Chinese Higher Education Model in Change: Negotiation with Western Power

Abstract

Although many scholars regard modern Chinese higher education as a mixed child of traditional Confucian values and Western paradigms of university construction, I would argue that it has been rich with perennial Chinese partisan characteristics. What those scholars have captured is the constant external influences that shaped the formation and reform of higher education in China. But they did not put the focal point on China’s unusually collective effort to respond to the world, in which higher education plays a crucial role. It is this chapter’s goal to extrapolate a contemporary Chinese higher education model that can be distinguished from the Western models through the philosophical diversity of, ideological totalitarianism over, and economic impetus within higher education. The foundation of such distinctiveness lies not in the higher education itself, but in the complex domestic and global sociohistorical context out of education in the twentieth century. The model in question remains Chinese because it was derived from the massive social mobilization since the earlier 1900s and guided by the urgent and ultimate goal of national development through optimal operation of all types of resource and centrality of power. Structural changes in Chinese higher education paralleled the series of tumultuous political and economic oscillation, which is unlike the models in the West. In imbibing, reforming, refusing, and re-joining the Western game rule, the trajectory of Chinese higher education is shaped by and contributes to the state’s negotiation with Western power.