Major universities

Many of Australia's major universities appeared on the list of master's degree programs affected, including five of the Group of Eight (Go8) coalition of leading institutions. They included a partnership between the University of Western Australia and the Shanghai Maritime University, the University of Sydney and Shanghai's Fudan University, the University of New South Wales and the University of Science and Technology Beijing, Monash University and Harbin Institute of Technology, and the University of Melbourne and the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Other Australian universities affected include James Cook, Sydney University of Technology, Deakin University, Macquarie University, Latrobe University, Wollongong University, Swinburne University and the University of Tasmania.

Two of the University of Sydney courses on the list expired in 2009 and 2013. The university has one continuing arrangement with China until 2021.

Axed programs

About half the axed programs involved universities from China's Heilongjiang province in the country's remote north-east. The province bordering Russia is one of China's poorer regions. One university lecturer with knowledge of the projects said the courses were failing to attract high-quality students because they were too expensive, with charges of 45,000 yuan ($9130) for the domestic component of a master's degree and 100,000 yuan ($20,300) for the overseas component.

Many of Australia's major universities appeared on the list of master's degree programs affected, including five of the Group of Eight coalition of leading institutions. Supplied

Ms Zhang from the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics said one of the partnerships being axed had not attracted any students for several years. Ms Ding, a staffer at the Shanghai Maritime University, said their partnership with the University of Western Australia had stopped in 2013.


The partnerships began in the 1990s and cater for Chinese students seeking experience at foreign universities. Under the partnerships, professors from foreign universities used to come to China to teach courses and Chinese students would complete part of a course at a foreign university.

There are just under 134,000 Chinese students enrolled in Australia's top universities, which are heavily dependent on the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue they bring in each year. Chinese students made up 38 per cent of all higher education enrolments in Australia as of December 2017.

Australian university officials were unaware of the cuts when contacted on Friday. One source said Beijing had been signalling for some time that it would tighten up joint programs, with a shift expected to delivering education entirely on the ground in China rather than having a component overseas.

Beijing in February issued a warning, published on the Chinese Ministry of Education's website, to current and potential students that Australia was unsafe. Universities raised fears at the time that they were being caught in the crossfire of a war of rhetoric between Beijing and Canberra over Malcolm Turnbull's foreign interference laws.