Twelve universities from the Chinese mainland and from Hong Kong and Macau - a record number- have made it onto the World's Top 100, making China the top country in Asia, and putting it hot on the heels of the United States and the United Kingdom, according to a new report.

File photo of Tsinghua University. [Photo/VCG]

Quacquarelli Symonds, a UK company that specializes in education and overseas study, released its QS World University Rankings on Thursday, in which 39 universities from the Chinese mainland were included, six for the first time.

Two of the new entries made it onto the World's Top 100 list.

The rankings included the universities of Tsinghua (at 25), Peking(38), Fudan(40), Shanghai Jiaotong (62), Zhejiang(87), and the University of Science and Technology of China(97).

China's top-ranked institution, Tsinghua University, outranked UC Berkley(27) and the University of Tokyo(28).

The company that compiled the listing said the rapid development of China's higher education sector can be attributed to the government's strategy of striving to create a group of world-class universities and disciplines by 2020.

Zhang Yan, China director at Quacquarelli Symonds's Intelligence Unit, said: "Chinese universities have experienced steady growth, with its top universities progressing quickly into the world's top 100. That is mainly due to the success of education reform and large government investment in the past 30 years."

The partnership between Chinese universities and business has helped Chinese graduates become more and more globally competitive, Zhang said, adding that"this helps to attract more global talents to come to China for study, internships, work, and setting up new business, in the long run to deepen the reform of Chinese universities".

The list showed that China is home to more top-100 institutions than any other Asian nation, ahead of Japan and South Korea, which each have five, and Singapore, which has two. Only two nations have more elite universities: the US has 31 and the UK has 16.

Hannele Niemi, a professor of education at the University of Helsinki, said: "The investments that China has allocated to higher education have had a high impact. China has also decisively made high efforts for promoting international cooperation."

This year's table provides a guide to the world's 965 top universities. The results are based on peer reviews from 75,000 academics and 40,500 employers from more than 100 countries during the past five years, in addition to the analysis of 12.31 million academic journals and 66.3 million citations.