Abstract
This study explored the marketisation process of top-tier Chinese universities by scrutinising their self-promotional strategies over the past two decades. Drawing on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework, we identified all attitudinal markers in the About Us texts posted by 35 top-tier Chinese universities on their official websites at two time-points: the turn of the century and the year of 2021. The 35 universities were drawn from China’s “Double First Class” Initiative that prioritises the development of a select group of elite universities in China. Close textual analyses focussing on the attitudinal markers with reference to their contexts were conducted to identify the themes evaluated in the About Us texts; Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were run to quantitatively compare the relative frequencies of the attitudinal markers between the two phases, which was then supplemented by diachronic qualitative comparisons on the fine-grained linguistic features surrounding the markers. The study identified seven major themes positively appraised by the universities at both time-points. It also revealed diachronic differences in the use of attitudinal markers, reflecting a mediated change of promotional strategies over the past 20 years or so in the Chinese higher education context. These findings point to the influence of market, government, and tradition on Chinese top-tier universities’ promoting strategies and the role of social cognition in shaping student choice. They also suggest the emergence of a higher education system with Chinese characteristics that features a reconciliation of market and government forces.
Highlights
The powerful encroachment of globalisation and neoliberalism has accelerated the marketisation of higher educational institutions worldwide
The backbone of Chinese higher education are state-owned public universities, which means that institutional fundings, appointment of university leadership, quotas of faculty and student recruitment are predominately determined by the government, most frequently the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE)
This study focuses on the texts on the About Us webpages of top-tier Chinese universities, and investigates how the promotional strategies, and more broadly the marketisation process, are verbally reflected in the virtual genre over the past two decades
Summary
The powerful encroachment of globalisation and neoliberalism has accelerated the marketisation of higher educational institutions worldwide. Discursive Marketisation Through Positive Evaluation protocols originally prevalent in the business world, such as quality control, auditing and ranking performance, quantifying students’ experience, and vying for a favourable position in league tables (Furedi, 2011; Molesworth et al, 2011) This marketisation logic is manifest in Chinese universities, as they are observed to lure quality faculty with attractive monetary incentives (Feng, 2019), build universityrun enterprises to generate revenues (Eun et al, 2006), set publishing requirements and rewards schemes for faculty promotion and doctoral students’ graduation (Lei, 2021). The marketisation process of Chinese universities is guided and supervised by the government This mediated version of marketisation has been noted as a strong contributing factor for succumbing challenges posed by the prevailing neoliberalism, and for gradually bringing Chinese prestigious universities to the forefront in the global higher education sector. While only five universities in Chinese mainland entered the Times Higher Education Top 200 World universities Ranking in 2004, the number doubled in the same ranking in 2021 (Times Higher Education, 2021)
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