When 22 Chinese higher education officials arrived in Michigan on May 11, they alone represented 18 universities with more than 612,000 students and growing rapidly.

Their first full day in Ann Arbor, news arrived of a massive earthquake hitting China. By the end of their second week at U-M, they were part of a vigil on the Diag honoring the more than 51,000 victims of the quake.

The Chinese officials are living through historic changes but they came to U-M, Michigan State University and Wayne State University for the Michigan-China Leadership Forum because they firmly believe higher education leaders have vital work to do in both nations as the world becomes increasingly inter-connected.

East China Normal University President Linzhong Yu, speaking to a U-M audience, said China is seeing an historic “internationalization of higher education.” Chinese universities are growing rapidly, decentralizing and gaining autonomy after years of being ?quite centralized.?

China today has 573 million square feet of higher education building space in use, three times bigger than university square footage in 1999 with more than 25 million Chinese students enrolled in Chinese universities in 2006. While some discipline-specific universities have merged, other new institutions have started, doubling the number of Chinese higher education institutions in the past decade.

“We need a lot of autonomy,” Yu said of the growing needs of ever-expanding universities.

He described continuing exchanges and partnerships between universities as “a marriage” where each brings different strengths to the table though it can take time for them to best understand each other.

Like U.S. universities, he said Chinese institutions are interested in attracting and retaining high quality faculty, increased collaboration, more interdisciplinary research as well as more life sciences and biomedical research.

Former U-M President James Duderstadt, speaking to the delegation about the future of higher education, praised current U-M President Mary Sue Coleman for deciding to become one of the first universities to join in the Google Project to put library collections online. As that project grows and progresses, most of the world?s books will be available around the world just as increased connectivity will further tie once remote parts of the world together.

“Globalization will be based on peer to peer transactions among equals,” Duderstadt said. “New kinds of universities may evolve: universities in the world and of the world becoming global in terms of their agenda like global sustainability, global climate change and resolving conflicts.”