Abstract
China has adopted policy experimentation (PE) as a means of introducing and testing innovative policy options for reforms in higher education (HE). This paper explores how PE plays out in the HE sector, involving state actors and university actors in a dynamic interactive process and bringing about institutional changes. This paper proposes a theoretical categorisation to understand four types of PE that occurred in China’s HE reforms, i.e. directive, authorised, exploratory and retrospectively authorised experiments. It discusses an empirically informed case study to illustrate the experiment process characterised by central-local interaction and intentionally ambiguous boundaries. The PE approach enables state-university interactions and power negotiations that create and maintain strategy space for consensus-building. The state, however, retains ultimate authority for legitimatising, selecting and expanding policy experiments. It is best understood as ‘elite-enabled experimentation within existing political hierarchies’. This study provides a distinctive perspective for understanding and explaining the power dynamics embedded in China’s HE reform process and more broadly the evolution of higher education governance.
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Notes
The phrase was originally proposed by Chen Yun in 1980, but it is constantly credited to Deng Xiaoping. Its literal meaning is that ‘we do not know how to cross the river, so we have to try it out through touching on stones in the water when crossing it’.
Suwen University was under the direct administration of the Ministry of M due to its disciplinary and industrial linkage until 1982. In 1983, it became a university directly administered by the MoE. City S reports directly to the central government. Its status equals to that of a province. Therefore, as a jurisdiction, the local government enjoys the same power and authority as a provincial government.
The ‘One Big Pot’ system (Da Guo Fan) literally means that everyone ‘eats’ from the same big pot. It refers to a system when everyone was treated equally and was paid the same salary irrespective of workload and efficiency.
In 1978, the net income per capita in China is ¥133.6. (Source: National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China)
It is a Chinese proverb used to describe someone who dares to be the first one to try new things or innovate.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. David Mills and Dr. Hubert Ertl, for their invaluable guidance in the research process. I'd also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions for improving this manuscript.
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Han, S. Policy experimentation and power negotiation in China’s higher education reforms. High Educ 79, 243–257 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00407-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00407-2