Tanzania–China University Partnerships Reveal a New Logic of South–South Cooperation

When five Tanzanian universities opened their planning documents, curriculum committees, and partnership agreements to researchers, what emerged was not the familiar story of one-way Chinese influence or African dependency. Instead, a new study published in the journal Higher Education shows that these institutions actively negotiate, adapt, and embed their collaborations with Chinese partners into their own institutional strategies — a finding that challenges how scholars and policymakers have long understood cooperation between countries of the Global South.

The study, conducted by Hamisi Mshamu Likoko and Rukia Ally Himu of Zhejiang Normal University and the Muslim University of Morogoro, together with Minxiang Wu of Jilin University of Foreign Language, examined how Tanzanian universities organize partnerships with Chinese institutions across governance, research, curriculum development, and capacity building. Drawing on a comparative multi-site qualitative case study, the researchers traced how Chinese language programs, scholarship schemes, research cooperation, academic exchanges, and institutional agreements move from informal initiatives into the formal structures of university planning.

For decades, research on the internationalization of higher education has been dominated by two frameworks: mobility-oriented models that track students and staff crossing borders, and North–South perspectives that frame partnerships as flows of resources from wealthy to developing nations. Both lenses, the authors argue, fail to capture what is actually happening in South–South collaboration. When African universities partner with Chinese counterparts, they are neither passive recipients of aid nor mere instruments of another country’s soft power. They are strategic actors negotiating terms under conditions of unequal resources.

To explain this dynamic, the study introduces a new conceptual lens: asymmetrical interdependence. The term describes relationships characterized simultaneously by unequal resources, reciprocal interests, negotiated governance, and constrained institutional agency. In practice, this means Tanzanian universities depend on Chinese funding, expertise, and infrastructure, but Chinese institutions also depend on African partners to advance their own academic and diplomatic goals. Neither side fully controls the relationship, and both must continually negotiate its terms.

The empirical picture that emerges from the five case universities is one of active institutional agency operating within real constraints. Tanzanian universities did not simply accept externally supported initiatives as delivered. Instead, they aligned Chinese-funded language programs with their own quality assurance procedures, adapted scholarship schemes to fit graduate development priorities, and shaped research cooperation around local capacity-building needs. Confucius Institutes, joint degree programs, and faculty exchanges were filtered through existing organizational routines, committee structures, and strategic plans before becoming part of institutional life.

This process of institutionalization, the study finds, is neither linear nor uniform. Different universities embedded the same types of Chinese partnerships in strikingly different ways, depending on their leadership, mission, existing internationalization strategies, and organizational capacity. Some institutions treated language programs as standalone cultural offerings; others integrated them into degree curricula and research agendas. The variation suggests that partnership outcomes depend less on the terms set by the stronger partner and more on how the weaker partner’s internal structures absorb, reshape, and redirect external initiatives.

The findings carry particular weight at a moment when China’s footprint in African higher education is expanding rapidly. Chinese government scholarships, university-to-university agreements, and language programs have grown across the continent, prompting debate about whether these arrangements represent neo-colonial influence, mutually beneficial cooperation, or something in between. The Tanzanian case suggests that this binary framing misses the most important variable: the strategies of African institutions themselves. Dependency theory captures the resource asymmetries, and soft-power analysis captures China’s motivations, but neither explains why Tanzanian universities sometimes succeed in bending partnerships to their own priorities.

By bringing together research on internationalization, institutional transformation, and South–South collaboration, the study offers a framework that links governance arrangements, institutional agency, negotiation processes, and reciprocal benefits. This framework has implications well beyond Tanzania. Universities across Africa, Latin America, and Asia increasingly find themselves negotiating with partners from wealthier nations — including China, but also traditional Western donors — under conditions where resources are unequal but interests overlap. The concept of asymmetrical interdependence gives scholars and administrators a vocabulary for describing these relationships without reducing them to charity or exploitation.

For policymakers, the message is that sustainable South–South partnerships require more than funding flows. They require governance structures that allow the less-resourced partner to shape the terms of collaboration, quality assurance systems that can absorb external initiatives without losing local relevance, and long-term institutional planning that treats international partnerships as strategic assets rather than opportunistic windfalls. Where these conditions exist, the study suggests, partnerships can reshape institutional strategies, governance arrangements, and patterns of knowledge production in ways that benefit both sides.

The research also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that foregrounds African institutional agency within unequal global relationships. Rather than portraying African universities as passive objects of external influence, the study documents how they negotiate, adapt, and sometimes resist — embedding foreign partnerships into local contexts on their own terms. As South–South academic collaboration continues to expand worldwide, understanding this agency may prove essential to building partnerships that are genuinely reciprocal rather than merely asymmetrical in new ways.

Subject of Research: South–South higher education partnerships and institutional agency in Tanzania–China academic collaboration

Article Title: From cultural exchange to institutional strategy: reconceptualizing South–South higher education partnerships through the case of Tanzania–China academic collaboration

Article References: Likoko, H. M., Himu, R. A., & Wu, M. (2026). From cultural exchange to institutional strategy: reconceptualizing South–South higher education partnerships through the case of Tanzania–China academic collaboration. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01795-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01795-y

Keywords: higher education, South–South cooperation, Tanzania, China, internationalization, institutional strategy, asymmetrical interdependence, African universities, cultural, exchange, institutional, strategy