Abstract
During the past three and a half decades, China has been progressing in higher education in a surprisingly dramatic manner, evidenced especially by scientific publications and sheer numbers of graduates. Such a fact has national, regional and global implications. China’s higher education development and its future directions are now placed highly on the research agendas of many from various parts of the world. Unlike the general acknowledgment of China’s achievements, assessment of the future development of China’s higher education is wide open to question. To some, Chinese universities are on a trajectory to become “world-class” and China’s high-fliers challenge Western supremacy. To others, China’s notion of “world-class” status has been largely imitative. Pumping resources into universities will only lead to diminishing returns as Chinese culture and practices will act as a brake to the pursuit of academic excellence. An increasing deal of attention has been paid to where China will be located in a global higher education landscape and in what shape. Based on the author’s long-standing professional observation and recent empirical studies, this article assesses China’s higher education development, with a particular focus on the challenges brought forward by academic culture. It interrogates China’s pride of the idea that Chinese universities are not willing to assume that Western models define excellence, and asks how far Chinese universities could move within their current development model.
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Notes
The interviews with Professor Hong Hocheng and Professor Yang Pan-Chyr were, respectively, conducted on May 29 and June 1 in 2015 at their offices.
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Acknowledgments
This work is part of the General Research Fund project entitled “Integrating Chinese and Western Higher Education Traditions: A Comparative Policy Analysis of the Quest for World-class Universities in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore” (751313H) supported by the Research Grant Council, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
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Yang, R. Reassessing China’s higher education development: a focus on academic culture. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 16, 527–535 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-015-9397-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-015-9397-2