In recent years, the Chinese government has signaled that there are “too many liberal arts students.” Tsinghua University in Beijing has proposed to control the scale of liberal arts programs and reduce the number of liberal arts doctoral students.
According to Tsinghua University’s website, when Qiu Yong. the current president of Tsinghua University, attended a conference on liberal arts on September 17, he put forward a 10-point to-do list for the future liberal arts education. At the top of the list was to control the scale of discipline and to downsize doctoral programs.
According to China Youth Daily, an official newspaper targeting young people, starting in 2019, Chinese universities and colleges have kept a tight grip on enrollment and significantly scaled back humanities and social science programs.
In April of this year, the People’s Bank of China published a paper titled, “Understanding and Responding to China’s Demographic Transition.” The paper argued that one of the reasons that Southeast Asian countries fell into the middle-income trap was that “there were too many liberal arts students.” It suggested that China “should pay attention to science and technology education” when formulating population policy.
Source: Tsinghua University, September 20, 2021
https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1177/87151.htm