China’s national/global synergy in higher education and science since 1978

• In Event: Breakthroughs and bottlenecks: Chinese higher education 1978-2018.

Proposal

The paper reviews the rise of internationalised higher education and science in China since the Deng Xiaoping policy turn in 1978, in the context of worldwide globalisation and more recently, emerging national/global tensions. The crucial steps were Deng’s recognition that science and technology were key to lifting China in the other sectors (military, agriculture and industry) and his depoliticisation of university research (‘better expert than red’). Under Deng and his successors, China used managed decentralisation and international benchmarking to foster bottom up disciplinary cultures and free and open cross-border engagement along with national R&D capacity. This paralleled Deng’s successful fostering of local initiatives and foreign trade in the economy. China achieved a remarkable positive synergy between national and global developments in higher education, though mostly in the sciences: achievements in the social sciences and humanities have been more limited. In the last decade, however, the global setting has changed. National/global synergies have become more difficult to achieve and national/global tensions have increased. The economic globalisation of manufacturing has slowed, although digital globalisation continues, while many countries have experienced political conflicts in relation to migration and industrial protection. Not all nations have seen growing middle class opportunities on the scale of China, and not all countries separate their internal political relations from their external relations in the manner of China (and in China that separation is not complete). Working collaboratively with higher education and science everywhere, China’s universities have a leading role not only in building society and economy in China but in evolving global knowledge, culture and world society. The question now is how to develop that role in a more testing political environment.

Author

• Simon Marginson, Institute of Education, University of London