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EU-China university governance structures—case studies

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Abstract

In the context of globalization and internationalization, several common development trends and challenges have emerged in higher education systems around the world. These will have an impact on the individual university governance structures. Since the international university network gets an increasing importance and several university functions are shared within that network, it is crucial to take the international context into account when reshaping the university governance structure. Although several publications are dedicated to the countrywide or regional governance principles in the EU member states, it is often impossible to assimilate these global descriptions to the individual governance structure of a particular university. In this paper, we conduct case studies on five Chinese universities and five European universities from the perspective of governance structure, from four dimensions of the internal democratic nature, the external involvement, the level of centralization of decision-making authority, and the level of individual responsibility. This study analyzes the differences and commonalities between both. Chinese universities have a unified governance structure that is statutory based on the “President Responsibility System” in which the university’s party committee is officially designated to play the core role of leading the university. EU universities are more diversified in their governance principles, and each of them has its own unique features. To achieve better and deeper cooperation and collaboration between EU and Chinese universities, it is critical to understand and acknowledge these differences. Future research can add more dimensions and factors to broaden the scope of the analysis.

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Notes

  1. Modern university: the term is used here for a university in which a multitude of missions are recognized within a fully developed third pillar of societal engagement and international embedding, next to education and research (Van den Akker et al. 2017). Modern universities engage across a broad transdisciplinary spectrum of activities with governments, funders, the private sector, civil society, and society at large in order to embrace a broad impact agenda (Wernli and Darbellay 2016).

  2. UPC of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a team composed of a secretary, deputy secretaries, and standing committee members. The president and some vice presidents are also members of the party committee. As a representative of the authority of CPC, the university party committee is officially recognized as the highest authority in universities.

  3. In this article, the party secretary is referred to in Chinese pinyin by “Shuji.” The Shuji and Vice-Shuji are elected by the university’s party committee and need to be approved by the appropriate level of the CPC. The Shuji is sometimes directly appointed by the CPC and acts by consulting the university personnel on their opinion, often through voting.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This research was conducted in the framework of an EU project supported under the Erasmus+ Programme, and also funded by the China Scholarship Council.

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Correspondence to Chang Zhu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Xue, Y., Cornelis, J. & Zhu, C. EU-China university governance structures—case studies. Asia Eur J 20, 137–171 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-021-00637-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-021-00637-z

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