The most prestigious universities in the Chinese mainland Peking and Tsinghua University made the news in a 2007 global elite university competitiveness ranking list as they stood at 192nd and 196th , state media said Monday.

Peking University ranked 253rd while Tsinghua finished 264th on the list last year, the China Youth Daily reported.

The competitiveness ranking was conducted by Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation (RCCSE) of Wuhan University in central province of Hubei.

The report went against a "The world's top 200 universities ranking list" conducted by Briton's The Times Higher Education Supplement in 2005 that placed centuries-old Peking University 15th position, topping other universities in Asia. Tsinghua University was amazingly excluded.

American universities are biggest winners on the list as nine of top ten universities are from the United States while one is from neighboring Japan.

The top ten rankings are occupied by Harvard University, University of Texas, Washington University, Stanford University, The Johns Hopkins University, University of California at Berkeley(UCB), University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), The University of Tokyo, University of Michigan and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Qiu Shuping, director and professor with the research center said the ten universities were selected from 1,027 universities all over the world taking part in the evaluation and they are the most competitive university on the globe.

"These universities have a complete structure of subjects which exceed those of other universities," Qiu said.

Eight mainland universities rank in the top 400. Apart from Peking and Tsinghua University, the rest are Zhejiang University (248th), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (252nd), Shanghai Fudan University (257th), Nanjing University (271st), China University of Technology (273rd) and Jilin University (382nd).

Top three universities on the Taiwan Island are Taiwan University (195th), Taiwan Cheng Kung University (295th) and Taiwan Tsing Hua University (387th).

University of Hong Kong (149th), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (198th) and The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (286th) are listed as the top three universities in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

However, the credibility of the Wuhan-based research center is questioned by media.

A commentary carried by Xinhuanet.com said it does not make clear that it is just a public organization and has no right to put it as a measurement of China's universities.

China began assess its nearly 2000 universities as early as 1987. So far, there are dozens of varying versions of rankings with many here saying there is no specific criterion and they lack credibility.

The university ranking list has drawn wide criticism from the public because it is not scientific and regulated.

Chia-Wei Woo, former President of The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology said these types of lists are ridiculous because they compare pairs of glasses with apples', previous reports said.