Belt and Rod Initiatives: implications for China's internationalisation of tertiary-level education

Since the launch of the One Belt and One Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the internationalisation of China's tertiary education has entered a new stage. Central to the BRI is investment and strategic planning for talent cultivation, knowledge production, and transmission. This paper explains how the BRI redirects, reinforces, and intensifies China's strategic planning and actions for internationalising its education. It adopts a policy analysis approach and reviews three key aspects of development and shifting emphasis of internationalisation under the impact of the BRI: international education networks along the Six BRI Economic Corridors, vocational colleges as new players in international education, and promotion of the Chinese language as a new global language. The analysis captures an important moment in which international education processes are being visibly altered through China's strategies to take the lead in economic globalisation and to compete for a central place in the world via the BRI.