As 12.9 million students sat down for China’s national college entrance examination this weekend, the Ministry of Education (MOE) quietly published an updated undergraduate catalog that reveals where Beijing expects the next generation of engineers and researchers to be working. According to Xinhua, these additions include: majors in embodied intelligence, semiconductor process and equipment, low-altitude economy and management, marine intelligence and unmanned technologies, and brain-computer science and technology, a list that reads less like an academic update and more like a map of China’s industrial priorities for the next decade.
The expansion is not happening in a vacuum. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) explicitly calls for an orderly expansion of enrollment in science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine-related programs, with a particular emphasis on fields aligned with national strategic needs. The new majors are a direct institutional response to that mandate.
Embodied Intelligence and Brain-Computer Science Enter the Curriculum
The most striking additions to this year’s catalog are the 15 new interdisciplinary majors, of which embodied intelligence and brain-computer science and technology are the most technically ambitious. Embodied intelligence, the study of AI systems that perceive and act in the physical world through robotic bodies, is a field that has attracted enormous investment in China over the past two years, with companies like Unitree Robotics, Xiaomi, and BYD now building in-house humanoid robot programs.
Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), one of China’s elite engineering universities, is among the first institutions approved to launch the embodied intelligence major. Jin Jing, a doctoral supervisor at HIT who will work on the program, described its ambition as producing graduates who have mastered “theories and engineering approaches related to the field, while developing systems thinking and interdisciplinary innovation skills needed for next-generation intelligent technologies.”
The brain-computer science and technology major, meanwhile, addresses a frontier that sits at the intersection of neuroscience, materials science, and AI, a field where China has been investing heavily in research infrastructure, including the National Multimode Trans-Scale Biomedical Imaging Center at Peking University.
Semiconductor Process and Equipment: A First for China
The most strategically significant addition may be the semiconductor process and equipment major at Sichuan University, which the MOE has confirmed is the first program of its kind in the country. The major is designed to address one of the most acute bottlenecks in China’s chip self-reliance effort: the shortage of engineers who understand not just chip design, but the physical processes and equipment used to manufacture them.
Yang Yang, dean of Sichuan University’s School of Electronics and Information Engineering, put the program’s purpose plainly: it exists “to provide a strong pipeline of talent to support self-reliance across the entire integrated circuit industrial chain,” language that makes no pretense of academic neutrality. The framing is notable, this is not a program designed to produce researchers who might eventually work in the semiconductor industry, but one explicitly oriented toward filling gaps in a supply chain that China is trying to build domestically, under sustained pressure from US export controls on advanced chipmaking equipment.
Low-Altitude Economy and Marine Intelligence Reflect Emerging Industries
Two other new majors signal China’s ambitions in sectors that are growing rapidly but remain talent-constrained. Low-altitude economy and management addresses the commercial drone and air taxi sector, which Chinese regulators have been actively developing through dedicated policy frameworks. Marine intelligence and unmanned technologies, meanwhile, reflects China’s strategic interest in autonomous systems for ocean monitoring, resource extraction, and maritime security, a domain in which the Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been a leading developer, including the LangYa 2.0 AI marine forecasting model we covered last week.
A Structural Advantage in Talent Cultivation
Zhang Nanxing, who directs the Institute of Higher Education at the China National Academy of Educational Sciences, read the update as a sign that China’s academic structure is maturing, the new majors “underscore continued improvement in the structure of academic disciplines,” he said. Education Minister Huai Jinpeng has framed the broader goal in more direct terms: the aim is to “establish a coordinated talent cultivation mechanism that aligns sci-tech innovation, industrial development and national strategic needs” and to “explore new models for nurturing top innovative talent in strategically critical fields like artificial intelligence and integrated circuits.”
The MOE has also introduced a fast-track mechanism for establishing urgently needed majors, allowing qualified universities to launch programs outside the normal annual review cycle. This institutional flexibility is designed to reduce the lag between the emergence of a new strategic technology and the availability of trained graduates, a lag that has historically been measured in years, not months.
The approach contrasts sharply with the more decentralized model in the United States, where curriculum decisions are made at the institutional level and can take years to propagate across the higher education system. Whether China’s top-down coordination produces graduates capable of driving original research, rather than simply filling industrial roles, remains the central question for the programs’ long-term success.