China’s 1st private university inaugurated, borrows fundraising model from Harvard, Yale

Zhang Han:

China’s first private research university was officially inaugurated in Hangzhou on Saturday in a move that Chinese experts said would push forward national higher-education reform.

Five Nobel laureates including physicist Chen-Ning Yang and more than 70 representatives of domestic and overseas universities attended the founding ceremony of Westlake University in Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang Province.

Westlake has 68 research group leaders, 139 students under joint supervision at the top Chinese institutes of Fudan University and Zhejiang University and 159 key researchers, according to the school’s website.

Schools of natural science, engineering and life sciences are located on a campus that can hold 120 independent laboratories and 2,000 research fellows.