Higher Education in Chinese Society in the Period before the Xinhai Revolution: Modernization Policy

Abstract

Higher education in China is given special importance. The improvement of the higher education system is one of the pressing problems of the state. In modern conditions of rapidly developing technological progress, China is pursuing a policy aimed at achieving a high level of technical equipment of the educational process. At the same time, understanding the prerequisites of the initial stage of modernization of higher education, the leading ones of which are historical and cultural foundations, is considered especially important. The object of the study is the development of higher education in China. The subject of the study is the process of modernization of higher education in China during the XIX – the first half of the XX centuries. The article is devoted to an attempt to comprehend the prerequisites of the initial stage of modernization of higher education in China, the leading of which is the historical and cultural foundations of this process. The analysis of the features of the Chinese higher education system modernization is carried out on the basis of Chinese sources representing the characteristics of the higher education modernization in the period before the Xinhai Revolution. The subject is the prerequisites of the early stage of modernization of Chinese higher education. The scientific novelty of the article is associated with the development of factors for the higher education modernization in China. The methodology of the undertaken research is based on: a meaningful, functional, historical and evolutionary approach developed in the works of Chinese authors. The result of the study is the position that Chinese education is a set of specific models rooted in the traditional historical background of China. However, the factors of the higher education system formation in China has become the influence of Western countries, which in the second half of the XIX century got an opportunity to participate politically, economically, scientifically and spiritually in the life of the country. As the authors show, under the conditions of the education system modernization in China, higher education opened the era of going beyond tradition and became the basis of the system of qualified personnel production, aimed at the development of a society focused on Western patterns of culture and production.