Abstract
Over the last 30 years or so, China has engaged in a series of systemic educational reforms. These reforms aimed to “improve the quality of the citizenry, produce more talents, and produce high quality talents” (MOE, 1985) through actions in all domains of education: governance and management, financing, teacher preparation, curriculum, and assessment. As a highly centralized political society, these reforms were always initiated by the central government and naturally their intended impacts were system-wide. However, not all reforms met with the same level of success. Some of them were much more fruitful than others.
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The 1977 Suggestion was launched in August 1977, immediately after Deng Xiaoping was reinstated after being purged twice during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1977). The College Entrance Exam (CEE) was cancelled for more than ten years during the Cultural Revolution, and its restoration was attributed to Deng. After Deng came to power, one of the first things he worked on was to reform China’s higher education system, starting with the way to select students. In August, the State Council approved the proposal to restore college entrance exams as the way to select students by the Ministry of Education, based on Deng’s suggestion.
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Zhao, Y., Qiu, W. (2010). China as a Case Study of Systemic Educational Reform. In: Hargreaves, A., Lieberman, A., Fullan, M., Hopkins, D. (eds) Second International Handbook of Educational Change. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2660-6_20
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