Internationalization of China’s E-Commerce Higher Education: A Review between 2001 and 2019

The purpose of this chapter is to review the development of China’s higher education in electronic commerce (e-commerce) and explore the requirements of the internationalization of China’s e-commerce higher education. The Benefit-Driving Model (BDM) was adopted to explain the reasons for the internationalization of China’s e-commerce higher education. The literature review spans 20 years from 2001 when the first 13 e-commerce programs were offered from China’s 597 universities. By 2019, 328 e-commerce programs were offered by 831 universities. There is a sustainable growth from 2001 (2.17%, 13 of 597) to 2019 (39.47%, 328 of 831). Currently, six universities offer two e-commerce programs with different majors. Eight universities established specialized e-commerce schools. There are also six jointly founded or cooperative e-commerce programs run in China with overseas universities. This research may be valuable for any international organization interested in collaboration with China’s e-commerce higher education. A limitation is that this research focuses only on bachelors of e-commerce programs. Further research will explore factors for success in jointly founded e-commerce programs with China’s e-commerce educators.


Introduction
In the past 40 years, China's higher education has undergone the transition from elite focused education to popular and mass education. In 2019, the number of students enrolled in China's higher institutions was 8.2 million, and the enrollment rate was 79.53% [1]. Students enrolled in the bachelor program of China's universities were 4.22 million, while the enrollment rate was 43.3% [2]. It is estimated that the enrollment rate of higher education will reach over 60% by 2035 [3]. Comparing the number of students enrolled (0.27 million) and the enrollment rate (5%) in 1977 [4], this is a remarkable growth in the development of China's higher education.
Since the Internet started to become popular with the public in 1994, the electronic commerce (e-commerce) market has evolved from a simple counterpart of brick and mortar retail to a shopping ecosystem; when looking at the e-commerce landscape, a relatively mature market with established players and a clear set of rules can be seen [5]. Among them, China's e-commerce market is expected to grow for students to accept overseas higher education in China, but opening an educational market can also attract overseas students to study in China. Many international cooperative programs and several cooperative universities are operating in China. This is an explicit trend that China has increasingly become one of the international education providers.
China has undergone a transition from a one-way education outflow to a twoway student exchange market. The number of Chinese students studying abroad in 2018 was over 662,100 [13,14]. At the same time, the number of overseas students from 196 countries studying in China had increased to more than 492,200 including 258,122 studying at China's universities [14]. In 1950, there were only 33 foreign students from Eastern European countries studying in China [15].

The third driver is financial constraint
The driver of financial constraint provides an opportunity for international higher education providers to joint-found or cooperate international programs in China. Cooperative programs may reduce the costs of moving overseas. Expensive tuition fees prevent many Chinese students from studying overseas. Cooperative programs provide the opportunity for those students who wish to access the advanced educational resources offered by overseas higher educational institutions. The students just pay about $5000 per year for enrolled in such joint-founded or cooperated programs in China [16]. It saves approximately 70% of tuition fees compared to studying overseas.   [20]; Data in 2016-2019 from MOE [3,21,22] has been involved in e-commerce programs since the beginning of the twenty-first century [20].

Run with different majors
By September 2019, 831 universities had been established in China and 328 universities (39.47%, 328 of 831) offered e-commerce programs. This is a sustainable growth since 2001 (2.17%, 13 of 597) (see Figure 2). They are currently provided by 19  Agriculture and Forestry; International; Science, Technology and Art; Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Arts, History, and Law; Humanities; and Big Data Engineering (see Table 1).  Table 1).

Two e-commerce programs offered within the same university
Six universities offer two e-commerce programs with different majors by different schools within the same university (see Table 2). These specialization majors in e-commerce include Marketing Management, Computer Science, MIS, Logistics Management, and Law, which are offered by the schools of Business Administration, Business and Management, Management, Logistics and E-commerce, IT and Security, IS, Computer and Information Science, Applied Technology, and Law.  Table 3.

Internationalization of China's e-commerce higher education
The University of Nottingham, UK, in partnership with Zhejiang Wanli University, China, launched the first overseas joint-founded universitythe University of Nottingham, Ningbo China in Autumn 2004 in China [43]. Many countries have since then exported their advanced higher education programs to China. It is predicted that the coverage of cooperative educational programs is likely to continue to increase substantially.
The first joint-founded e-commerce programs run in 2004. Clearly, China's e-commerce higher education took steps to keep up with the internationalization of education, while China is embracing the world's economy and markets since entering the twenty-first century. In the internationalization's review of China's e-commerce programs, six joint-founded or cooperative e-commerce programs are run in China with overseas universities (see Table 4). Beijing

Suggestions for the development of China's e-commerce programs
For the better development of China's e-commerce programs further, the following four suggestions will be provided and discussed.

Learning curriculum from international experience
Although there are 328 e-commerce programs run in 2019, there are only six joint-founded or cooperative e-commerce programs run with overseas universities. Table 5 shows the international pioneers in e-commerce education [20]. China's e-commerce educators could learn the experience of curriculum development from these international pioneers.

Integrating e-commerce courses into postgraduate programs
CEO and senior staff IT/e-commerce/e-commerce marketing knowledge play critical roles for SMEs successfully in adopting e-commerce [51]. If the decisionmaker is knowledgeable about the issues and reliability problems on the Internet, he/she is likely to make a more informed decision about e-commerce adoption [52]. The higher the managers' knowledge of e-commerce, the higher the probability of the acceptance of e-commerce [52]. Senior business management knowledge is highly relevant to e-commerce success.

Developing teaching materials based on industry requirements
Although many real business cases have been discussed, teaching materials still lag the business and industry requirements. Although some China's universities have established the number of joint programs with industries, China's e-commerce education needs improvement in business practices, industry requirements, and industry involvement [20]. Innovative technologies have not yet been introduced into e-commerce education, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). Apple has developed ARKit as its own Augmented Reality platform for iOS, and Google has developed ARCore as its own Augmented Reality platform for Android [53]. The emerging innovative technology of VR, AR, and MR may be widely used for developing immersive e-commerce systems and enhancing customer online experience. It should be encouraged to adopt the real industry project into teaching materials and study assessments.

Offering specialization major in cross-border e-commerce
Despite a slowing Chinese economy, a shift in purchasing power from the U.S. and Europe to China and Southeast Asia has begun [5]. China's cross-border retail e-commerce sales are projected by eMarketer to reach $245 billion by 2020 [54]. China has announced another 24 cities as pilot zones for cross-border e-commerce to boost exports in December 2019 [55]. Cross-border e-commerce has thus expected as one of the dominating industry sectors and contributors to impetus the development of China's economy. There is only Zhejiang Foreign Studies University that offers a specialization major in Cross-border e-commerce.
universities. The purpose of this chapter is to review the development of e-commerce higher education in China and address the requirements of the internationalization of China's e-commerce higher education.
The Benefit-Driving Model (BDM) was adopted to address the reasons for the marketability of internationalization of China's e-commerce higher education. A 20-year review of China's e-commerce program found that there was sustainable growth from 2001 (2.17%, 13 of 597) to 2019 (39.47%, 328 of 831). Three hundred and twenty-eight e-commerce programs are run by 19 different schools. Six universities offer two e-commerce programs with different majors. Eight universities established specialized e-commerce schools. There are also six joint-founded or cooperative e-commerce programs run in China with overseas universities. There are opportunities to improve including adopting the learning curriculum from international experience, integrating the e-commerce courses into postgraduate programs, developing the teaching materials based on industry requirements, and offering the specialization major in cross-border e-commerce.
Although this research focused only on China's e-commerce higher education, the increasing demand will also affect international higher education providers. This research should be also of interest for any international education organizations attracted to China's e-commerce higher education.