Since the late 1990s the Chinese government has implemented two key policies for the development of higher education. The first was launching Project 985, with the purpose of seeking excellence through creating internationally competitive universities. The second was a radical move to a mass system of higher education. In this context, China’s top universities have faced dual missions, each with their challenges: playing key roles in the revolutionary expansion process on the one hand and closing the gap between them and top universities around the world through the implementation of Project 985, on the other. It is thus important to know about how these institutions have transformed themselves for excellence through the implementation of these policies. With the three cases of Peking, Nanjing and Xiamen Universities, this paper aims to examine each institutional response and the broad changes that have come about in these top Chinese comprehensive universities. It looks especially at the divergent trajectories these institutions have followed in balancing their elite and mass education functions, their global, national and local missions, the pursuit of excellence alongside of a commitment to equity, efforts at curricular comprehensivization while preserving unique historical strengths, and finally globalization and localization. From two higher education frameworks, one based on epistemological considerations and the other on political philosophy, that are equally important in light of China’s traditions, the paper concludes that Chinese universities will continuously but selectively respond to the national expansion policy with various institutional models of seeking excellence that enable them to contribute to Chinese society and the global community in the future.
Three different “logics”—that of the internal strategies of the institutions, the economic pressures of the socialist market economy and the political policies of the state drive the development of a university. The dynamic interaction and coexistence of the three logics has determined the transformation models of teacher-education or normal universities in China. This paper aims at describing and analyzing both the process and the forces that led to these transformations by taking East China Normal University (ECNU), Southwest University (SWU) and Yanbian University (YBU) as examples. Reliance on government and market resources has put these universities into a dilemma: On the one hand, they wanted to retain their original features so as to preserve their leading position in the “teacher education” market, and on the other, they needed to merge, expand, restructure and enhance their quality as they pursued overall development. The case analyses show that the teacher-education university’s need for self-development, which is the internal determinant, plays a critical role in its transformation. At the same time, the socioeconomic environment and national policies influence the institution while it displays considerable capacity for self-adjustment.
China’s key science and technology universities are modelled on the French école Polytechnique. As such, they are utilitarian institutions, rooted in the concept of cultivating manpower for society’s economic progress, and tending to ignore the development of the individual. As China’s elite higher education system took in a rapidly increasing number of students in the recent massification process, China’s key science and technology universities underwent reform to become more comprehensive in curricular offerings and more research-oriented in function. The authors have uncovered an interesting phenomenon: Despite repeated discussion in academic circles, this transformation was never actually a conscious strategic choice for universities. Only when the Chinese government launched a program of higher education “massification” did universities develop their own unique reform strategies in a move to become more comprehensive and more research oriented. The authors have adopted a multi-stream analysis framework to describe and analyze three case study universities: University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), and Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University (NWAFU). It was found that Chinese universities already have quite a high level of autonomy, but that the government still has the power to make strategic decisions. Each university’s decision-making mechanism has been an independent process within the constraints of the political economic structure over this period, and policy-making has combined top-down and bottom-up processes.
Two distinctive paradigms have been used in researching higher education phenomena in China’s process of social transformation. The first might be described as “critical realist,” and the second as “interpretivist.” The book Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education, has inclined toward the second paradigm and a central concept is that of “civil society.” However, the authors of this article argue that the concept of “commercial civil society” may better explain the characteristics of Chinese private higher education. Different from civil society that is based on voluntary action and contributions, commercial civil society is characterized by profit making behavior. This article focuses on analyzing the profit making features of Chinese private higher education, and thus aims to supplement the interpretivist analysis presented in the book. The authors believe that the concept of “commercial civil society” not only reflects certain features of the social environment in which Chinese private higher education operates, but may also be helpful for analyzing private higher education phenomena in other countries.
This paper explores, through the lens of childhood, the Chinese cultural dynamics that encourage harmonious human relationships at the price of individual development and yet support a deep appreciation of natural human experiences that allows room for the development of individuality. The purpose of such investigation is to reexamine our cultural heritage in regard to the ways we conceptualize human beings and treat them, retracing its promises, difficulties, pitfalls, and spiritual resources, and thus to help reconfigure a new individuality for education.
Female education is an indispensable part of educational practice and research. In recent years, along with the development of both the women’s liberation movement and the expansion of the practice of female education, Chinese academic circles have become increasingly concerned with female education. Of these concerns, methodological innovation can be said to have achieved a great breakthrough in recent years. With the rise and development of “narrative research” in the field of education in China, new vitality has been breathed into the sphere of female educational research. Starting from the perspective of either historical studies or reality, researchers have made profound discoveries about the female educational experience, revealing Chinese women’s experiences in education, their stories of development, and the problems they have faced. Moreover, researchers have reviewed not only the freedom and restrictions that education brings to women, but also the influence exerted by Chinese education, cultural conventions, and social economic conditions on female progress and living circumstances. This article is mainly a comprehensive literary review of research by Chinese scholars who have used narrative research in their studies of female education.