WORLD-CLASS UNIVERSITY BUILDING RATIONALES AND IMPLEMENTATION IN THE CONTEXT OF CHINA

Abstract

Over the last three decades, the quality and competitiveness of Chinese higher education have been strengthened significantly, due to the implementation of three major national excellence initiatives: Project 211, Project 985, and the current Double-world Class (DWC) Project. The direct manifestation of the success of Chinese higher education is its performance in major global rankings, with more and more leading Chinese universities entering the top 100 and top 200. The building of world-class universities (WCUs) has been accelerated since the inception of the DWC Project in 2015.

The purpose of this study is to examine the rationales, implementation and outcomes of the DWC Project. Over a decade ago, some academics in international higher education argued that there might be a distinctive Chinese model of building WCUs, and their argument is further supported by this study. Employing a theoretical framework consisting of political economy, ‘new’ institutionalism, and positional goods, this study examines secondary data from extensive government policy papers, and annual progress reports from three case study universities representing different dimensions of the DWC Project to begin to define the characteristics of this Chinese model.

This study confirms that the way in which China is building WCUs is very different from major western countries. These distinctions are fully reflected in the core value of the DWC Project, which is ‘World-class and with Chinese Characteristics’. My findings provide a full exemplification of these Chinese characteristics in different institutional settings. These characteristics are embodied in funding and usage, disciplinary development, student cultivation, faculty development, inheritance and innovation in fine culture, and institutional mechanism development of universities of the DWC Project.

From a political economy perspective, higher education provides resources for economic development and global competition. China has long been adopting a national strategy of rejuvenating its economy and national culture through science and education. Positions in global university rankings can be viewed as positional goods. National systems and individual universities are competing for the positional goods of limited supply. During the implementation of the DWC Project, political ideology has been further strengthened by comparison with the previous Projects 211 and 985. A number of isomorphic changes in university practices have been driven by the project, yet there are also indications that the DWC Project is moving towards a more diversified and balanced approach. Along with the huge success in building WCUs are issues and challenges such as huge imbalance in funding, and in geographical distributions of disciplines. This study has also identified trends within the DWC project, such as greater focus on basic research, frontier subjects, and future technologies; whilst paying more attention to traditional Chinese culture.

Date of Award	14 Feb 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Dan Davies (Supervisor) & Roger King (Supervisor)