A Chinese auto company said on Sunday it had adopted Tai Shan, a much-loved panda that has just arrived in China from its birthplace in the United States, in a US$60,000 (S$85,308) corporate deal.

The animal arrived in southwestern Sichuan province on Friday from Washington – where its departure nearly five years after it was born at the National Zoo drew tears from the crowds – to join China’s panda-breeding programme.

Cao Guodong, deputy general manager of the Sichuan Auto Industry Group, said the firm, which makes hybrid cars, had decided to adopt Tai Shan to initiate an ‘environmental protection philosophy’ for the company. He denied the deal was for advertising purposes, but added the company would organise activities centered around Tai Shan at its businesses around China at key moments, such as the panda’s birthday.

‘Four hundred thousand yuan (60,000 dollars) is the basic fee, but that doesn’t include money we might donate in the future,’ he said.

Hen Yi, a spokesman for the Wolong panda base in Sichuan’s Bifengxia, where Tai Shan is currently staying, told AFP the panda would not be disrupted by the deal and would never be moved from its feeding centre.

Meanwhile, unaware of the excitement, Tai Shan, a male panda, was adapting well to life at the centre, but still had to get accustomed to its new Chinese handler, Mr Hen said. ‘He doesn’t understand either Chinese or English, but he needs to get familiar with the voice of his new handler,’ he said.

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China’s top universities could soon rival Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League, the president of Yale University has warned.

Professor Richard Levin, speaking to the Guardian on a trip to the UK, said Chinese institutions would rank in the world’s top 10 universities in 25 years’ time, squeezing out some of the west’s elite campuses.

At the moment, British universities dominate the top 10 rankings, with Cambridge coming second to Harvard, University College London fourth and Oxford and Imperial College London joint fifth. The rest of the top 15 are US universities. China’s highest-ranking institution is Tsinghua, at 49.

But the Chinese government now spends billions of yuan – at least 1.5% of its gross domestic product – on higher education with the aim of propelling its best institutions, such as the universities of Tsinghua and Peking, into the top slots, Levin said.

“In 25 years, only a generation’s time, these universities could rival the Ivy League,” said Levin, the Ivy League’s longest-tenured president. He was speaking before giving a lecture on the rise of Asia’s universities to the Royal Society in London on Monday evening.

Levin said: “China and India … seek to expand the capacity of their systems of higher education … and aspire simultaneously to create a limited number of world-class universities to take their places among the best. This is an audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make it feasible. It has built the largest higher education sector in the world in merely a decade.”

China has more than doubled the number of its higher education institutions in the last decade from 1,022 to 2,263. More than 5 million Chinese students enrol on degree courses now, compared to 1 million in 1997.

Chinese scholars are increasingly leaving their posts in US and UK universities to return home, Levin said.

The growth of Chinese higher education comes as English university leaders fear they may not be able to maintain their world-class reputation for higher education, with savage government cuts of 950m pounds over the next three years.

Commenting on the cuts, Levin said it would be “a shame if the British government didn’t recognise the status of Oxford and Cambridge as global leaders”.

He pointed out that it had taken centuries for Harvard and Yale to match Oxford and Cambridge. And while China had a large pool of talent to draw on, it was currently seen as less attractive to scholars from across the world than the US and the UK, he said. China’s universities lack “multidisciplinary breadth” and “the cultivation of critical thinking”.

Levin said: “I don’t see the rise of Asia’s universities as threatening. Competition in education is a positive sum game. Increasing the quality of education around the world translates into better informed and more productive citizens.”

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JIUZHAIGOU, CHINA — By noon, the tour buses that ply the length of this U-shaped limestone valley are packed tight. Elbows are up. People are pushing.

“Are you going to walk?” someone hollers.

“Don’t bump!” comes the reply.

It’s a common scene in any major Chinese city, but here in northern Sichuan Province, 10 hours by bus from Chengdu, the crowds are surrounded by karst peaks and turquoise pools, not high-rise buildings and freeways.

Each day, tens of thousands of Chinese tourists board buses to visit the pine forests and mock-ethnic villages of Jiuzhaigou, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Admission costs 320 renminbi, or $47. For 25 renminbi more, visitors can rent a bejeweled, Tibetan-inspired costume and have their pictures taken by a local.

These sightseers, clad in Gore-Tex and Gucci, are fueling a boom in China’s domestic travel sector. Spurred by a mix of middle-class money, government support and interest in rediscovering China, the market is beating predictions and bucking global trends.

While the industry lost ground in Europe and the United States, China’s tourism sector posted a 9 percent jump in revenue 2009, to 1.26 trillion renminbi, thanks to domestic demand.

In 2010, total tourism revenue is expected to rise 14 percent, totaling 1.44 trillion renminbi, according to figures released Jan. 24 in state media reports.

“There is clearly an upward trend, a huge upward trend,” said Nancy Cockerell, a policy adviser at the World Travel and Tourism Council. “For the next 10 years, China will be leading the way.”

Though Chinese people have been on the move for centuries — as explorers, migrants and traders — leisure travel is relatively new to the People’s Republic. The post-Mao era afforded little time for holidays, and for most, money was scarce. The state regulated travel between provinces, so would-be wanderers needed papers and permission, in addition to cash.

As China’s economy began to gain momentum in the 1990s, the travel industry benefited. The number of domestic trips jumped 54 percent from 1996 to 2006, according to figures released by the China National Tourism Administration.

Higher incomes have driven up leisure travel, but the government has helped, too. As average incomes climbed, the state eased travel restrictions and increased the number of mandatory public holidays to 11 to drive demand.

Since 1999, Chinese workers have enjoyed “golden weeks,” a set of mandatory national holidays. There are now two per year, one held in autumn and one in winter.

The purpose is to get people spending — a strategy that seems to be working. During the National Day Golden Week holidays from Oct. 1 to Oct. 8 last year, 19.6 million tourists visited Sichuan Province alone, generating 7.7 billion renminbi in revenue, according to state media.

Nationally, tourism revenue has been climbing for more than a decade, and more people than ever are traveling.

The National Tourism Administration said domestic tourists had made 1.9 billion trips in 2009, an increase of 11 percent over the previous year, and generated 1 trillion renminbi of revenue, up 15 percent from the previous year.

But Ms. Cockerell of the World Travel and Tourism Council said the sector still had room to grow.

“For China, two billion trips is small,” she said. “When they start traveling like Americans, the numbers will be phenomenal.”

The world’s largest travel Web site, Tripadvisor, shares her optimism. In October, it said it had purchased Kuxun.cn, a Chinese flight and hotel search engine, as part of plans to invest $50 million in China through 2011.

Peripheral industries stand to benefit as well. With the rise of mass tourism comes the development of what Tim Winter, editor of “Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism,” calls “travel culture.”

In China, travel culture means big money, he said: “People want the travel uniform; they want the gear.”

For sightseers who want more gear, the shops are ready to help. Visitors to the gift shop near the main cafeteria of the Jiuzhaigou National Park can purchase fox fur stoles (1,400 renminbi), faux fur hats (80 renminbi) or plastic back scratchers (30 renminbi).

Outside the park gates, rows of shops sell high-end travel equipment, including brand-name jackets, digital cameras and the latest in luggage.

Suitably attired, visitors to this once remote region can choose from dozens of hotels, including a Sheraton and an Intercontinental. At night, charter buses ferry guests to Tibetan shows, where, for about $25, they are treated to live music, dancing and food.

Leading the spending spree are China’s young urbanites. Overworked, wealthy and worldly, they have the means to travel and the desire to get away from city life.

“There are skyscrapers everywhere in Shanghai, but here there is natural landscape,” said Allen Zhang, a newlywed touring the park with his wife, Christine Xiong.

“Travel is a completely new lifestyle for us,” he added. “My father’s generation didn’t have the opportunity to travel.”

Mr. Zhang does, so he and Ms. Xiong flew to Sichuan to shoot their wedding pictures at Swan Lake, an algae-green pool famous for its glassy surface.

She stood by the water’s edge in a gauzy, white wedding gown; he beheld his bride through the lens of a tripod-mounted digital SLR.

They plan to travel every season, they said, and explore the country’s far reaches. “China is just a pretty, beautiful place,” Mr. Zhang said.

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