China's first private university inaugurated

China's first private research university has been officially inaugurated in Zhejiang Province's Hangzhou city, official media here reported on Monday.

The university which was inaugurated on Saturday would push forward national higher-education reform, state-run Global Times quoted experts as saying.

China's educational institutions are mostly state-owned and governed by ministry of education. Autonomy for top educational institutions has been a long-standing demand of the Chinese academic community.

Five Nobel laureates, including physicist Chen-Ning Yang and more than 70 representatives of domestic and overseas universities attended the founding ceremony of Westlake University in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province.

Westlake has 68 research group leaders, 139 students under joint supervision at the top Chinese institutes of Fudan University and Zhejiang University and 159 key researchers, the report said.

Schools of natural science, engineering and life sciences are located on a campus that can hold 120 independent laboratories and 2,000 research fellows, it said.

Another campus to be completed in 2021 will accommodate 300 labs and 3,000 doctoral students, said the website.

The university aims to be an explorer of China's higher-education reform and a world leader in frontier technology, Westlake University President Shi Yigong, a biologist and former vice president of Tsinghua University in Beijing, said at the ceremony.

"We expect that the university will be a new research university that attracts world attention in 10 or 20 years, and advances human progress and world civilisation in its own way," Shi said.

In April Qian Yingyi, school board chairman, suggested the university president be granted maximum freedom in management, and teachers be given "maximum freedom in teaching."