Abstract
China has experienced significant social, economic and political transformations since its economic reform started in the late 1970s. Considerable changes in its policy-making and implementation approaches have also emerged. Confronted with the intensified tension between the call for efficiency and strong pressure to improve social welfare, the Chinese government had no choice but to become instrumentally pragmatic in adopting different governance strategies to address the increasingly complex social, economic and political developments. Thus, neoliberal tenets were introduced. This article sets out to examine, against the wider policy context, how neoliberal tenets, particularly its emphasis on market principles, have been injected in higher education governance. This article aims to explore how the multi-faceted dynamics shaped the development of transnational higher education and influenced the governance of Sino-foreign cooperation universities.
Highlights
The growing influence of neoliberalism has shaped how Asian states manage their economic affairs and how they formulate public policy and manage the public sector (Carroll, 2012; Hayashi, 2010; Stubbs, 2009)
Two questions emerge when exploring the influence of neoliberal ideology on transnational higher education (TNHE) in the current study: first, with reference to Bernstein’s recontextualising rule (1990), when a certain kind of knowledge moves from one context to another, a space that permits ‘interruption, disruption and change’ is created (Singh, Thomas, & Harris, 2013, p. 469)
Literature that argued that modern governments would confront the increased multifaceted characteristics of contemporary public policy when governing the Higher education (HE) sector (Chou & Ravinet, 2015; Jayasuriya & Robertson, 2010)
Summary
The growing influence of neoliberalism has shaped how Asian states manage their economic affairs and how they formulate public policy and manage the public sector (Carroll, 2012; Hayashi, 2010; Stubbs, 2009). The single tendency of decentralization cannot explain the situation of ‘fragmentation.’ In this paper, we adopt the dual decentralization model to synthesize the state power and market principle when analysing their coordinated influence on the development of TNHE and in the governance of Sino-foreign cooperation universities.
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