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Gary Cheung

A holiday resort in Shenzhen is being redeveloped as a private university to accommodate 3,000 students, including hundreds from Hong Kong.

Guangdong Jianhua University will begin classes for 400 mainland students on the site of the Shiyanhu Holiday Resort in the middle of next month.

There are plans to enrol 400 Hong Kong students in the 2003-2004 academic year.

University president Wu Zewei said the Shenzhen Municipal Government had approved the university's purchase of the resort in Baoan from a state-owned company, for 180 million yuan (HK$170 million).

The 20-year-old resort, popular in the 1980s with Hong Kong visitors, occupies more than 100 hectares.

The new university will offer diploma programmes in translation, computer studies, hotel management and foreign enterprise management.

'We will keep running tourist facilities and parts of hotels within the resort complex to provide training for students who specialise in hotel management,' Mr Wu said.

The annual tuition fees for a mainland student are set at 10,000 yuan, plus a boarding fee of 1,500 yuan a month.

Mr Wu said the fees for Hong Kong students would be 'slightly higher'.

The university is sponsored by a Guangdong enterprise which also set up the School for Hong Kong Children in Guangdong in Baoan - the first of its kind on the mainland - in 1997.

The school, which has about 350 Hong Kong students enrolled and adopts the Hong Kong curriculum, is located more than an hour's drive from the Lowu checkpoint.

Mr Wu said students graduating from the school were likely to be given preference for places at his university.

'These students still have to sit the Higher Education Enrolment Examination on the mainland but they can enter our university with relatively lower scores,' he said.

Dr Cheung Kwok-wah, associate dean of education at the University of Hong Kong, said that each year there were tens of thousands of Hong Kong students whose results in public exams were inadequate to enter local universities.

Of the 36,213 Hong Kong students who sat this year's A-level exam, 18,007 met the minimum standard for degree programmes. There are 14,500 undergraduate places in the territory.

Lee Siu-tin, principal of the School of Hong Kong Children in Guangdong, said that although qualifications from mainland universities were not yet recognised in Hong Kong, they were a valuable asset for those intending to seek jobs on the mainland.



University to open on Shenzhen resort site