Chinese angle is not obtuse...

China edges India to emerge a global education magnet - The Economic Times: "he world goes to China to entice its young to their colleges. As in India, there too, higher education fairs, road shows and special admission campaigns drive thousands to pick brochures that give a peek into life on a campus in the West. Suddenly last year, China moved to a different level, leaving India lumbering ranks below. China joined the big league becoming one of the top six nations to host international students on its land.
South Korea continued to send the maximum number of students (27.1%) to China, but the surprise entrant, a close second was the US. When this decade opened, China was not on any student's radar; now, most are studying humanities, followed by medicine. But fresh data put together by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that there are as many international students in China as there are in Australia or in Germany, pulling our neighbour right up on the chart.

It sits there in the company of giants like the United States, the United Kingdom and France, three nations that now capture 40% of the international student market which is growing at a feverish pace. Since 2000, the number of students leaving home in the pursuit of higher education increased by 65%, totaling about 3.3 million students globally.

Clearly, international education has turned into an export house; a fertile ground where share among nations is constantly altering-the rise of Canada and China, the drop in US's singular hold, the UK inching towards the number 1 spot and smaller Asian nations like Singapore marching in for space.

Dynamic exchange replaces brain drain

China has made rapid strides in the unlikely field of higher education and is attracting several thousand foreign students every year.

Speaking of the rise of the Asian region, Rajika Bhandari, Raisa Belyavina and Robert Gutierrez in their work, 'Student Mobility and the Internationalization of Higher Education', note, "While this has resulted in a somewhat smaller market share for top host countries, it is nonetheless a positive development as it has brought more countries into the field of international education and has changed the relationship between sending and receiving countries from a unidirectional 'brain drain' type of mobility to one of dynamic, mutual exchange."

The trio feels the journey from being a nation which sees its scholars leave the shores for greener academic pastures to becoming a magnet for students from around the world, is a long one, fraught with challenges..."