Funds sought for China studies centre
Oxford is appealing for at least GBP45 million (HK$556 million) in donations to house, equip and endow a new multi-disciplinary China centre announced in May.
The centre will bring together the university's 40 existing China experts from a wide range of academic divisions and draw on its experience of conducting research on the mainland spanning more than 30 years.
It will create research clusters across the fields of politics, the arts, economics, anthropology, history, and environmental and public health.
Andrew Dilnot, principal of St Hugh's College, which has a site for the centre in its grounds, said: 'We would like to double the scale of our activity. We want more academics, more students and more scholarships.
'And we also want to put up a building that can act as a focus for all these activities. We hope we can start building in 2010 so that by 2011 we will have the new building in place.
'We need about GBP50 million to run this programme - GBP20 million for the new building and GBP30 million in new posts and scholarships, collaborative work and exchanges.
'We hope that by going down this road, Oxford will solidify the position which we already have as arguably the most significant centre in Europe working on China.'
The University of Oxford China Centre would be built close to the Radcliffe Observatory, which is the focus of an entirely new campus. The centre would include language labs, study rooms for academics and graduate students, an independent study area, lecture theatres, conference facilities and accommodation for visiting scholars.
Mr Dilnot said fund-raising for the centre began in September and more than GBP9.5 million had been pledged, with the two largest individual gifts coming from the UK and Hong Kong.
'Whether we find the unique donor that we probably need for the building this year, next year or the year after, it won't affect the passion with which the university continues to work in this area,' he said.
China expert and pro-vice-chancellor Dame Jessica Rawson said Oxford aimed to become the leading China studies centre in the west.
'Your institutions in China are always going to be ahead - but we bring something else to the table,' she said. 'We have the China enterprise embedded in a university that is famous for its philosophy, its astronomy and its politics and economics.
'I think we are outperforming Harvard, Yale and Princeton at the moment. That is quite a triumph because we don't have the funds they have - but we have the atmosphere, the tradition and the commitment. Whether we can keep it up is another matter.'
It would cost GBP3.5 million to endow one chair professorship and between GBP500,000 and GBP750,000 to set up a student scholarship lasting 25 years, she added.
