Beijing's elite Peking University yesterday announced plans to launch China's second international program as the country seeks greater influence in global education and more international prestige, commensurate with its economic expansion.

The university said it will launch the Yenching Academy to seek to recruit top scholars from China and around the world for its one-year master's degree program.

The announcement came just 12 months after Steve Schwarzman, the founder of United States-based private equity firm Blackstone, established a similar program at Tsinghua University, also in Beijing, and led a US$350 million endowment campaign.

The two schools said both programs are modeled on the Rhodes Scholarship, an elite award for students to study at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Yenching scholars will be granted full scholarships, free accommodation and living stipends to study literature and culture, history and archaeology, philosophy and religion, public policy and international relations, economics and management, law and society.

The first classes are set to start in the fall of 2015.