Mainland students are also being recruited with free tuition at the University of Western Australia, which introduced a fee-waiver programme in 2005.

Initially, 40 scholarships were available to foreign PhD students and this has been boosted by a further 50 places a year specifically aimed at mainland students.

At the University of Queensland, the school of engineering has attracted more than 30 foreign students by waiving fees worth A$30,000 (HK$206,000) a year.

The students are undertaking research in a wide range of areas, including biological, civil, environmental, mechanical, metallurgical and mining and materials engineering.

Australia's top universities are now competing to attract mainland research students.

With Australia's booming resources sector, local engineering and science graduates can earn up to A$100,000 a year compared with the usual A$20,000 as a postgraduate on a research scholarship.

Professor John Taplin, the pro vice-chancellor (international) at the University of Adelaide, was in Beijing this week to take part in signing the agreement with the secretary general of the Scholarship Council, Zhang Xiuqin.

Professor Taplin said his university would waive tuition fees, while the council would provide all the students' travel expenses, living costs and health insurance while they were in Australia.

He said Adelaide had developed partnerships with five research-intensive mainland universities and expected the number to increase over the next few years.

'Adelaide has a very good relationship with China and we have seen the number of students enrolled in our programmes markedly increase,' Professor Taplin said.

'But we have not seen the same dramatic rise among our PhD research students and we identified this as an area where we needed to do more.'

He said universities around the world, particularly in the United States, were providing fee waivers to attract students so Adelaide decided to find a means of achieving the same goal.

A spokeswoman for Melbourne University said about 150 international fee remission scholarships were offered each year to international students undertaking a research higher degree course, with each faculty having a limited number to award.

A further 38 new endeavour international postgraduate research scholarships were also available to students undertaking research higher degrees.

These were funded by the Australian government and covered full tuition for each year of the course and the annual overseas student health cover.

Students awarded a scholarship by the university also received free tuition, a living allowance, thesis allowance and other benefits.

The University of Sydney offers 30 international research scholarships to outstanding students each year and these cover tuition fees and an annual stipend of some A$20,000 for up to two years for a master's by research candidates or up to three years for PhD students.

A spokesman for the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations said fee waivers would become a trend as universities competed at the higher end of the international student market.

This was in sharp contrast to the previous attitude of universities trying to attract the maximum number of foreign full-fee paying undergraduates to boost their incomes, the spokesman said.

Boom times

Australia's universities compete to attract mainland students

Soaring resources sector offers research graduates, in A$ an annual: $100,000