The Beijing government has established a scholarship fund for students from countries along the One Belt and One Road initiative for studies in the Chinese capital.

The municipal government set up a "Belt and Road Scholarship" on Monday to fund academic programs in fields like aviation, railway operation, law, finance, electronic information engineering and traditional Chinese medicine, according to the China News Agency.

The scholarship program will fund a number of selected programs each year. In 2017, 11 programs from 11 municipal-level colleges and 21 programs from 21 universities directly administrated by the Ministry of Educationwill receive the funding, benefiting 502 students.

"There are many students from Belt and Road countries studying at our university, and many others are keen to come to China to study, especially to top universities like Tsinghua," said an anonymous program manager at Tsinghua University's International Students and Scholar Center.

Due to limited financial capacity, many foreign students rely on Chinese government scholarships or other funds while studying in China.

With enhanced support from the Chinese government, more students from developing countries will have the opportunity to study in China's best universities, she said.

"Higher education is an important resource. In the past, only developed countries could provide this resource to the rest of the world, but due to the limited [number of] universities and high costs, students from developing countries who can study in the West are also limited. But now, those students have one more choice," an Iraqi post-graduate student surnamed Hosseini who studies at Peking University told the Global Times.

"If my younger friends or family ask me for suggestions for overseas studies, I would suggest that they try Chinese universities. And I will tell them Chinese universities are not easy to apply [for], because universities like Peking and Tsinghua compete with the ranking, reputation and academic standards of many top Western universities," he added.

10,000 people each year

Before the Beijing scholarship, the Chinese government had rolled out State-level scholarships to attract talented students from Belt and Road countries.

China released the Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk RoadEconomic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road in March 2015, which stated that, "We [China and other Belt and Road countries] should send more students to each other's countries, and promote cooperation in jointly running schools." China provides 10,000 government scholarships to the countries along the Belt and Road every year, according to the document.

Experts said this trend of international students receiving education in China coincides with the needs of Belt and Road cooperation.

In the Middle East 20 years ago, one could rarely find anyone who could speak fluent Chinese to be an interpreter, but now this won't be a problem at all, said Hua Liming, a former Chinese ambassador to Iran.

"China is becoming more developed, so students and officials from the Middle East don't just come to learn the language, but also other subjects like social management, economics, energy engineering and medicine," Hua said.

Many of these students will become elites in their countries, and most of them are very friendly to China, appreciate China, and understand Chinese society and its political system, so they won't use ignorant Western bias to judge China, and they tend to cooperate, said Hua.

"So providing educational resources to them will benefit us because we are creating future friends," he said.

"Providing free or semi-free educational resources to students and officials from Belt and Road countries will attract more talented people and help the youth of these countries understand the Chinese model," said Liang Haiming, chief economist of the China Silk Road iValley Research Institute, a Guangzhou-based think tank. "It will also strengthen China's ties with these countries' governments and business people," he said.