On the evening of January 29th, the fifth lecture of HUST CI-UFMG Online Camp: Contemporary China was held successfully. Prof. Guo Hui, from School of Education at HUST, was invited to give a lecture on “Higher Education Reform and Development of China in Recent 20 Years”. It was presided over by Dr. Huang Chao, Director of Office of Confucius Institute at HUST, Director of International Students' Office at HUST.

Cultivation of talents lays the groundwork for a country. Today, the key to win competition in overall national strength is to win talent competition. Therefore, education with its role and function of foundation, orientation and wholeness is becoming more and more prominent. Since 1999, in a fact that Chinese higher education has witnessed dramatic changes, how did Chinese higher education transfer from elitism to universalization? What crucial policies did Chinese government make for building world-class universities? How did China further reform undergraduate education? In Prof. Guo' s lecture, with a focus on scale and quality of higher education, she introduced the history and achievements of higher education reform and development of China in recent 20 years and shared various data and cases with Brazilian students.

Prof. Guo started the lecture with illustration of Chinese higher education system and pointed out the features of degree establishment in China. She introduced, in order to keep pace with the needs of the rapid social and economic development and serve the national innovation-driven development strategy, a comprehensive reform of higher education system has been carried out since the beginning of 21st century, which can be summarized as scale enlargement and quality improvement. Based on higher education development theory and data analysis, Prof. Guo expounds the higher education transformation in China. In 1999, the enrollment expansion policy was launched, which led to a remarkable increase in the amount of enrollment; in 2002, Chinese higher education entered the stage of massification; in 2019, the gross enrollment rate reached 51.6%, which indicated that China has stepped into the stage of universalization. On a par with scale enlargement, China attached importance to quality improvement. Since 1995, 211 Project, 985 Project and First-class universities and disciplines of the world have been introduced. Specifically, Prof. Guo described the cases about how HUST implemented high-impact education practices for Brazilian students. She drew conclusions that China' s higher education has become the largest system in the world, where the rise of high-level universities with world competitiveness in China strongly supported the national innovation-driven strategy, and constantly improving the quality of undergraduate education is the eternal pursuit of colleges and universities.

In Q&A, Prof. Guo answered in detail to Brazilian students' questions and encouraged them to visit representative Chinese universities in the future.