Doing a PhD in China – the financial side (questions)

[山东朱]

Hello everybody, a first-time poster (and longtime lurker) here!

I have been living and working in China for the past two years and will continue to do this until next summer. After that, getting a PhD in the field of politics is my next step. I already have some options back in my home country of Germany and in the UK, and because of the direction that these studies would take, a good chance of getting at least one scholarship. Additionally, tuition fees in Germany are a total non-issue, and doctoral candidate are paid rather than having to pay.

However, for personal - and even some professional - reasons, I would actually love to do the PhD in China. I am fully aware of the shortcomings that exist on the Mainland, and have over the last year aquired the necessary insight into the chinese education system with its numerable flaws and differences in structure compared to the West. That is not part of my question, though if anyone has some interesting stories to share about doing a doctorate in China, feel free to do so. What I want to ask is the financial side of matters. I have read some stories on this board that promised scholarships were withdrawn to prospective foreign student on short notice, and that for me is quite a detriment. Since in Europe, the financial side checks out for me, I would consider doing the PhD in China only with some assurances that I wouldnt have to tuitions fees and living expenses in the full. Long story short, my question is:

-What reliable option for stipends and scholarships exist for foreign doctoral candidates who are already living in China?

-How about the China Scholarship Council, is it possible to apply for such a scholarship when you already live in China?

-Anybody here who has done a PhD in Hong Kong and can describe the financial options for doctoral candidates there?

[imron]

That is not part of my question, though if anyone has some interesting stories to share about doing a doctorate in China, feel free to do so

Although not entirely similar, if you haven't seen it already, kdavid has written an ongoing series of posts regarding his experience as a graduate student in China.

[山东朱]

I have read that thread a while ago, it was quiten enlightening. Having visited a number of universities, that rather sad level of academics seems to be the norm amongst 2nd tier universities. Even 1st tier universities can be lacking. I am not necessarily going for the big two, 清华 and 北大, but it should at least be a university of the 985工程, which leaves 39 at the table (or rather around 20, since not all have a Politics department with PhD studies). Anything else is, from what I have gathered, really easy to get into - e.g. I have asked at 曲阜师范大学 just for the sake of it, and they would take me, no questions asked. However, in terms of academic prowess and level of education, those institutions are a no-go and getting a PhD there would even hamper career prospects for me. My grades allow me to go to some prestigious institutions in the West, its just that I don't want to exclude China from this equation.

[Kanjiology]

You can apply for the China Scholarship Council in China. You can send your application to your home country's embassy or apply directly at a university in China. To apply for the CSC scholarship as a PhD candidate you just need to hold a Master's degree and be under the age of 40 I believe. You'll have to apply next year as this year's results are starting to come out now.

[山东朱]

Ah, I see, that is really helpful! I was wondering If I could apply from inside China. And yes, I will apply next year. But since this is an important undertaking, I want to start sorting things out now rather than later.

From what I have read, it is not really transparent as to what makes an application through the CSC successful?

[kdavid]

I applied from within China, but I still had to submit everything to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C.

[Kanjiology]

You're right, all of us on the CSC threads really have no idea what makes an application successful or not. I think the best advice I could give you is just to have a complete application with all the required forms and materials attached.

[山东朱]

From what I gathered, the chance to get into at least one of the three selected universities isn't to shabby, especially if you exclude the two most popular ones, 清华 and 北大? Those, as mentioned, wouldn't be included in my application anyway. Would love to study there and will still check on it, but 3 years in the capital isn't something that I would look forward to. I have been there enough to know that both winter and summer can be horrible experiences in Beijing.

[OneEye]

For what it's worth, an American friend of mine is doing a PhD here in Taiwan. He's in one of the top departments here, and his dissertation adviser is a giant in the field. Despite all this, he's been told by two different leading Western scholars (one in the US, one in the UK) that he's wasting his time by not doing his PhD in the West. Your field may be different, but I'd urge you to really be certain that this is the best path for you before you decide to do this.

[山东朱]

Of course! As I said initially, I am looking at several universities in the UK and Germany, and have some prospects of getting into rather prestigious departments - not Oxbrigde, mind you, but top 100 globally. In the Asia region, Hong Kong actually holds my biggest interested as a place to study - especially cause of the minefield that politics are here. However, since I do work for a political party that is desperate for better relations with the PRC, a PhD from one of the better universities in China wouldn't be a waste of time and actually offer me a number of attractive employment opportunities both here and back home.

[山东朱]

After all my chinese colleagues advised me against it, and a chinese friend of mine who works at Tsinghua after getting her doctorate in Germany also discouraged me, I have thought it over and decided not to pursuit a PhD in China. There are alot of other factors that got me to that conclusion, but the lack of faith of the academic staff in their own institutions got to me the most.

[gato]

Certainly, it would be a particularly maddening task to try to do a degree in politics or anything related to politics (such as law) in China.  Censorship and self-censorship would be par for the course.  That on top of all the other problems of Chinese universities, such as restaurant-worker-level wages for professors.

[kdavid]

After all my chinese colleagues advised me against it, and a chinese friend of mine who works at Tsinghua after getting her doctorate in Germany also discouraged me, I have thought it over and decided not to pursuit a PhD in China. There are alot of other factors that got me to that conclusion, but the lack of faith of the academic staff in their own institutions got to me the most.

 

 

I believe this is the right choice; especially for politics. If you've got good options back home, that's the route you should take.

 

Studying the humanities in China wouldn't be a bad idea if you were limited elsewhere.

 

Personally, I didn't have much of a background in history (except for a minor during my undergrad), and that little background was in western history. As such, doing an MA here before applying to PhD's back home in the States, will hopefully at least get me into a funded MA program; though I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can go right into a PhD.

[Meng Lelan]

Despite all this, he's been told by two different leading Western scholars (one in the US, one in the UK) that he's wasting his time by not doing his PhD in the West.

 

 

Why is that the case?

[OneEye]

A few reasons off the top of my head: research methodology differs significantly, the theoretical framework from which scholars approach things differs significantly, scholars in the West are expected to have broad mastery of their general area and deep knowledge of their specific field, while scholars here can get away with only the latter. It's not uncommon for world-class experts in palaeography to have completely off-the-wall, outdated, or flat out wrong ideas about even the most basic tenets of historical phonology, for instance, even though the two are intimately related. One such person in my department likes to test Middle Chinese 反切 spellings using Taiwanese pronunciations of characters, and when it doesn't work, rather than adopting the rational position that perhaps it's not appropriate to test the pronunciations of 1000+ years ago with a modern language, he says "well anyway, 反切 isn't all that accurate in the first place," because he hasn't questioned his (all-too-common in Taiwan) belief that "Taiwanese is the same language that Confucius spoke and has remained unchanged for 2500 years." A lot of people go so far as to call it 古音 or 雅音 (including that professor), which is flat out insane.

 

There is a general trend to ignore anything not published by a native Chinese speaker, because 反正，你們外國人不懂我們這個悠久、偉大的文明. That's a quote. Here's another, from famous palaeographer 唐蘭：「這一種西方人所不能理解的特殊的學科，我們只有把它叫做“中國文字學”。」 There's an deep-seated tradition of racism in this field, and it doesn't help that so many of the people in this field are in it because they're "true believers" in Chinese culture. So all of the outstanding work being done in Japan, the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany, among others I'm sure, is getting ignored simply because the authors aren't Chinese. There are some scholars who are more open to this stuff (mostly younger people), but the problem is extensive enough that I've been encouraged not to quote from languages other than Chinese in my papers, because my professors won't be able to read them and will assume that the person doesn't know what they're talking about, and that by extension, neither do I.

 

There's also a tendency for them to let foreigners off the hook easily, which sounds like it's in opposition to what I just said, but is really rooted in the same racism. Having foreigners graduating from your department looks good on paper and helps with university rankings. But they set the bar incredibly low (because we're foreign, and so "can't be held to the same standard because we don't understand"), so that graduating really means nothing, except that you continued to show up to class. There are a lot of graduation requirements that get waived for foreigners (including, I believe, qualifying exams for PhD students, which is counter to everything that grad school is supposed to be about). There's even a girl in my department, a second-year MA student, who doesn't speak or read Chinese beyond the most basic level. She just started studying Chinese last year, her first year in the MA program. In the Department of Chinese. She's still in the beginning levels at the MTC (PAVC Book 3, I think). She passed all her classes last year without being able to hold a real conversation in Chinese, much less being able to comprehend any of the lectures or read any of her books. That's how low the bar is set. Of course, a foreigner can hold himself to the same standards as the Taiwanese students, and that's what I'm trying to do, but I'll still end up with the same degree as that girl if I decide to finish. Of course, I'll get a lot more out of the degree than she will, but our resumes will both say the same thing.

 

That's not to say that there aren't benefits to studying here. At least, for an MA. But anyone who wants to work in academia in the West should forget about doing a PhD here. An MA would perhaps be understandable. I am getting excellent training by some of the top scholars in the world, which will serve me well during my PhD, and it gives me the opportunity to continue improving my Chinese in a Chinese-speaking environment. Not to mention the cheap, plentiful books in my field not easily (or cheaply) available in the US, which I'm loading up on for when I go back, or the library full of stuff that may or may not be available at whatever university I end up at in the US. But I have a career/the rest of my life to think about, and that weighs more heavily in the balance than any of those things.

 

Now, the friend I mentioned doesn't intend to leave Asia once he's finished his PhD, so maybe he has a different set of considerations to worry about, but there's no way I would even consider doing a PhD here, not if I ever wanted to get a decent job in my field in the US.

 

Of course, this is all very field-specific. Maybe in other ones, this isn't the case. I don't have any idea.

[Meng Lelan]

As usual great post, OneEye. I was planning to do my PhD at UT Austin anyway (after the master's degree in a Chinese language related field). The PhD situation you described may not be field specific to just Chinese studies,  because research methodology is taken very seriously here in the US including deaf and blind education. 

[山东朱]

My grades are good enough, and since I have worked part-time in my field of expertise (Analysis of Party politics) after graduation, I won't have much of a problem of getting a good PhD advisor at a respectable university in Europe, even a small scholarship by my institute or the Academic exchance service should be possible. Since Germany has really low tuition fees, that beats out even the CSC scholarship. And job prospects are superior in China with a german degree in almost any case - most Chinese graduates from a German university would beat out a candidate from Beida, and the same applies for foreigners, according to my head of faculty.

 

Having decided on that, the tricky part will be to find a suitable research subject related to China, since I really want to get to an academic level of language, and then finding a rhythm to easily commute between both countries - which will again depend on the monetary side of things.

[Meng Lelan]

What are the tuition fees in Germany for grad schools?

[kdavid]

反正，你们外国人不懂我们这个悠久、伟大的文明

 

 

I hear this a lot.

 

Additionally, none of my professors speak English. They also do not reference foreign-language works in class. The one professor who did only referenced Chinese translations, but even then he didn't seem to understand the core material well--perhaps due to the translation, which included words and phrases which simply don't exist in normal everyday mainland academia.

 

 

There's even a girl in my department, a second-year MA student, who doesn't speak or read Chinese beyond the most basic level.

 

In my first semester there was a Japanese student taking the same class. He couldn't speak either, and when he did his pronunciation was very poor. He communicated with us by writing Japanese characters on the board.

 

But they set the bar incredibly low (because we're foreign, and so "can't be held to the same standard because we don't understand")

 

 

This has been one of the most frustrating aspects of doing the program here. I feel everyone just assumes I don't understand anything, and therefore I'm excluded from discussions. In one of our "classes," (where a student just had everyone read a text she photocopied and handed out), when it came to be my turn to read, she simply looked at me, paused, then called on the next student on the other side of the classroom! I've had professors do the same thing.

[renzhe]

What are the tuition fees in Germany for grad schools?

Tuition fees are a relatively recent phenomenon in Germany, where the idea that education must be free for all is very strong. In the last 5 years or so, some states have started introducing them, but you'll have to check the individual institution for details, as they vary a lot (some only charge long-time students, some are cheaper than others, and post-graduate courses are typically free).

PhDs were completely free while I was there. It varies by state (and I am primarily familiar with technical fields), but generally the only thing that is required is that you have two examiners, submit a thesis and defend it publicly. It's the quality of the thesis and your defense that decides whether you graduate. In theory, you could register as a student, and submit your thesis a week later, since PhD programmes in Germany typically don't involve lectures, only research. In practice, most people spend 4-5 years as assistants, working closely under guidance of a professor, and most of this work ends up in the thesis somehow. PhD students typically have a scholarship, work at the University (teaching or research), or work for a company (which then makes use of the research in some ways), but this is for covering costs of living, not tuition. If you find a supervisor willing to work with you and meet the enrollment criteria, you should be set.

Masters, not so sure, because many people in Germany consider it an undergraduate degree, equivalent to the old German 5-year Diploma which it replaced. These typically involve courses, and might involve tuition fees. I remember that a 4-year Bachelor in Sinology at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg was free a few years ago, for example.

Tuition fees, where they exist, are generally considerably lower than in the US or the UK.

EDIT: typically, you pay a small fee (few hundred Euro per semester) to get a student status and corresponding privileges (free public transportation, subsidised meals in the cafeteria, access to all public libraries, etc. etc), but that is cheap (200-300 Euro) and does not go to the University, but student services, bus companies, etc.