Has the coastal higher education backwater quietly staged a comeback?

According to Hainan Daily, the 2026 opening ceremony of Hainan Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (hereinafter referred to as Hainan Bielefeld UAS) was recently held at its permanent campus in Yangpu, Danzhou. Provincial Governor Liu Xiaoming attended the ceremony and delivered a speech.

Liu Xiaoming stated that Hainan Bielefeld UAS is a landmark achievement of Hainan's efforts to expand opening-up in the education sector and deepen Sino-German education cooperation. Giving full play to the advantages of Sino-German education resources, the university has innovated the "practice-embedded" talent training model, which precisely aligns talent cultivation with the industrial development needs of Hainan, explored a new path for the innovative development of Hainan's international education, and made positive contributions to cultivating international applied talents.

He also noted that he hopes the university will continuously improve its school-running capacity, become a prominent educational calling card and an incubation base for international talents of Hainan Free Trade Port, and cultivate more high-caliber talents with international competitiveness for the construction of Hainan Free Trade Port.

What makes this university so special that the provincial governor attended its opening ceremony?

Public information shows that the German Bielefeld UAS is the leading public university in Germany that first launched "practice-embedded applied higher education", and it mainly serves the industrial intelligent manufacturing cluster.

In August 2020, Hainan signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the German Bielefeld UAS, which was approved for establishment in May 2023 and started enrollment and operation in September the same year.

According to the agreement, the university will run independently in Hainan, offer bachelor's and master's degree programs, and boost the construction of Hainan Free Trade Port as well as the development of German-funded enterprises in China.

Hainan Bielefeld UAS has also become the first overseas university independently-run education project in the Chinese mainland. Compared with the existing Sino-foreign cooperative education model, it has great differences in aspects such as school-running entity, education level and university governance.

Against this important background, Hainan, which is traditionally perceived as a region with scarce higher education resources, is now seeing a boom in the introduction of overseas and domestic universities.

In 2019, as the strategic deployment of the Free Trade Port advanced, the national authorities first put forward the initiative to support Hainan in building an international education innovation island.

In 2020, the *Overall Plan for the Construction of Hainan Free Trade Port* issued by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council further clarified that "high-level overseas universities and vocational colleges specializing in science, engineering, agriculture and medicine are allowed to run independent schools in Hainan Free Trade Port and establish international schools".

In 2023, the *Interim Provisions on the Administration of Schools Run by Overseas Higher Education Institutions in Hainan Free Trade Port*, jointly issued by the Ministry of Education and the People's Government of Hainan Province, systematically designed the basic rules for overseas higher education institutions to run schools in Hainan Free Trade Port.

In addition to Hainan Bielefeld UAS, Hainan Les Roches University of Tourism was also approved for establishment and started enrollment in 2025, becoming the second independently-run overseas university introduced by Hainan Free Trade Port.

In terms of discipline and specialty setting, both universities are precisely aligned with the industrial development needs of Hainan Free Trade Port ——

Hainan Bielefeld UAS focuses on the fields of engineering, economics and management, covering industrial directions such as high-end manufacturing, digital economy and modern logistics; Hainan Les Roches University of Tourism focuses on the tourism service industry, which highly matches the construction needs of Hainan International Tourism and Consumption Center.

In addition, Hainan has also adopted methods such as setting up research institutes and Sino-foreign cooperative education to attract well-known domestic and foreign universities to gather at an accelerated pace, so as to quickly fill the gap of local high-end scientific and educational resources.

At present, many "Double First-Class" universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Ocean University of China have already deployed in Hainan. The number of universities in Hainan has increased from 21 in 2020 to 28 in 2025, and the number of enrolled students in the same period has increased from 240,500 to 348,600.

Projects including Hainan Moscow Power Engineering University and Hainan Berlin University of Science and Technology (tentative name) are also under advancement.

According to the 15th Five-Year Plan of Hainan, the province will continue to introduce high-level domestic and overseas universities to run schools in Hainan, and strive to make new breakthroughs in introducing top overseas universities to run schools in Hainan. The scale of higher education will be expanded steadily, and the total number of enrolled higher education students across the province will reach 430,000 by 2030.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "City Evolution", written by Liu Yanmei, and authorized for release by 36Kr.