Fees favour for top Chinese scholars

BEIJING - Top Chinese graduates will be offered the chance to study for doctorates in New Zealand and pay domestic-level fees.

Prime Minister Helen Clark outlined a new scholarship programme in Beijing yesterday as she wrapped up her visit to China.

The scheme would begin next January 1 and would enable students from other countries such as China to achieve a 90 per cent saving by paying domestic fees instead of current international fees.

The partners of PhD students will be able to work in New Zealand and their children attend school also without paying international fees.

Talking up New Zealand's education industry, she pointed out this small country had produced three people who had won the Nobel Prize.

"We hope New Zealand will become known in China as a place to come to earn a top-class world-quality PhD," she said.

New Zealand's foreign exchange earnings from Chinese students took a pounding after a peak in the early 2000s. But New Zealand still has more than 23,000 Chinese students at its language institutes, secondary schools and universities.

To nods of approval by Chinese Education Minister Zhou Ji, Helen Clark said her Government was keen to expand education links with China, including joint research.

She also launched a network to link Chinese alumni from New Zealand education institutions.

New Zealand's creative industries will also be boosted if a proposal to negotiate a cultural agreement with China gets off the ground.

At CCTV's Beijing headquarters yesterday, Helen Clark promoted opportunities for companies from the two countries to work together to create products that can be sold to the world.

Officials have singled out China as a prime market for flagship New Zealand companies such as Natural History NZ and Weta Workshop. Weta created the special effects for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For some Chinese, the images and phenomenal commercial success of the trilogy stimulated them to think about New Zealand for the first time, a briefing paper noted.

China's second-ranked leader, Wu Bangguo, visited Weta's workshops in Wellington last week.

The Natural History Unit scooped the Nature and Environment category at the 2004 Prestigious Beijing International Science Film Festival and has had several successful co-productions with Chinese companies.

Annual PhD fees (University of Auckland):
* Domestic $3228
* International $18,810