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China’s Move to Mass Higher Education: Analyzing the Policy Execution with a “NATO-Scheme”

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Survival of the Fittest

Part of the book series: New Frontiers of Educational Research ((NFER))

Abstract

In early 2007, China officially announced that within the past decade it had embraced mass higher education. This meant that the Chinese higher education system became the largest aggregate higher education system in the world surpassing the American system. Many higher education researchers around the world wondered how this dramatic expansion could have happened in such a short timeline. So far, this expansion is generally analyzed in the literature as a strictly top-down process (and purely based on an economic rationale) triggered and commanded by the central government policy. In this chapter, we provide insight into this change process and highlight how the Chinese government employed a wide range of policy instruments to encourage growth. The momentum for the change was gradually built up at the institutional level and further encouraged through the expansion policy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Great Leap Forward period between 1958 and 1960 represented a bold and idealistic attempt to achieve an accelerated social development and economic growth. In this period, higher education enjoyed rapid development, as seen as a means of “achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results.” The new policy stipulated that provincial governments could make decision on creation of a new higher education institution, if there was no requirement of central resources. Each province took the initiative to create new provincial level institutions, which resulted in an increase of nearly six-fold in the aggregate total of Chinese higher education institutions. Most of the new institutions were of such types as engineering, teacher training, agriculture, and medicine (traditional Chinese medicine in particular), whose share took 88.4 % of the increased total. The Great Leap Forward exhausted the human and material resources of higher education and led to a sharp decline in the quality, thus a period of adjustment followed to reverse this trend of development. Between 1961 and 1963, the government shut down 882 higher education institutions, of which 773 were engineering, teacher training, medical, and agriculture institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. York University, Toronto, Canada

    Qiang Zha

  2. University of Maryland, Washington, USA

    Jing Lin

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  1. Qiang Zha
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  2. Jing Lin
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Correspondence to Qiang Zha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, People's Republic of China

    Qi Li

  2. College of Education and Social Services, University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

    Cynthia Gerstl-Pepin

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Zha, Q., Lin, J. (2014). China’s Move to Mass Higher Education: Analyzing the Policy Execution with a “NATO-Scheme”. In: Li, Q., Gerstl-Pepin, C. (eds) Survival of the Fittest. New Frontiers of Educational Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39813-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39813-1_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39812-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39813-1

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