Chapter 4. Higher Education Across the Taiwan Strait
4.2 Development of China’s Higher Education System
4.2.1. Overview of Development and Challenges
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regional development…and vigorously implement technological and vocational education policies and programs.”15 These efforts aim to develop market diversity among
universities and maintain the regional distribution of institutions while improving educational quality for students and the Taiwanese economy. While it is still early to evaluate the effectiveness of the Innovative Transformation Policy, we may conclude that Taiwan’s higher education institutions and education officials remain highly concerned about the island’s future competitiveness in the global higher education marketplace. The following section focuses on the expansion and reformation of mainland China’s higher education system.
4.2 Development of China’s Higher Education System
The expansion and marketization of China’s higher education system over the late 20th and early 21st centuries parallel significant and rapid changes in other areas of
China’s development. This section first provides an overview of the Chinese higher educational system and how it achieved such rapid growth, also highlighting challenges in China’s higher education system. This section then turns to focus on the efforts of the Chinese government and universities to promote international connections in education and recruit international students. Finally, this section analyzes China’s growing role as a global and regional hub of international activity in higher education.
4.2.1. Overview of Development and Challenges
While China and Taiwan’s higher education both have traditions in Confucianism and share a common history in the political upheavals of 1911, the PRC government frequently changed educational policy over the course of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution during the 1950s and 1960s. Following this period of social and political turmoil, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1970s and 1980s reached the higher education institutions as well.16 Recognizing that modernizing China’s economy rested on the quality of its education system, Deng’s reforms between 1977 and 1984 focused on restoring the function of the university to pre-Cultural Revolution status. This
15 Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), “Ministry of Education Objectives for 2018 (January-December),” published September 26, 2017, accessed May 1, 2019,
https://english.moe.gov.tw/cp-9-17161-B6F6B-1.html.
16 Rui Yang, Third Delight: The Internationalization of Higher Education in China, (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 36.
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included the reinstatement of the college entrance exam (Gaokao), the rebuilding and restoration of key higher education institutions that had moved, split, or merged during the Cultural Revolution era, the reestablishment of postgraduate studies, and permitting international study for Chinese students.17
While still largely publicly administered, China’s higher education institutions are becoming more marketized and privatized in the post-Mao era. Since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Policy in 1978, the Chinese higher education landscape has been characterized as an economic sector with an industrial orientation, which requires institutions to become more “managerial and entrepreneurial.”18 Prior to 1985, higher education enrollment rates remained at around five percent. In this elite higher education system, students received complete support from the state.Several government policies since then have changed the higher education system to become more marketized. The 1985 Decision on Reforming Chinese Educational System relaxed government control of higher education to allow institutions to start their own recruitment activities; in 1989, the Regulation on Higher Education Institution Tuition and Accommodation Fee proposed that the government should relinquish responsibility of supporting students in higher education, thereby initiating the shift toward charging tuition fees for all students. 19 Throughout the 1990s the PRC government promoted policies to expand access to higher education and orient higher education institutions toward market forces.
Ka Ho Mok identifies several trends in the marketization of China’s universities, including a shift toward charging fees for enrollment and tuition, raising those tuition fees to meet funding needs, a growing emphasis on student choice in higher education, and the gradual opening of the private education market.20 Meanwhile, Zha uses the historic strategic metaphor of “walking on two legs” to trace the massification of China’s higher education system by identifying three sets of “legs:” (1) governmental planning versus market forces, (2) elite versus local institutions, and (3) public versus private funding.
These sets of “legs” illustrate the balance between active government planning and opening the higher education sector to global market forces. This balance creates a
17 Lei Zhang, Ruyue Dai, and Kai Yu, “Chinese Higher Education Since 1977,” in Shibao Guo and Yan Guo, eds., Spotlight on China: Changes in Education under China’s Market Economy, (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2016), pp. 177-178.
18 Fengliang Zhu and Sumin Li, “Marketization in Chinese Higher Education,” in Hans G. Schuetze and German Alvarex Mandiola, op. cit., 181.
19 Hongxia Shan and Shibao Guo, “Massification of Chinese Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges in a Globalizing Context,” in Shibao Guo and Yan Guo, op. cit., p. 218.
20 Ka Ho Mok, “Marketizing Higher Education in Post-Mao China,” International Journal of Educational Development, vol. 20, 2000: pp. 114, 116.
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market in higher education that is guided by government planning and oversight on one hand and driven by market forces on the other.
These strategies have resulted in growing university enrollment rates and a dramatic increase in the number of higher education institutions in China. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of higher education institutions increased by 121.4 percent from 1,022 to 2,263, making China’s higher education system the largest in the world in terms of the number of institutions.21 Enrollment has also greatly expanded in China’s higher education system, recently achieving universal levels. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), gross enrolment in tertiary education in the PRC reached 51.1 percent in 2017, up from only 20.67 percent in 2008.22 A particularly large jump in enrollments occurred between 1998 and 1999, wherein undergraduate enrollments increased by 47.4 percent over that one year alone.23
While private institutions have grown in China and legislation has developed to meet the demand for private higher education since 2002, the proportion of students enrolled in private versus public institutions is much smaller than in Taiwan: about twenty percent of students enrolled in higher education are in private institutions.
However, like Taiwan, China’s university system now exhibits a hierarchical structure in which a small number of publicly-administered universities enjoy higher rankings, more prestige, and better resources than private institutions.24 This was the result of the PRC’s 21/1 and 98/5 projects launched in the late 1990s to enhance funding and global status of a small number of high-ranking public universities.25 Project 21/1 launched in 1995 to make additional funding available to China’s top 100 universities in their pursuit of high global status in academic and research activities. Project 98/5, which first launched in 1998, was also designed to funnel additional money and support to a small number of elite universities to quickly improve their status in the worldwide higher education
21 Qiang Zha, “’Walking on Two Legs:’ A Policy Analysis of China’s Move to Mass Higher Education,” in Hans G. Schuetze and German Alvarex Mandiola, eds., State and Market in Higher Education Reforms, (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2012), pp. 167-68.
22 UNESCO Institute of Statistics, “Browse by Country: China, Education in Literacy, Participation in Education,” 2019, accessed February 16, 2019, http://uis.unesco.org/country/CN.
23 Fengliang Zhu and Sumin Li, op. cit., 181.
24 Lei Zhang, Ruyue Dai, and Kai Yu, op. cit., p. 180.
25 Ruth Hayhoe and Jian Liu, “China’s Universities, Cross-Border Education, and Dialogue among Civilizations,” in David W. Chapman, William K Cummings, and Gerard A. Postiglione, eds., Crossing Borders in East Asian Higher Education, (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, 2010), p. 78.
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marketplace.26 These 21/1 and 98/5 universities now form the upper ranks of China’s higher education system. More recently, the PRC government’s “Double First Class” plan aims to support top-tier universities with government funding, with the addition of
targeted disciplines that are also getting support.27 These government-supported institutions illustrate the PRC’s efforts to create world-class universities in the global higher education market.
Higher education expansion has created its own set of challenges for Chinese society. As in Taiwan, inequalities have developed in mainland China’s higher education system that result in differences in student experiences in elite versus local and public versus private institutions. Students attending less prestigious institutions in the private education market must pay relatively more while receiving a lower-quality education in return. The largest increase in number of higher education institutions in China has also been confined to the lower levels of the higher education hierarchy, which includes tertiary-level vocational schools and the growing number of privately-funded
institutions.28 These developments in China reflect similar trends in Taiwan, even as control of the Chinese higher education system’s marketization and expansion is split between free market forces of privatization and guidance from the central government.
In China, the urban-rural divide manifests itself clearly in disparities in access to higher education. Shan and Guo point to rising tuition fees and aversion to taking on debt in the form of student loans as financial barriers to access among the lower-income rural population. Shan and Guo note that disparities exist even between the
locally-administered public universities, as local governments receive varying amounts of
funding dedicated toward maintaining higher education institutions.29 Wang notes that the Hukou (household registration) system is at the root of the urban-rural divide in education because it restricts the mobility of rural residents to China’s cities. The Hukou system therefore plays a role in preserving the division between urban and rural education
26 Qiang Zha, op. cit., p. 172.
27 The Charlesworth Group., “New Chinese Double First Class University Plan Released,” Charlesworth Author Services, October 3, 2017, accessed May 27, 2019, https://cwauthors.com/article/double-first-class-list.
28 Qiang Zha, op. cit., p. 173..
29 Hongxia Shan and Shibao Guo, op. cit., 224.
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systems, as the primary and secondary schooling that prepares children for higher education also exhibits wide disparities depending on location.30