The number of Chinese universities in the top 100 has been steadily increasing for the past four years, with an increase of one or two each year, and all of the entries are participants of the Double First-Class initiative.

Other universities involved in the project have also shown outstanding improvements. Yunnan University and Taiyuan University of Technology both jumped hundreds of places into the top 600 this year.

"The rapid development of Chinese universities is inseparable from the strategic decisions of our country, and also from the fact that the universities have generated their own clear directions of development," says Wang Lu, director of the consultancy's ranking projects.

Wang says the ARWU rankings were first established as a set of systematic and scientific evaluation indicators, to find out the level of Chinese universities in the world. Each year's ARWU assesses more than 2,000 universities from around the world and a list of the top 1,000 is published.

The ranking system boasts a consistent methodology of basing the rankings on six indicators－the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and the Fields Medal, the number of articles published in the journals of Nature and Science, the number of highly cited researchers, articles published in international journals, and per capita faculty performance.

"Understanding the gap between our universities and the world's top universities means knowing how we can work toward narrowing it. I believe that, in the near future, as Chinese universities continue to advance, the good universities will become excellent, and those already excelling will rise to the top," Wang says.