Network Governance in Chinese Education: The Case Study of Schools in Civil Aviation Industry

Abstract

Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) established schools to reduce the burdens of the government to the provision of public education to its citizens since the 1950s. They spend billions of Chinese yuan each year to educate the children of their employees by creating and operating a variety of early years centers, schools, vocational institutes, and universities. However, the Chinese SOEs schools are required to transfer to local education bureaus under the modern enterprise system. This article utilizes network governance theory to explore the process of handover of Civil Aviation Guangzhou Children’s School from the Civil Aviation Department to the local education bureau. It traces the historical development of SOEs schools under the Civil Aviation industry. By drawing on policy document analysis and semi-constructed interviews of different stakeholders, this article reports the detailed process of transferring. By applying Asia as method lens of network governance, Mohe involves various stakeholders to work together to solve the problems and achieve win-win results. This article argues that education governance in the Chinese administrative system has entered a new phase, from a central hierarchical approach to the approach of central steering with local diversity. The central government drove its core policy objective, and the local governments were able to achieve the objective by their own means in ways that reflected local characteristics.