Insight into UK-China partnerships and collaborations in higher education: what has changed in the last five years?

International collaboration is now in the era of partnerships. UK China higher education articulation programmes (henceforth referred to as “articulation programmes”) are playing an important role in internationalising both British and Chinese universities. Articulation programmes are popular with both “providing” universities (for example, Chinese universities in this context) and “receiving” universities (for example British universities in this context). The author published one paper in 2009 on motivations of Chinese universities on international programmes in 2009 and pointed out “providing” universities are normally motivated by filling the funding gap and the desire for inward internationalisation of the universities and “receiving” universities are not only motivated by financial reasons but also by the market demand for higher education, especially for the higher social classes. However, changes have taken place in the last few years due to changes in both the external and internal environment. One of the external changes is that the Chinese government has become reluctant to see articulation programmes simply becoming a recruitment tool for overseas institutions and now emphasises that the essence of the cooperation should be for the Chinese institutions to introduce and absorb high quality educational resources through which their own education system could be improved (Hou, Montgomery and McDowell, 2011).