On Chinese, European & American universities

Abstract

past three decades have seen an unprecedented expansion of higher education and, in the most recent time, efforts at reform and restructuring.1 My own university, Harvard, has overhauled its undergraduate curriculum in a comprehensive fashion for the 1⁄2rst time in thirty years. European universities have witnessed even more thoroughgoing changes in the structure of undergraduate education. But perhaps nowhere on earth have recent decades seen more revolutionary change in higher education than in the People’s Republic of China. Thirty years ago, Chinese universities were just reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution. Today they are poised for positions of international leadership in research and education. The case of Wuhan University, arguably China’s oldest modern university, illustrates the dramatic changes the Chinese system of higher education has undergone in the past century. Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei have long been important centers of commerce, scholarship, and political leadership. It was the great reforming Governor-General Zhang Zhidong, who founded in 1893–1⁄2ve years before Peking University began–the “Self-Strengthening Institute” that would become Wuhan University. That university would be a witness to central events of China’s twentieth century: it was in Wuhan that the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1912 began; Wuhan hosted one of the two contending Nationalist governments in 1927, and the retreating government of Chiang Kaishek in 1938. In the early People’s Republic, Wuhan became a great industrial sector. Today, western Hubei, upriver from Wuhan, is home to the largest engineering project in world history, the Three Gorges Dam (and even a “Three Gorges Dam University”). Wuhan University had a strong history of growth before 1949. It was then nearly destroyed during the Cultural Revolu-