The Forum on Building up China’s Cultural Strength 2026, held in Shenzhen on May 21, called for deepening cultural-sector reforms to ignite cultural creativity. The forum’s ambition to “release and develop cultural productive forces” marks a significant moment in China’s national strategy — one that invites us to consider where, institutionally, these forces are most deeply generated.

Research universities demand attention here. They are not merely scientific institutions; they are among the most consequential cultural institutions any society possesses. They are where intellectual traditions meet, contest one another, and generate new frameworks for understanding. If cultural strength is the goal, the university is its deepest engine.

Chinese universities have played a significant role in global science and higher education. With priority funding for academic excellence and professional aspirations to enhance competence and impact, these universities spurred an inspirational movement of institutional transformation across many developing countries.

Chinese academics increasingly claim global leadership as their scientific progress sets new benchmarks in education and research, locally and regionally. Referencing Chinese ambitions and achievements has become a major thrust of political campaigns in G20 countries and beyond. Learning from China, as well as about China, has become increasingly important.

Hong Kong is playing a key role in advancing the standards of excellence in universities in the region and stimulating the pursuit of internationally significant knowledge production within China’s ambitious science and technology system. The enhanced mobility and exchange within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area have enhanced the diversity of epistemological approaches and trained a significant number of doctoral students for the highly productive academic profession in the country.

The Greater Bay Area is increasingly a harbinger of Belt and Road Initiative projects, and Hong Kong has been a strategic connector for top universities in Central Asia and the Middle East. As the world expects China to enhance its peacebuilding roles amid geopolitical tensions and crises, knowledge diplomacy, facilitated by top research universities, offers a powerful means for cross-cultural communication and learning.

The forum’s dedicated Greater Bay Area session on cultural integration and digital intelligence illuminated something the academic world has long understood intuitively: The Greater Bay Area’s distinctive power lies not in homogeneity but in the productive coexistence of different intellectual and cultural traditions within shared institutional spaces.

In Macao, Portuguese-style cobblestone roads blend with Guangdong vernacular architecture; the Na Tcha Temple stands near the Ruins of Saint Paul’s College. This architectural coexistence is a metaphor for what occurs at the level of ideas within Greater Bay Area universities — different knowledge systems generating creative friction and, from that friction, new understanding.

China has made particularly impressive advances in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, and Hong Kong has contributed significantly to fintech, biotechnology, life sciences, and smart city technologies.

China has been a global power for many centuries, with trade, manufacturing and the arts fascinating elites abroad with its creativity and originality. The 21st century has positioned China and its universities for global leadership in science and education, and opportunities for cross-border collaborations and discoveries are immense

Hong Kong’s academic health-science complex enjoys global prominence and contributes to advancing healthcare quality in the motherland and elsewhere. Moreover, leading Hong Kong universities are a core part of China’s global efforts to diversify research and discourse in the social sciences and humanities, building on the heritage of East-West collaborations and higher education.

The Confucian culture of continuous professional development draws on the best practices of competitors and collaborators alike, creating a dynamic, multicultural environment where international scholars find a home for their learning and opportunities to reassess their own philosophies and practices.

Academic freedom often emerges as a contentious aspect of Western thinking about collaborations with Chinese universities. The forum’s proceedings suggest a more productive framing. Participants articulated a model of cultural engagement that transcends both cultural hegemony and protectionism — a third way that acknowledges plurality without surrendering coherence. This resonates particularly powerfully in the academic domain.

One must understand the cultural and historical premises of a highly complex country like China to facilitate a common understanding of what might work regarding freedoms and what would not. This is not a retreat from principle; it is a recognition that principles themselves are enriched through cross-cultural deliberation — precisely the intellectual sophistication that Greater Bay Area universities embody.

Under the “one country, two systems” framework, the Chinese culture of higher learning and inquiry shows itself to be sophisticated. It challenges the concepts and interpretations of epistemological approaches that dominated global science and education in preceding decades, while simultaneously inviting mutual learning.

China has been a global power for many centuries, with trade, manufacturing and the arts fascinating elites abroad with its creativity and originality. The 21st century has positioned China and its universities for global leadership in science and education, and opportunities for cross-border collaborations and discoveries are immense.

Yet in these complex cross-cultural contexts, it is first of all mutual respect and responsibility that should be prioritized — a principle that the Shenzhen forum, in its very composition and ambition, affirms.

Anatoly Oleksiyenko and Naubahar Sharif are professors in the Department of Social Sciences and Policy Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.