Tertiary Education in Contemporary China

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Tertiary education in contemporary China (1990–) marks an era of reforms and expansion. In this period, the Chinese tertiary education sector struck the world with its ambitious moves that simultaneously push for rapid enrollment growth, constitute new governance structures, and seek to build world-class universities. Though some of the initiatives were started as early as in the mid-1980s when the Chinese government proclaimed reform programs in the education realm, these moves were forged intensively and extensively since the 1990s. The aggregate enrollment of the tertiary education sector grew from 3.4 million in 1998 (the year immediately before the latest expansion that aimed at having a mass system) to 38 million in 2017, increasing more than eleven times in less than twenty years. The number of institutions increased from 1,022 to 2,913 in the same time span, or by nearly three times. Now the Chinese tertiary education sector stands out as the world’s largest, and a majority of high school graduates in the country are able to continue their education and training at the tertiary level, which used to be a privilege for the very few. In the meantime, the Chinese government has been investing hugely in the elite university schemes (i.e., Projects 211 and 985) to raise some universities and programs to a world-class standing. Put together, tertiary education in contemporary China exhibited extraordinary changes in the past two decades, thus has attracted interest from researchers worldwide to study it. Against this backdrop, we have compiled this bibliographic text in the hope that it would provide a useful research instrument for scholars and students in the field. For this sake, we set up five criteria when selecting the bibliographical items: (i) frequency of citations (it is commonly perceived that solid works are more likely to be referenced and good for further references); (ii) reputation of the publisher or the journal (reputable publishers and journals arguably produce high-quality publications); (iii) status of the author(s) (active researchers in good standing always contribute a bulk of meritorious works in their own fields); (iv) scholarly awards and honors (the recipients of scholarly awards and honors often make outstanding publications in the field); and (v) nominations by scholars in the field (as a highly eclectic thematic area that draws vigor from a large array of scholarly pursuits, it is the field’s practitioners who are most knowledgeable about the remarkable works with respect to tertiary education in contemporary China). The last criterion may especially help identify recent and important works that don’t necessarily get high visibility/citations yet. Based on these criteria, we have collected slightly over two hundred journal articles and scholarly books, published in English or Chinese since 1990, with roughly equal emphasis on literature in either language.