The Proposed "PolyU Foshan Campus": Origins, Stasis, and Current State

30.7 billion, 3.07 billion, 6 billion RMB—three wildly divergent investment figures, all pointing to the same "campus" that to this day has no perimeter wall, no entrance gate, and not a single enrolled student. This is "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Foshan)": a proposed project that signed a framework agreement in 2019, was once written into Guangdong Province's key construction plans, yet has for the past six years repeatedly drawn the same response from the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau: "no construction plans at present." This article lays out each party's account in chronological order, without drawing conclusions.

This document belongs to the "PolyU WILD · 09 Internationalisation" module. For PolyU's core research footprint in the Greater Bay Area (Shenzhen Research Institute, Daya Bay, and the wider MTRI network), see the companion document mainland-and-gba.md; for Belt and Road collaborations, see mainland-and-gba-3.md.

⚠ This section deals with a frequently misunderstood topic: the name "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Foshan)" circulates in popular discourse and some encyclopedia entries, but after cross-checking multiple sources, this campus has never been built, has never enrolled students, and has been stalled for years.

# 1. Origins and Planning Narratives: 2019–2020

According to multiple reports, the origins of PolyU's education collaboration with Foshan are as follows:

• 2019: PolyU and the Foshan Municipal Government signed a framework cooperation agreement, proposing to establish a branch campus in Foshan.
• Early 2020: The project was reportedlylisted in Guangdong Province's 2020 key-construction preliminary preparatory projects^※; the Wikipedia entry, citing press reports, states the planned total investment at approximately RMB 30.7 billion, with a campus floor area of about 2 million square metres (as cited from Foshan Daily, 10 January 2020, and Sing Tao Daily). If this figure is accurate, the scale would considerably exceed PolyU's existing Hung Hom campus.

⚠ The figures do not agree: the "RMB 30.7 billion" figure cited by the Wikipedia entry differs tenfold from the "approximately RMB 3.07 billion (about HK$3.43 billion)" repeated by some Hong Kong media (such as Bastille Post^※)—likely a difference in units or a transcription error across reports; a further 2023 claim by mainland-China finance self-media suggested a "turnaround" narrative with "total investment around RMB 6 billion" (as cited by a Sohu repost^※). All three figures are second-hand; this site cannot determine which is correct, and therefore presents them side by side without adopting any as definitive. This is also the main reason this article marks its reliability as "doubtful, with counter-evidence"—even the most basic scale of investment cannot be reconciled across accounts.

# 2. Stasis and Official Responses: 2022–2023

According to multiple reports, the project made little headway after signing, and the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau's public responses have been particularly blunt:

• According to Hong Kong media reports (May 2022), the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau responded that the two sides had "differences", that the designated land "has not been clearly earmarked as school construction land, and there are no construction plans at present" (as cited by Bastille Post^※). The report also noted that one of the three proposed land parcels originally held buildings for non-educational purposes, raising land-use issues—in other words, even the land question had not been sorted out.
• According to the Wikipedia entry citing the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau's replies on the "People's Daily leadership message board" (May and November 2022): the two sides had not reached consensus on core educational matters such as campus site selection and enrolment scale, and with pandemic-related communication difficulties on top, "the project has made no substantive progress, and there are no construction plans at this stage" (as cited by the Wikipedia entry^※).
• May 2023: According to Jiemian News, PolyU's current President said in an interview that after signing the 2019 framework agreement with Foshan, the project was "shelved for the time being due to factors such as the pandemic and changes in leadership, but the direction has not changed" (as cited by Jiemian News^※). In the same interview, the President also mentioned that PolyU "hopes to establish a second campus in the (Hong Kong) Northern Metropolis", intending to relocate more than 2,000 doctoral students and over 2,000 R&D personnel there—a separate idea within Hong Kong, unrelated to the Foshan project and not to be conflated with it.

The gap between the two official narratives is worth noting: the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau stresses "land undesignated, no construction plans", while PolyU's leadership stresses "direction unchanged, temporarily shelved"—one leans toward "the deal basically fell through", the other toward "still waiting for the right moment". The two are not mutually contradictory, but the emphases differ markedly.

# 3. The "Turnaround" Rumour and the Naming Question: 2023

• In the second half of 2023, several mainland-China finance self-media outlets ran stories along the lines of "Foshan is getting a new university—there may still be a turnaround for bringing in Hong Kong PolyU" (as cited by a Sohu repost^※), which counts as folk/self-media accounts, with no official confirmation; this site records them only as leads.
• The name "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Foshan)" does appear in some encyclopedia entries and early planning documents, but as of this site's compilation (June 2026), the campus has no independent legal-person status, no campus, and no enrolment record, setting it apart from CUHK (Shenzhen) and HKUST (Guangzhou), which are actually operating. A name preceding the campus is a common phenomenon in mainland China's university-establishment pipeline—the signboard goes up before the entity exists.

# 4. Hong Kong Universities Operating in the Greater Bay Area: Four Models with Independent Legal-Person Status, PolyU Not Among Them

To judge whether the stalling of the "PolyU Foshan campus" is anomalous, a yardstick is needed—how many Hong Kong universities in the Greater Bay Area have actually turned their mainland campuses into entities with independent legal-person status that can award their own degrees, and how long did that take.

According to the institution list published by the Ministry of Education's Sino-Foreign Cooperative Education Supervision and Information Platform^※, as of April 2024 only three Mainland–Hong Kong cooperative institutions had been approved with "independent legal-person status": Beijing Normal University – Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (2005), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (2014), and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) (2022). On 16 April 2024, the Ministry of Education approved a fourth—City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan)—the second new addition in a decade. The four institutions compare as follows:

This table makes the situation of the "PolyU Foshan campus" starkly clear: from signing to formal Ministry of Education approval of "independent legal-person status", CUHK (Shenzhen), HKUST (Guangzhou) and CityU (Dongguan) all completed the journey, with CityU (Dongguan) going from approval in April 2024 to over 1,400 enrolled students by 2025—hardly slow; while the PolyU Foshan project signed its framework agreement in 2019 and six years later even the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau publicly says "no construction plans at present"—it has not even reached the threshold for approval, let alone enrolment.

Why is the threshold so high? Under relevant Ministry of Education regulations, Mainland–Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan cooperative education programmes at undergraduate level and above must be reviewed by the provincial education department before being submitted to the Ministry of Education for approval; the overseas partner must provide certification of "no record of illegal or non-compliant operation in the past five years" along with quality-accreditation materials; and to obtain "independent legal-person status" (i.e. the right to award degree certificates independently of the parent university), scrutiny is even stricter, typically also involving land allocation, fiscal support and site stability on the part of the local government (as per the Ministry of Education's Education涉外监管 Information Network^※). The PolyU Foshan project is stuck at "no consensus on core issues such as site selection and enrolment scale" (see Section 2)—precisely the earliest stage of the approval chain. With the provincial preconditions for submission to the Ministry unmet, talk of "independent legal-person status" is moot.

According to an overview article reposted by the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, HKU, CUHK, HKBU and HKUST have all been expanding northward in mainland China in recent years, but their paths are far from uniform: some take the independent legal-person cooperative university route (e.g. HKUST Guangzhou), some non-independent teaching centres or joint research institutions (e.g. laboratories and colleges co-built with mainland universities), and some remain at the intention stage only (as cited by the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office repost^※). This shows that "moving north to run education" has multiple parallel tracks, and the "independent legal-person undergraduate campus" is merely the highest-threshold, longest-cycle one—PolyU in Foshan happened to pick the hardest road, while what PolyU has actually made work in Foshan (the joint research centre covered in Section 6) runs on a much lower-threshold track.

# 5. Foshan Did Not Wait: The Alternative "Graduate Innovation College" Route

While the PolyU Foshan campus stalled, Foshan was not idle—it simply switched to a more feasible route.

In 2023, the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau stated publicly that, building on the University of Science and Technology Beijing Shunde Innovation College and Northeastern University Foshan Graduate Innovation College, and in light of fiscal conditions, it would "strive to bring in multiple resources and actively promote the landing of more higher-education resources in Foshan" (as cited by a NetEase repost^※, August 2023). These two colleges deserve a closer look, because they represent a second model of importing higher education entirely different from the independent legal-person campus:

• University of Science and Technology Beijing Shunde Innovation College: co-built by USTB with the Foshan Municipal Government and the Shunde District Government, positioned as a graduate-training and industry-university-research innovation base; no undergraduate admissions, no independent legal-person status required.
• Northeastern University Foshan Graduate Innovation College: after moving into Foshan, it focuses on talent recruitment, joint graduate training, university-industry collaboration and technology transfer around Foshan's pillar industries—equipment manufacturing, automotive and new energy, electronic information, intelligent manufacturing and robotics, and new materials—again a postgraduate-level, non-independent legal-person model.

The common thread of this route: no Ministry of Education approval of independent legal-person status required, no undergraduate enrolment quotas involved, short landing time—in essence much closer to the "joint research centre" model PolyU has already made work in Foshan (see Section 6) than to the "Foshan campus" vision that has stalled for six years. In other words, Foshan has actually submitted two answer sheets on importing higher-education resources—the graduate innovation colleges/joint research centres have "turned in their papers", while the independent legal-person undergraduate campus "remains blank"—and the PolyU Foshan project happens to be stuck in that second answer sheet.

Incidentally, another strand of Foshan's local higher education has also been steadily expanding: Foshan University of Science and Technology was recently renamed "Foshan University", with an undergraduate intake plan of 5,085 for 2026, and a new Sino-foreign cooperative institution—the "Foshan University Shannon School of Intelligent Manufacturing", partnered with Ireland's Technological University of the Shannon (TUS)—launched the same year (as cited by a report on Foshan University's 2026 admission brochure^※). This means Foshan already has an actual operating precedent on the "Sino-foreign cooperative education" track—except the partner is an Irish university and the model is college-level rather than an independent legal-person campus, not on the same scale as the PolyU Foshan vision. But it is enough to show that Foshan is no stranger to attracting higher-education resources—it is the specific "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Foshan)" project that has never cleared the initial site-selection-and-consensus hurdle in six years.

# 6. The Difference from "Foshan Research Collaboration": 2025–2026

One distinction must be made explicitly: PolyU and Foshan do have ongoing cooperation, but it is research/industry-university joint centres, not a degree-awarding campus. Interestingly, this strand has been advancing at remarkable speed—in stark contrast to the six-year deadlock over the campus.

• December 2025: PolyU signed a cooperation framework agreement^※ in Foshan with a technology company under the Foshan Transportation Group, covering collaboration on transportation materials, structures, and technologies.
• 7 February 2026: a little over two months after signing, the two sides held a plaque-unveiling ceremony on the PolyU campus, formally establishing the Joint Research Centre for Technology and Innovation^※, running seven collaborative projects (covering hybrid structural components, digital-twin bridge monitoring, pavement defect detection, advanced pavement materials, soil remediation, concrete testing methods, and more), attended by PolyU's President, Deputy President and Provost for Research and Innovation, and the Dean of the Faculty of Construction and Environment, together with representatives from the Foshan Transportation side.

From signing to plaque-unveiling took just two months—a striking speed contrast with a campus project that has dragged on for six years with still "no construction plans". This also corroborates the judgment at the end of Section 1 and the comparisons in Sections 4 and 5: what PolyU is genuinely good at—and genuinely able to move forward with—in mainland China is technology-transfer projects and postgraduate-level industry-university-research collaboration, not degree-awarding campuses requiring Ministry of Education approval of independent legal-person status.

That is: the "Foshan campus (education)" and the "Foshan Joint Research Centre (research)" are two different things. The former remains stalled/never built to date; the latter was actually established in 2026, is an industry-university research collaboration, and awards no degrees. This site lists them separately to avoid conflation.

# 7. Summary (No Conclusion)

Pulling together the six sections above, the known information can be sorted into three categories:

• Factually confirmable: PolyU and Foshan signed a framework agreement on running a campus in 2019; the project was once included in Guangdong Province's plans; it has since been stalled for years by site/scale disagreements, the pandemic, leadership changes, and other factors; officials (the Foshan Municipal Education Bureau) have repeatedly responded "no construction plans at present"; PolyU's leadership says "the direction is unchanged"; as of April 2024, four Hong Kong universities' mainland campuses in the Greater Bay Area had received "independent legal-person status" from the Ministry of Education, and PolyU Foshan was not among them; Foshan has partly filled its higher-education import needs through the graduate innovation college model (USTB Shunde, Northeastern University Foshan).
• Unconfirmable/doubtful: the investment figure (RMB 30.7 billion / 3.07 billion / 6 billion, three versions coexisting), whether the project will ultimately be revived, and the timeline.
• A clear distinction: the 2025–2026 "Foshan Transportation Joint Research Centre" is a research collaboration, not a degree-awarding campus; it proceeds at an entirely different speed and requires no Ministry of Education independent legal-person approval.

To this day, whether and when the "PolyU Foshan campus" will materialise remains undetermined. If it is placed against PolyU's overall mainland layout (see Section 9 of mainland-and-gba.md) and then overlaid with the four-institution comparison in Section 4, the picture is hardly surprising: PolyU has never actually operated an independent degree-awarding campus in mainland China, the Ministry of Education's bar for "independent legal-person status" is far higher than a piece of framework agreement paper, and if Foshan is to become the exception, the hurdles to be cleared are far higher than outsiders initially imagined.