The Ministry of Education has issued the Opinions on the Establishment of Ordinary Colleges and Universities during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period, clearly requiring strict control of running schools in different places. The document pointed out that universities are not encouraged or supported to run schools across provinces and different places, especially universities affiliated to ministries and commissions and universities in the central and western regions in the eastern region. In principle, cross-provincial campus establishment is not approved. For the existing university campuses in different places, it is necessary to gradually clean up the norms and promote them in a stable and orderly manner.

In recent years, the trend of establishing branch schools and new campuses in the developed provinces in the southeast coast by famous universities in the central and western regions has intensified. Typical examples are that Harbin Institute of Technology has set up new campuses in Shenzhen and Weihai, and Northwestern Polytechnical University has built a new campus in Taicang, Suzhou.