An AI Turn in China’s Universities?

Jordan Pouille’s recent article in Le Monde, “A l’ère de l’IA, les universités chinoises bouleversent leurs cursus,” offers a useful but narrow entry point into the current restructuring of Chinese higher education. The article presents the reform as a broad attempt to align university curricula with state economic priorities, above all artificial intelligence, digitalisation, and the employability of graduates. It cites Ministry of Education figures indicating that, between 2021 and 2025, Chinese higher-education institutions suppressed or suspended 12,200 undergraduate programs and created 10,200 new ones. While the article is informative, like similar posts published on Linkedin or Facebook, there is little substance behind the grand claims of a “revolution.” As a researcher, the absence of concrete data and sources makes me uncomfortable, especially when it frames China in binary terms.

Looking for proper data was not difficult. It took me five minutes to search the web with a few keywords in Chinese to find the relevant pages on the website of the Ministry of Education, another five minutes to download the documents by year in pdf format. I processed the documents with ChatGPT 5.5 to convert the tables in the PDF document into spreadsheets, then run a series of statistical analysis. Since I do not trust direct outputs from LLMs in absolute, I also ran my own code in R to replicate its operations double check the results myself.

The data compiled from the Ministry of Education provides the annual lists of new undergraduate program registration and approval. The data  largely supports the interpretation of a significant overhaul, at least on the side of program creation. The dataset used here covers the annual additions from 2020 to 2024, based on the Ministry’s published lists for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. There was no available list yet for 2025.

1. The pace and nature of new program creation

The compiled data contains 9,513 newly added undergraduate program-sites between 2020 and 2024. The annual rhythm shows a decline from 2020 to 2023, followed by a rebound in 2024 (Table 1).

Table 1. Number of newly created programs by year

Year	New program-sites
2020	2,223
2021	1,961
2022	1,817
2023	1,673
2024	1,839
Total	9,513

Figure 1. Annual creation of undergraduate program-sites, 2020–2024.

The figures are therefore consistent with the scale suggested in Le Monde. For the overlapping period 2021–2024, the dataset records 7,290 additions. If 2025 is added, the Ministry’s aggregate of 10,200 new programs becomes plausible. The strongest signal is not simply quantitative but qualitative. The most frequently added program titles point clearly toward artificial intelligence, digital economy, smart manufacturing, data science, robotics, and applied engineering (Graph 3 and table 2 in Appendix).

Graph 3 — Top 15 program titles by number of additions

The leading program titles point overwhelmingly toward AI, digital economy, smart manufacturing, big data, robotics, fintech, and digital media. The distribution therefore supports the claim that the reform is not a generic expansion of higher education, but a targeted reorientation toward data-intensive and technologically inflected fields. This pattern strongly supports the article’s central claim: the expansion side of the reform is heavily oriented toward AI, digitalisation, intelligent systems, data, automation, and applied technological fields. The degree-category distribution confirms the same trend. Engineering dominates the additions (Table 3).

Table 3. Number of newly created programs by discipline

Degree-granting category	Added program-sites	English translation
工学	4,173	Engineering
管理学	1,443	Management
文学	912	Literature
艺术学	807	Arts
理学	741	Natural Sciences
经济学	548	Economics
教育学	324	Education
法学	284	Law
农学	178	Agriculture
医学	73	Medicine
历史学	25	History
哲学	5	Philosophy

Graph 2 — Additions by degree category, top categories

Note: Engineering dominates every year in the dataset, while management, natural sciences, arts, literature, economics, and education remain far behind. The 2024 rebound is particularly concentrated in engineering, which reinforces the interpretation of the reform as a shift toward applied technological and industrial priorities.

The reform is therefore not merely adding “new majors.” It is rebalancing the curriculum toward a techno-economic agenda: AI, smart industry, digital economy, energy transition, new materials, transport technologies, and data-intensive management.

2. Suppressed programs: method and limits

The suppression side is harder to analyze because the Ministry of Education does not post the same kind of lists as for new creations. It may require further fine-tuned data mining. As a substitute, I used two graphs published in an article in China (“After universities “cut” more than 5,000 majors” 当高校“砍”掉5000多个专业后), based on ministerial statistics. This is how I proceeded: the Chinese graphs do not provide raw numbers for each category. The first graph shows the distribution of withdrawn or suspended programs in “双一流 (Double First-Class)” universities from 2020 to 2024.

Graph 2. Top 10 Majors Cancelled/Suspended by “Double First-Class” Universities from 2020 to 2024

I treated the chart as an image, segmented the colored pie slices, measured the surface area of each slice, converted each area into a percentage, and then applied those percentages to a base of 12,000 suppressed/suspended programs. This is necessarily approximate: the graph covers 147 “double first-class” universities, while the 12,000 figure refers to the broader national reform. Table 4 provides the estimated distribution by major disciplines.

Table 4. Distribution of the suppressed programs by discipline

门类	Estimated share	Estimated suppressed programs, base 12,000	English translation
工学	35.65%	4,278	Engineering
管理学	19.16%	2,300	Management
艺术学	12.83%	1,539	Arts
理学	11.79%	1,415	Natural Sciences
文学	8.05%	966	Literature
经济学	6.82%	818	Economics
法学	1.90%	228	Law
教育学	1.88%	226	Education
农学	0.90%	108	Agriculture
历史学	0.54%	65	History
医学	0.48%	58	Medicine

The second graph, which lists the most frequently suppressed or suspended program titles, adds an important nuance. The leading fields include 电子商务 (E-commerce), 公共事业管理 (Public Administration), 市场营销 (Marketing), 材料化学 (Materials Chemistry), 国际经济与贸易 (International Economics and Trade), 工业设计 (Industrial Design), 旅游管理 (Tourism Management), 生物工程 (Bioengineering), 信息管理与信息系统 (Information Management and Information Systems), and 视觉传达设计 (Visual Communication Design). These are not simply “humanities” programs. Many are applied, managerial, commercial, design-oriented, or older technical fields.

Graph 2. Top 10 Majors Cancelled/Suspended by “Double First-Class” Universities from 2020 to 2024

The suppressions do not support a simple story of China cutting the humanities in order to fund engineering. Engineering itself appears as the largest category among suppressed programs. Management is also heavily represented. This is important. The most plausible hypothesis is that the reform is pruning older, duplicated, generic, or weakly employable program-sites across many categories. In other words, the state is not eliminating broad disciplinary families as such; it is replacing older curricular forms with new ones that better match current policy priorities.

This helps explain the apparent paradox: engineering is both the largest area of addition and the largest area of suppression. Older engineering programs may be closed while new ones in artificial intelligence, robotics, smart manufacturing, semiconductors, energy storage, low-altitude technologies, and intelligent systems are created. Likewise, older management programs such as marketing, public administration, e-commerce, logistics, or information management may be reduced while newer programs in digital economy, big data management, fintech, and smart supply-chain fields expand.

The addition-side data strongly supports the Le Monde article’s interpretation. Chinese universities are indeed restructuring their curricula around AI, digital economy, data, smart engineering, robotics, new materials, energy, and other state-priority sectors. The suppression-side evidence, reconstructed from the Chinese graphs, suggests a more complex process than a simple anti-humanities turn. The reform is best understood as curricular substitution: the removal of saturated or poorly aligned program-sites and their replacement by programs tied to digitalisation, industrial upgrading, and graduate employability. This will require better data to validate. Those interested in examining the data and make their own analysis or supplement mine with a more qualitative approach will find the data on my GitHub repository.

Sources:

1.2020年度普通高等学校本科专业备案和审批结果 http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A08/moe_1034/s4930/202103/t20210301_516076.html

2. 教育部关于公布2021年度普通高等学校本科专业备案和审批结果的通知 http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A08/moe_1034/s4930/202202/t20220224_602135.html

3. 教育部关于公布2022年度普通高等学校本科专业备案和审批结果的通知 http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A08/moe_1034/s4930/202304/t20230419_1056224.html

4. 教育部关于公布2023年度普通高等学校
本科专业备案和审批结果的通知. http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A08/moe_1034/s4930/202403/t20240319_1121111.html

5. 教育部关于公布2024年度普通高等学校本科专业备案和审批结果及《普通高等学校本科专业目录（2025年）》的通知

 

Appendix

Table 2. Distribution of the newly created programs by major field

Rank	Program title	Additions	English translation
1	人工智能	413	Artificial Intelligence
2	数字经济	298	Digital Economy
3	智能制造工程	241	Intelligent Manufacturing Engineering
4	大数据管理与应用	211	Big Data Management and Application
5	智能建造	180	Intelligent Construction
6	数据科学与大数据技术	160	Data Science and Big Data Technology
7	机器人工程	150	Robotics Engineering
8	网络与新媒体	142	Internet and New Media
9	金融科技	124	Financial Technology (Fintech)
10	跨境电子商务	120	Cross-border E-commerce

Graph 4 — Top 15 universities by additions

The additions were not evenly distributed across institutions. A small group of universities, including Tongji, Tarim, Harbin Institute of Technology, Jiangnan, and Beijing Jiaotong, appear prominently in the dataset. This institutional concentration should be interpreted cautiously, since counts refer to program-sites rather than student enrolment or strategic importance. Still, it suggests that the reform operated not only through national categories but also through institution-specific repositioning. This figure is mainly indicative. It shows where additions are concentrated, but it should not be overinterpreted without considering university size, institutional mission, regional policy, and whether additions are ordinary four-year programs or second-degree programs.

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