China is rapidly becoming a major player in the higher education game if the 2018 Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings are anything to go by. A number of government initiatives and funding boosts have helped to secure China as an attractive destination for international students and this momentum doesn’t appear to be waning any time soon.

A key priority of the Chinese Ministry of Education is to attract more international students to the country and the fairly new development of Sino-foreign joint venture universities is helping fulfil this aim.

Duke Kunshan University is one such venture, set up by Duke University in the US and Wuhan University in China. Students who choose to attend the university have the opportunity to study in both Kunshan, China and Durham, in the US.

Denis Simon, the executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, thinks that there are many reasons why students would choose to study in China. “Students who are now studying in the Asia-Pacific region have all sorts of career opportunities," he says. They can use their knowledge of the East and the West, and they can learn new languages and new cultures, he says. In fact, research predicts that China will be teaching at least 500,000 international students by 2020.

With about seven Sino-foreign joint-venture universities now established, including Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Wenzhou-Kean University and New York University Shanghai, international students have several options if they are considering heading to China for a university education.