Looking east: interest in chinese and american universities in russian-language wikipedia, 2016-2025

Abstract

Where do Russian-speaking readers look when they think about leading universities abroad? This study uses the number of views of Wikipedia articles as a measure of interest in five leading Chinese and five leading American universities, in Russian and, for comparison, in English, from 2016 to 2025. In Russian, views of the Chinese universities grew by 38% while views of the American universities fell by 29%, and the American lead narrowed from 21.4 to 11.0 times. Part of the American decline reflects the fall of Russian Wikipedia as a whole (−19%), and in English the American universities lost views mainly in 2025. The growth of the Chinese universities in Russian came after 2021: their views fell by 17% in 2016-2021, reaching their lowest level in 2020-2021, and rose by 65% in 2021-2025, a pattern not seen in English Wikipedia. Tsinghua University grew the most (+84%). The results are consistent with the author's suggestion that the change is linked to closer ties between Russia and China after 2022, but cannot show its cause.

Keywords: university choice, China, United States, Wikipedia page views, public attention, international students

References

1. Mestyán M., Yasseri T., Kertész J. Early prediction of movie box office success based on Wikipedia activity big data // PLoS ONE. 2013. Vol. 8, No. 8. e71226. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071226
2. Wikimedia Foundation. Pageviews API (REST v1, per-article and aggregate, user agent). https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/ (accessed 30.10.2026).

How to cite

Graduate of Gymnasium No. 17 named after Akan Kurmanov, Astana, Kazakhstan Looking east: interest in chinese and american universities in russian-language wikipedia, 2016-2025 // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 2. – Pp. 297–300.