Maira Tahir requests to be considered for a spot at a top school landed on the desks of admissions officers in the United States, Finland and China.

In the end, she accepted an offer of admission from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an old public research university in China known as “The MIT of the East”.

What helped Tahir make her decision was not just the school's reputation and tradition – it was founded in 1896 at the edict of the 10th emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) – but something more tangible: a scholarship offer.

“I thought knowing Chinese language and about the culture would be a bonus to my CV,” said Tahir, 23, who will study new media and take required courses in Chinese language and culture at the school.

“The school has a great reputation, and they gave out a really nice scholarship,” Tahir said. “I was accepted in the US, but I was not going to get a scholarship.”

For Tahir, going to the Shanghai university caps off years of watching China’s influence grow over her home country.

Along with the establishment of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015 – a US$62 billion collection of infrastructure projects China is building – has come a flurry of interest in building business ties and opening Chinese language centres in universities.

As Tahir has observed China’s outward push, she is also a product of China’s painstaking efforts to draw students to its institutions of higher learning. Just under half a million international students now study across 31 provinces and regions in China, about as many as in Britain.

And like Tahir, about two-thirds of China’s international students numbering 317,000 last year which hail from countries that have partnered with China in the “Belt and Road Initiative”, Beijing’s massive and ambitious US$1 trillion infrastructure plan.

The influx of international students to Chinese schools is part of a carefully conceived but little publicised aspect of the global project: education.

In the past year alone, enrolment from belt and road partner nations has jumped 12 per cent to 317,000 students.

Meanwhile, students are moving away from short-term Chinese language study. Almost half of all international students in China are pursuing bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees, with the number increasing 15 per cent from 2016 to 2017, according to Ministry of Education statistics.