This article sets out in the context of globalization to identify, examine and discuss issues related to structural adjustment and educational restructuring in China, with particular reference to university merging and changes in higher education governance models. While it is basically an historical and documentary analysis of policy change in Chinese higher education, this article focuses on restructuring strategies that the Chinese government has adopted to make its university systems more competitive and efficient in the global market context. University merging in China should not be simply understood as a pure higher education reform but rather a fundamental change in higher education governance model from an ‘interventionist state model’ to an ‘accelerationist state model’. Rather than globalization bringing about the decline of the nation state, this article shows transformations taking place in Chinese universities may not necessarily diminish the capacity of the state but instead make the Chinese government a more activist state in certain aspects.

http://bcct.unam.mx/adriana/bibliografia%20parte%202/MOK%20K.%20M.%202005a.pdf

Globalization and educational restructuring : university merging and changing governance in China

English or Chinese? The trade-off between local and international publication among Chinese academics in the humanities and social sciences

Marketizing higher education in post-Mao China

China Urban is an ethnographic account of China’s cities and the place that urban space holds in China’s imagination. In addition to investigating this nation’s rapidly changing urban landscape, its contributors emphasize the need to rethink the very meaning of the “urban” and the utility of urban-focused anthropological critiques during a period of unprecedented change on local, regional, national, and global levels.

Through close attention to everyday lives and narratives and with a particular focus on gender, market, and spatial practices, this collection stresses that, in the case of China, rural life and the impact of socialism must be considered in order to fully comprehend the urban. Individual essays note the impact of legal barriers to geographic mobility in China, the proliferation of different urban centers, the different distribution of resources among various regions, and the pervasive appeal of the urban, both in terms of living in cities and in acquiring products and conventions signaling urbanity. Others focus on the direct sales industry, the Chinese rock music market, the discursive production of femininity and motherhood in urban hospitals, and the transformations in access to healthcare.

China Urban will interest anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and those studying urban planning, China, East Asia, and globalization. 

Contributors. Tad Ballew, Susan Brownell, Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Robert Efird, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Ellen Hertz, Lisa Hoffman, Sandra Hyde, Lyn Jeffery, Lida Junghans, Louisa Schein, Li Zhang

China urban : ethnographies of contemporary culture

This paper examines an important development in Chinese higher education in the late 1990s and early 2000s, namely, its radical expansion of enrollment starting from 1998. After a brief review of the related literature on educational expansion, the paper analyzes the higher education expansion in China in detail. The paper argues that a variety of factors have led to the enrollment expansion, including the expectation to stimulate domestic consumption and to ease the immediate pressure on the labor market, the high public interest in and demand for higher education in Chinese society, and the political will of the Chinese government to develop higher education. The outcomes of the enrollment expansion are also examined. The paper argues that the expected short term impact of enrollment expansion on Chinese economy is not warranted by reality. Enrollment expansion has also put pressures on Chinese higher education to further reform its structure, curricula, and administration. More importantly, enrollment expansion has brought the issue of equity to the front.

/pdf/expansion-of-chinese-higher-education-since-1998-its-causes-2p9rw2sd97.pdf

Expansion of Chinese Higher Education Since 1998: Its Causes and Outcomes

This book looks beyond the articulated goals and accomplishments of the modernization of higher education in China. It delves into the grass roots reality and identifies the true achievements, the unintended outcomes and the major obstacles that still have to be overcome.

Michael Agelasto

Papers

Higher Education in Post-Mao China