement with China in 2024, incorporating dispute resolution and data reciprocity mechanisms.
Japan and Singapore have maintained partnership commitments, citing mutual benefit. Latin America has deepened research linkages with China over recent decades, though Chinese universities remain relatively unknown across the region and robust bilateral studies programmes on either side are largely absent.
These are not simply technical responses to a technical problem. They reflect different calculations about where power now resides and where it is going. Universities that treat these as purely administrative questions – matters of memoranda of understanding, due diligence or export control compliance – will be surprised by how quickly governance frameworks become sites of political pressure.
What does the multipolar university offer?
There is, buried in all of this, a question that seldom surfaces in strategic planning documents. Who, precisely, is being prepared to thrive in the multipolar university?
The Lumumba model offered Global South students graduate access at no personal cost, at the price of ideological formation. The Western model offered access at increasing financial cost, with ideological content more diffuse but no less present.
China now hosts growing numbers of international students while facing, as analysts of the sector have noted, the challenge of accommodating the expanding worldview perspectives its own returning mobile students bring home.
Every system of international education has always involved a theory of what knowledge is for and who it serves. The current moment does not change that. It makes it harder to look away.
University leaders navigating the multipolar era are not, in fact, managing the collapse of an open system. They are managing the visibility of a structure that was always there. The institutions that will navigate it well are those that acknowledge this clearly enough to act on it, rather than those that mistake the disruption of Northern dominance for the disruption of neutrality itself.
Carlos Vargas is the founder of Societas Partnerships, a Panama-based consulting firm dedicated to bringing clarity and focus to the internationalisation of higher education.
Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News from where this has been culled.
