Article in Higher Education Research & Development journal (2021)
Let nine universities blossom: opportunities and constraints on the development of
higher education in China
Kris Hartley1 & Darryl S. L. Jarvis2
To cite this article: Kris Hartley & Darryl S. L. Jarvis (2021): Let nine universities blossom:
opportunities and constraints on the development of higher education in China, Higher Education
Research & Development, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2021.1915963
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07294360.2021.1915963
Received 19 March 2020
Accepted 17 March 2021
Published online: 21 Apr 2021
ABSTRACT
China’s pursuit of global superpower status compels the country to make coordinated efforts
across numerous sectors. Global leadership in higher education is one example and provides a
case study in how resource support and strategic vision can generate ‘quick wins’ in reputation
and rankings. The ascendancy of Peking University, Tsinghua University and Fudan University,
among others, has positioned China to attract top-tier faculty and supports local innovation
ecosystems through collaborative research capacity. However, universities with global visibility
account for only a fraction of China’s university enrollment, and reputational stagnation among
universities outside the elite ‘C9 League’ has implications for regional economic development,
geographic diffusion of innovation, and workforce competitiveness. This article offers
explanations for why China has not developed a cadre of globally competitive non-elite
universities in the same vein as many Western countries. Issues explored include the institutional
and political contexts of university governance, national strategic focus on high-visibility
institutions, near-exclusive emphasis on KPIs measured by university ranking indices, and
concerns about academic freedom and their cooling effects on research and faculty recruitment.
KEYWORDS
China; higher education policy; managerialism; political ideology; university rankings;
knowledge economy; knowledge competition
1
2
Assistant Professor, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, Education University of Hong Kong
Professor, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, Education University of Hong Kong
1
Introduction
China has boasted a culture of educational sophistication throughout its history, shaped
in part by an imperial examination process that produced government administrators
trained in Confucian philosophy and public and cultural affairs. Steeped in a deep
history of meritocracy and now possessing one of the world’s largest tertiary education
systems,1 China declared an interest in internationalizing its higher education system
and in the 1990s identified a group of universities around which to develop capacities
in targeted disciplines (Kim et al., 2018; Levin, 2010; Luo, 2013; Mohrman, 2008;
Peters & Besley, 2018; Rhoads et al., 2014). This initiative evolved ultimately into a
pursuit of elite global university status – such as it can be defined – that emerged
from then-President Jiang Zemin’s 1998 proclamation that the country should develop
several world-class universities (WCUs) as facilitated by national-level schemes (Song,
2017; Yang & Welch, 2012). This pitted universities in a competition for resources
and visibility (Li, 2012; Ngok & Guo, 2008). Nearly two decades later, China’s elite universities
have earned recognition in global rankings while making substantial efforts to
internationalize. Tsinghua University, for example, reached its first-ever top ranking
among Asian universities in the Times Higher Education 2019 report, a position it maintained
in 2020 (Bothwell, 2019; Times Higher Education, 2017; WUR, 2019, 2020). Of
mainland China’s universities, six were in the top-20 (30%) in the 2020 iteration of
the same ranking, 26 in the top-100 (26%), and 65 in the top-300 (22%). In the 2020
ranking of Asian universities by Quacquarelli Symonds, Tsinghua University ranked
fourth and mainland China’s universities performed similarly: five in the top-20
(25%), 24 in the top-100 (24%), and 73 in top-300 (24%) (QS, 2020). Tsinghua University’s
top ranking in one of the major regional (Asia) indices is symbolically significant
because the ranking ended the National University of Singapore’s extended run in first
place; the milestone was embraced as a cause for celebration in Chinese media and
engendered positive reflection among some higher education analysts (Kang-chung &
Chiu, 2019).
Such recognition is arguably the result of China’s coordinated and well-resourced
effort to boost the global research profile of its top universities, including those in the
C9 League2 and members of Project 985 (39 universities; Zhang et al., 2013) and
Project 211 (116 universities) (Grove, 2017; Mohrman, 2008; Rhoads et al., 2014).
Announced in 2015 as an extension of these programs, the Double First Class Project
(DFCP; Peters & Besley, 2018) encompasses 36 Class A universities, six Class B universities,
and 95 universities housing ‘first class disciplines’; the aim is to help members
achieve global status by 2050 (Asian Correspondent, 2017). These programs offer institutional
support, resources, and monitoring capacity to universities for boosting research
capabilities, internationalization, and talent recruitment, among other activities (Kim
2
et al., 2018; Shen, 2018). Of these select few, C9 universities account for 10 percent of
national expenditures appropriated for university research (Times Higher Education,
2017).
Despite these rapid gains in higher education stature, there remain policy, institutional,
and sector-level deficiencies that compromise the ability of China’s elite and
non-elite universities to reach the potential envisioned for them by policy makers. It is
thus fair to ask whether their performance in rankings is as high as it could be given
the vast quantities of resources channeled into elite university development and, more
importantly, the impacts of preferential resourcing on the non-elite institutions that
comprise the vast majority of universities within China’s higher education system
(2,838 of 2,880 currently in existence) (Jarvis & Mok, 2019, p. 38). As Zha (2016)
argues, resources are important but not by themselves sufficient to produce globally
leading higher education systems. The success of Western systems of higher education
in global comparative rankings, for example, rests not on the performance of individual
universities per se but rather on ‘the strength of the normative model’ (Zha, 2016).
For China, this macro-institutional explanation suggests innate and perhaps irreconcilable
tensions that detract, or at least limit, the development of its higher education
system. Western imprints on the type of academic model China is pursing, for
example, highlight the degree to which ‘indigenization’ in the context of social, political,
and institutional norms might undermine this model (Altbach, 1998, pp. 37–40). Indeed,
China’s higher education model is replete with such tensions, a point highlighted by
Postiglione’s (2015) observation that, while ‘top-tier universities are coming to resemble
their OECD counterparts,’ they find themselves caught between ‘the goals of internationalisation
and safeguarding national sovereignty,’ with the government encouraging
‘Sino–foreign cooperation along with stern warnings of its dangers’ (p. 239). The implication
is that, while China’s higher education system has made quantifiable progress, the
limits of this progress under current institutional and political arrangements are becoming
apparent.
Relatedly, it is pertinent also to consider whether China’s top-down approach in
resource strategies (often appropriated in lump-sum fashion; Usher, 2018) materially
influences publication impact and citations that generate global status, or whether it
incentivizes universities to focus only on easily quantifiable KPIs (e.g., research
volume and number of publications3) that exhibit ‘quick wins’ but reflect little structural
progress on quality, innovation, and discovery. Deeper issues concerning the top-down
approach to higher education administration include censorship, suppression of academic
freedom, and their impact on a type of academic culture that elsewhere thrives
on uninhibited scholarly inquiry and international collaboration.
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This article examines these issues through the lens of China’s higher education
governance strategies and its efforts to shape the function and culture of universities in
service to national socio-political goals. The article proceeds with a brief review of academic
literature pertaining to China’s pursuit of global status in higher education and
its efforts to managerialize universities through reform efforts that quantify research
output, rationalize administrative systems, and marketize the relationship with students.
An analysis of the growing divide between China’s elite and non-elite universities is
presented, followed by a conclusion that describes the implications of China’s current
strategy.
Global status and managerialism in China’s universities
This review focuses on two interrelated elements central to the article’s analysis: China’s
pursuit of WCU status and the reform-backed managerialization of higher education
administration in pursuit of internationalization and WCU status. The literature on
China’s WCU ambitions has focused primarily on government-based declarations that
confer privileged status to selected universities, as activated through the suite of numbered
initiatives previously described (Grove, 2017; Peters & Besley, 2018; Rhoads
et al., 2014). Since the late 1980s, China has pursued an aggressive higher education
development strategy, in the early stages even departing to some degree from the country’s
favored top-down resource appropriation model by introducing performance
accountability and halting elements of autonomy (Huang, 2015). One example is the
Law of Higher Education, introduced in 1998 to relax administrative controls in the
interest of fostering creativity and entrepreneurial behavior in research and university
management.
The Huang (2015) study underscores the relevance of institutional culture and context
in translating global WCU policy standards into national- or institution-level policies by
articulating ‘narrowly defined responsibilities and productivity’ (p. 106). Context is
crucial because the development of WCU strategies in the international sphere has
occurred largely outside the ideological strictures of socialist-authoritarian systems; by
contrast, China’s strategies reflect efforts to reinterpret such strategies in ways that complement
government policy. It is prudent to note that ideological frameworks in China
have often been reoriented depending on prevailing political circumstances, as illustrated
in the evolution from Marxism in the Mao era to the more utilitarian approach of the
Deng, Jiang, and Hu eras (Chai, 2003), and recently back towards recentralization,
control, and consolidation under Xi. Peters and Besley (2018) argue that the latest iteration
of China’s WCU strategy – the DFCP – uses performance measurement-based
reforms to foster an ‘innovation excellence culture’ (p. 1075), with the think-tank
model culturally embedded in value frames reflecting socialist principles. Peters and
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Besley (2018) argue that this strategy, as executed through managerialist reforms, is
touted by the government as a pathway towards improved university governance. We
argue that the strategy captures the mechanics, but not the spirit, of innovation promotion
strategies seen in WCUs around the world. The implication of our argument
is that, at a politically strategic level, universities are seen by the government as vessels
for legitimizing and disseminating ideology, with an underlying interest in deepening
social control. This may explain why the pursuit of WCU status has proceeded only as
far as material resource appropriations allow; the softer cultural aspects of openness
and innovation are seen to undermine ideological and social disciplining efforts and
are thus ignored.
Reactions to WCU strategies have been mixed, however. For example, a study by Kim
et al. (2018) of perceptions among professors at highly ranked Chinese universities
reveals a disconnect between the execution of WCU strategies and the way professors
interpret their role. Interviewees often referenced Western universities as models for
China’s WCUs and viewed teaching quality as a key element of university status at
national and global levels. The adoption of Anglo-Saxon-dominated conceptualizations
of WCU status is critiqued also by Deem et al. (2008), who find that the internationalization
of scholarly activities such as publishing in English-language journals is seen to distract
teachers and scholars from activities that have local impacts. The study finds that, in
Hong Kong, commitment to achieving WCU status compels universities and governmentbacked grantmaking bodies to focus on research performance as monitored and
benchmarked through models popular in the UK. Nevertheless, China’s strategies to
promote research output appear to perversely incentivize quantity over quality
(Mohrman, 2013). According to Mohrman and Wang (2010), for example, a preoccupation
with publication quantity has not led to a corresponding rise in citations; according
to the authors, ‘the current pressure for numbers of publications in international journals
in some Chinese universities is a misguided priority. Perhaps fewer, but higher quality,
articles would be a more suitable goal’ (p. 174) (see also Yang & You, 2018). Seeking
‘quick wins’ on the pathway to WCU status, according to the literature, appears not
only to be ineffective at building reputation in the longer term but also to divert
faculty effort from tasks that some research interviewees believe better advance the
core mission of their universities (i.e., to educate students and develop knowledge and
capacities relevant to local needs) (Wang & Ieong, 2019). This strategy can be seen as
reflective of the pragmatic and utilitarian approach to developmental ‘catch-up’ popularized
under Deng (Chai, 2003; Zhang, 1996).
The relationship between the pursuit of WCU status and the managerialization of
higher education is analogous to that between vision and execution, and China’s
higher education reforms appear to acknowledge that a fundamental shift in the behavior
5
of universities and individual academics is precipitated by shifts in institutionalized
incentive structures. With ideological roots in neoliberalism and new public management,
the managerialization and economic instrumentalism applied to Asia’s higher education
reforms has spread apace via the embrace of university-level administrative and
procedural reforms (Cheung, 2010, 2011; Fischer & Mandell, 2018; Huang, 2015,
2018). In Hong Kong, a relatively early adopter of higher education managerialization,
the University Grants Committee (UCG) has focused since the 1990s on quality assurance,
intricate quantification and measurement, process efficiency, and fiscal accountability,
inducing universities to adopt managerialist reforms to meet increasingly
specific and ambitious targets (Mok, 1999). Competing with one another for WCU
status, Hong Kong’s universities have undertaken benchmarking exercises, adopted
entrepreneurial approaches to resource procurement, and implemented efficiencybased
reforms (Mok, 2005). The privatization and corporatization of Hong Kong’s university
sector, through a wave of entrepreneurialism, has engendered a culture among
academics and students that reduces educational pursuits to ‘employment readiness’
and commercial activities holding little inherent value beyond their contribution to economic
outputs; this trend marginalizes what some see as the role of higher education as a
center for ‘ideas and values like democracy, liberty and humanity’ (Chan & Lo, 2007,
p. 317). Predictably, these changes have lowered morale by placing additional burdens
and scrutiny on academic staff while diluting the meaningfulness of academic labor.
Managerialist reforms ultimately filtered into mainland China, where the university
governance climate is arguably indistinguishable from that of Hong Kong. According
to Mohrman (2008, p. 45), ‘market values have come to dominate [China’s] academic
system.’ Embracing a value-for-money view of higher education, China began to move
away from the socialist market model of the 1990s and towards the marketization of universities
(Mok, 1999, 2000), executed through policies such as ‘increasing student tuition
fees, reducing state allocations, strengthening the relationship between the university
sector and the industrial and business sectors, and encouraging universities and academics
to engage in business and market-like activities to generate revenue’ (Mok,
2003, p. 123). The involvement of government in WCU development explains the
bureaucratization and massification of higher education in China, particularly regarding
administrative control and resource appropriation (Mohrman, 2008; Ngok, 2008;
Shen, 2018).
Such rapid and comprehensive reform is facilitated through the coordinated and
seemingly efficient apparatus of the unitary administrative state. According to Ngok
and Guo (2008), ‘traditionally, Chinese officials prefer to use administrative tools to
achieve policy goals’ (p. 555). Thus, it can be expected that the pursuit of WCU status
is inspired by a model of top-down policy coordination. Altbach (2015) argues that
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WCUs are characterized by internal self-governance, but China’s approach appears to
marginalize the autonomy of universities. Song (2017), for example, finds that centrallevel
performance benchmarks have compelled universities to acquiesce by undertaking
personnel reforms (e.g., distribution of roles and responsibilities around the researchteachingservice triad), but that these reforms have not been popular among university
staff due in part to lack of consultation and general aversion to top-down tactics.
Additionally, Song finds incongruence between internationalization (i.e., indigenization
of Western-style university governance reforms targeting autonomy) and the government’s
goal of maintaining ‘Chinese characteristics’, explained by the fact that
‘Chinese universities are deeply embedded in the political hierarchical system, unlike
the liberal market in Western countries’ (p. 740). Deem et al. (2008) likewise find that
the managerialist wave of internationalizing reforms is inspired by Western-style practices
and neoliberal ideologies, including ‘marketization, privatization and corporatization’
(p. 92).
Indeed, the adoption of some Western elements by China’s universities – which have
an institutional heritage deeply rooted in non-Western models – reveals a paradox complicated
by government-imposed pressure to attain WCU status (Zha, 2016). According
to Yang (2013), this reform process has resulted in superficial improvements to ‘hardware’
that mimic those of Western universities, with little attention to less tangible cultural
factors that lead to the types of innovation and research output that enhance a
university’s global influence. Yang argues that the results of these efforts are measurable
but limited, illustrated by the fact that the ‘software’ of university culture is a nonpurchasable
commodity. As with neoliberal economic development prescriptions popularized
by global institutions in the post-war era, the ‘copy-paste’ approach to WCU
development ignores local context at the peril of its own durability.
Finally, it is revealing to consider the impressions that reforms have made on those
executing them, given that university culture – as shaped by emerging and shifting expectations
and incentives – can impact the research behavior of individual faculty members.
According to Kim et al. (2018), the prioritization by WCU policies of research over teaching
and service (and within that, research of international rather than local relevance) is
shaping the experience of academics in negative ways and has met some resistance.
According to the study, China’s university administrators seek to ‘check boxes’ regarding
physical investments, recruitment of high-profile professors (with mixed results; Ngok &
Guo, 2008), and other generally quantifiable measures and ‘observable outcomes’
(p. 102). The authors argue that this phenomenon widens a culture gap between professors
and administrators. In a study of lecturers and teaching staff in China, Tian
and Lu (2017), for example, find that academics increasingly harbor feelings of insecurity
and anxiety resulting from increased organizational hierarchy, intensified pressure to
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perform, and ‘rigid tenure requirements’ (p. 957) that distract faculty from teaching
and compromise research quality. Similarly, a qualitative study by Huang et al. (2018)
of academics at China’s universities finds mixed impressions about managerial
reforms; there are no uniform sentiments and levels of support vary across role types,
length of tenure, and degree of influence. The study illustrates that claims about monolithic
resistance to reforms should be made cautiously.
It is clear from the literature that China’s higher education ecosphere has undergone
substantial strategic restructuring in recent decades, with evident impacts on the culture
of universities and their approach to pursuing WCU status. This restructuring blends
reform models from the West with certain national-level governance characteristics,
raising the additional specter of ideological agendas and their influence on university
function and the execution of research. The next section builds on this literature by analyzing
and discussing the implications of China’s managerialist higher education policy
for the reputation of the country’s elite universities and the performance of its non-elite
universities.
Analysis and discussion
China’s higher education policy has generated a university ecosphere characterized by a
small number of well-resourced elite universities on one side and the rest on the other.
China’s WCUs are, at least in observable dimensions, closing the status gap with WCUs
from the West. Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, and a handful
of others enjoy collaborations with elite universities around the world, boast graduates
with high-profile careers in government and business, and look the part with manicured
campuses near research clusters in wealthy neighborhoods like Beijing’s Haidian district.
For outside observers invited to these universities to participate in conferences and
collaborations, the image promoted is that of modern, progressive, open, and generously
funded higher education environments. The appearance of these universities near the
top of the global rankings has also generated media interest around the world in a
way that supports the ‘growth of Asia’ hypothesis while also helping project an image
of rapid progress and global leadership favored by Beijing’s political leadership. The
capacities of these universities is undeniably formidable, with privileged access to government
coffers and public research institutes, connections to the private sector, and the privilege
to cherry-pick China’s top-performing college entrants.
A majority of the faculty at these elite institutions are Chinese nationals who received
advanced degrees from high-profile Western universities and were recruited back to
China through schemes like the ‘Thousand Talents’ program launched in 2008
(Hepeng, 2018; Li et al., 2018; Lundh, 2011). These scholars have the advantage of returning
8
to their country as a cadre of celebrated researchers and thought-leaders ready to
advance the reputational interests of their employer-universities and shape the development
of China as a whole. Indeed, the Chinese WCU is a rarefied environment to which
few are granted access and in which the country has placed nearly all its hopes for global
scholarly leadership. Furthermore, funding privileges set these universities apart and
have placed them on a path towards unassailable long-term preeminence. China’s 30
richest elite universities, for example, now each record annual expenditures in excess
of US$1 billion – a figure surpassed only in the United States and indicative of rapidly
increased resources commitments since 2009, when only five Chinese universities
enjoyed annual expenditures of US$1 billion or more (Zha, 2016, p. 10) (see Table 1).
Outside WCUs, higher education in China is vastly different. Many of the country’s
non-elite universities are striving for status by competitively jostling for resources and
personnel. These universities also strive to both meet managerially imposed internationalization
targets and enhance their global image by aggressively recruiting foreign students
– at some material expense and often considerable relaxation of admissions and
graduation standards. The lesser among these (constituting a majority of China’s
higher education institutions) exhibit a substantial drop-off in capacity and performance
on typical measurements of university quality such as teaching and research, due largely
to limited resources, inadequate facilities, and research or staffing capacities that reflect
historical patterns of training and recruitment (Jarvis & Mok, 2019). Lesser pay, modest
professional qualifications among academic staff (normally acquired domestically), and
less research funding severely constrain publication opportunities as a pathway to
career advancement and institutional status, while internal methods for assessment
and quality assurance are often lacking (Altbach, 2016). At the same time, regulatory
and procedural restrictions limit opportunities for advancement pursued by more creative
and entrepreneurial strivers. Given these circumstances, disaffection among scholars
and failure to retain talented staff perpetuates a cycle of underperformance, with leadership
churn and waves of initiatives seeking but failing to reshape the trajectory of these
universities. This dynamic is particularly evident in cases where elite universities in
coastal areas recruit talented scholars away from inland and regional universities –
furthering the country’s geographic imbalance in university quality. As such, the set of
complex problems facing administrators in the vast bulk of non-elite universities
includes not only resources and administrative constraints but also the accumulated cultural
and psychological effects of being on the less-privileged side of a highly bifurcated
system (Postiglione, 2015; Postiglione & Arimoto, 2015).
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Beyond its influence on non-elite universities themselves, the concentration of
resources and efforts among WCUs also comes at the detriment of economic development
opportunities in regional communities. All but two C9 universities (exceptions
being Xi’an Jiao Tong University and Harbin Institute of Technology) are located in
the country’s most populous corridors: the Beijing-Bohai Rim and Shanghai-Yangtze
River agglomeration belts. While universities in the DFCP are somewhat more geographically
dispersed, there remains a concentration in Beijing and Shanghai, with no
presence among the 36 Class A universities in the country’s interior. This exacerbates
spatial inequalities in economic development as localities fail to capture the spillover
effects of research activities, including spin-off enterprises leveraging research innovations
and the presence of talent that can support regional economies. Deleterious
effects are felt also in the absence of exchanges and collaborations with international
universities, which could expand the perspectives of local staff and introduce foreigners to
the higher education environment outside of China’s first-tier cities and regions. Finally,
foregone opportunities to improve educational quality in regional areas tend to stunt
workforce development and over time can compromise regional economic competitiveness.
Taken as a whole, China’s higher education system – top-heavy in global reputation
and national influence – arguably cannot be appraised on the performance of so small a
share of its elite universities. Relative to other, internationally competitive higher education
systems, what characterizes China’s higher education system is its highly
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unequal nature, where levels of internationalization, quality of staffing and academic
labor, and curriculum design and teaching practices in a majority of universities
operate at a much lower level of achievement than that of elite universities (Altbach,
2016, 2009; Jarvis & Mok, 2019). Indeed, for outsiders who recurrently spend time visiting
elite and non-elite universities in both China and elsewhere, the differences can
appear stark.
Even in the elite university sector, however, quality, impact and reputational issues
persist, suggesting that reform efforts have further progress to make. As publication
pressures mount, the country’s higher education system is increasingly plagued with a
scholarly reputation for shoddy workmanship, including recent high-profile cases of
fraudulent research (e.g., retractions from the Journal of Tumor Biology of 107 papers
authored by Chinese academics and the official retraction, in 2016, of 81 percent of
Chinese drug approvals due to suspicious and possibly fraudulent pharmacological
studies) (Hancock, 2017a; Hancock, 2017b; Retraction Watch, 2020). Even a system as
large and well-resourced as China’s cannot fully protect its global image amidst the
repeated discrediting of its output. Furthermore, restrictions on academic freedom and
high-profile cases of academic firings, some of which are suspected to relate to political
sensitivities, does not reflect well on prospects for the longer term development of the
sector’s international image (Bothwell, 2018; Qiang, 2015; Rui, 2020; Shepherd, 2019).
Given that academia, and in particular the field the social sciences and humanities, are
sensitive to issues of free speech and criticism, China’s compromised credibility can
undermine efforts to appear open and collaborative – two essential characteristics of
WCUs. China’s universities are thus trapped by resource dependency, where any institutionalstrategic deviation from the government’s vision of a university as ‘think tank
with socialist core values’ (Peters & Besley, 2018, p. 1075) risks denial of funding or,
worse, professional and disciplinary consequences. This resource-performance trap
handcuffs elite universities to a prescribed ideology while inducing them to meet expectations
regarding internationalization and collaboration – an especially perilous passage
for university administrators to navigate.
Importantly, these contradictory pressures appear only to be worsening with the
reassertion of party ideology since 2013 (Altbach, 2016). As Altbach and de Wit (2018)
observe, ‘China’s investment of billions of dollars in the upgrading of its top universities
to create “world-class” institutions may be…put at risk [by ideological forces]’ (p. 25),
along with China’s internationalization efforts and its attempts to build joint-collaborative
ventures with leading international universities (Altbach & de Wit, 2018; Feng,
2017). Recent and on-going political developments seem to support this assertion.
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Finally, the ‘indigenization’ of global WCU practices, under the most recent re-assertion
of party ideology, is revealing limits to reform and innovation efforts even among
elite institutions. Relative to their international counterparts, for example, elite
Chinese universities continue to have much less institutional autonomy. The autonomy
once enjoyed by university presidents, often professors themselves, has been ceded
increasingly to government bodies and political authorities. Subject and academic organization,
for example, remains at the discretion of the Ministry of Education (MoE). Areas
of study must be defined in relation to established disciplines prescribed by central authorities
in order to access funding and build legitimacy, reducing the prospects for the
inter-disciplinary experimentation crucial for fostering the type of creative and innovative
scholarship produced in international universities. Tenure practices are likewise
subject to centralized procedures mandating that only departments teaching undergraduate
programs are allowed to offer tenured appointments, with applicants vetted
not only for their academic abilities but also for their political suitability as viewed by
party cadres embedded in each department and in the senior leadership ranks of universities
(Altbach, 2016, p. 12; Liu, 2020). Similarly, program and curriculum design are
overseen by the MoE, while university-level administration remains, in essence, the preserve
of central and regional political authorities and is interlaced with dense administrative
and reporting requirements (Rhoads et al., 2014, p. 38). At a broader level, the
increasing influence of party ideology on university management – from the veiled
and coded instruments of managerialism to more politically manifest monitoring –
has the effect of sidelining the MoE as party secretaries and operatives exert control
through parallel institutional structures.
Conclusion
The pursuit of a WCU model, now deeply institutionalized in China, has produced paradoxical
outcomes. On the one hand, intensive and targeted resource strategies have
benefited the elite university sector, rapidly transforming capacities, research output,
international reputation, and impact. On the other hand, ‘home-grown’ WCUs and
‘indigenization’ have fundamentally strengthened the relationship between the party-state
and university – facilitating a reassertion of party control over institutions and, in
some instances, of corruption in resource allocation, accreditation, and promotion practices,
among other issues (Ngok & Guo, 2008). As recently as the mid-2000s, China was
trending from explicit control to looser supervision, from a center to peripheral locus of
power, and towards increased autonomy for universities through financial decentralization,
institution-based decision-making, increased organizational experimentation, and
shrinkage of staff numbers at the MoE (Luo, 2013; Mohrman, 2008; Mok, 2003). The
recent re-centralization of authority in China’s higher education system, not only
through bureaucratic and managerialist reforms but also through the pursuit of ideological
12
conformity, raises concerns about academic autonomy and freedom of inquiry – a
phenomenon that will almost certainly compromise the global standing of China’s universities
pending the direction and intensity of party ideology in the coming years. These
developments also bear implications for institutional and academic creativity and the
competitiveness of Chinese higher education at the global scale, as Chinese scholars
increasingly position their scholarship in ways that support party ideology to secure
professional rewards (Hancock, 2017b; Li, 2012; Qiang, 2015).
While WCU status would seem to be more a byproduct than a core objective of
research efforts, there is some evidence that higher rankings precipitate material
outcomes, whether positive or negative. Yang and Liu (2018) argue that the rise in rankings
of China’s universities has compelled the government to pay increasing attention to
higher education, with Project 985 and Project 211 as examples; higher prestige also
avails universities of a broader pool of external research funding options. Additionally,
the pursuit of high rankings has motivated universities to broaden international institutional
collaboration, provide some international exchange opportunities for domestic
students, and serve as ‘soft’ national branding vehicles through visitations by international
students and scholars. If the pursuit of WCU status continues to be the paramount
objective of China’s higher education policy, it would be necessary to more
robustly examine the associated institutional and governance arrangements – those
that are often found to influence competitiveness in many other sectors. At the same
time, the ambition for university improvement cannot be advanced while international
collaboration and academic freedom are apprehensively thought by government to threaten
national sovereignty (Postiglione, 2015). China’s universities thus endure a constraint
to further development reminiscent of Liebig’s Law, according to which no level of
resource investment can overcome the predominance of a single limiting factor. Vast
sums of money have indeed earned China’s universities ‘quick wins,’ as anticipated.
Further progress – at the individual university and systemic levels – is now contingent
on institutional and cultural factors. The government’s command-and-control approach
to higher education institutions, including dominion over university-level strategic
initiatives, promotion, tenure, research directions, establishment of new academic programs,
and publication and academic content (Gorban et al., 2011), is largely inconsistent
with the types of institutional and cultural conditions under which many current global
WCUs earned their reputations.
In closing, the types of reforms that have propelled China’s nominated WCUs to their
current lofty global status (e.g., focused efforts to enhance teaching and research quality,
internationalization, and faculty recruitment (Altbach, 2016)) have been largely unavailable
to China’s non-elite universities. This perhaps is the single most significant challenge
for China’s higher education system: an overt favoritism towards and celebration of only
13
a handful of anointed WCUs, to the relative neglect of the vast array of non-elite universities
where most students are trained for vocations and careers. Our goal in this article
has been to call for deeper acknowledgment of the convergence of these factors, with the
purpose of identifying how China might re-think its ambitions for developing not only a
globally competitive cadre of WCUs but also a world-class system of higher education
that serves students, communities, and scholarship at all levels. This is where
the impact of reform can best enable the higher education sector to advance China’s
developmental aspirations in the decades ahead.
Notes
1. In 2020, China is expected to have 8.74 million new tertiary graduates (Xinhua, 2019),
outpacing
the United States twofold (3.96 million; NCES, n.d.).
2. The C9 League is considered the country’s most prestigious group of universities. It
includes: Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, Nanjing University, University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang
University, Xi’an Jiao Tong University, and Harbin Institute of Technology. (http://en.
people.cn/203691/7822275.html; accessed 9 Aug 2020)
3. The motivations behind this policy change are addressed in (https://www.nature.com/
articles/d41586-020-00574-8 accessed 9 Aug 2020)
Acknowledgment
We thank Dr. Alex He, Education University of Hong Kong, for helpful insights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Kris Hartley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5349-0427
Darryl S. L. Jarvis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4661-9154
14
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