Emerging studies on university stratification have often attributed the developmental gaps between universities to the popularization of new public management in contexts where market mechanisms prevail in higher education governance. However, less attention has been paid to how state powers continue to mediate university stratification alongside…

In China, formal school groupings known as 'education collectives' have become one of the most common forms of school-to-school collaboration, promoted by policymakers to narrow the achievement gap between schools and optimise resource allocation. Previous research has focused on the purposes and achievements of education collectives rather than…

In the field of international education and development, International Language and Culture Promotion Organisations (ILCPOs) have played an important part for more than a century. More than 40 countries and regions have set up such organisations. Despite the diversity of these ILCPOs, few comparative studies have been conducted to examine their…

This paper explores how a novel university governance model at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), largely learned from the West, has been implemented in the highly institutionalised and centralised Chinese higher education system. For this purpose, we first constructed an analytical framework, integrating the…

Given the fact that school governance entails reorganizing power, changing organizational structures, and reconstructing education methods in contemporary Chinese primary and secondary schools, this study reviewed the relevant literature and conducted a semi-structured in-depth survey of more than 50 education administrators and primary and…

School governance is a topic of general interest worldwide in educational research, and in recent years, it has also drawn widespread attention in China. In order to examine the problems faced in the process of promoting the modernization of school governance at Chinese primary and secondary schools, we conducted interviews with different…

Foucauldian critical studies are cornucopian in illustrating how policy as discourse normalizes and yields human beings into made subjects in modern societies. However, Foucault's own slide from the 'terminal stage of discourse' pays little attention to the linguistic elements, and thus weakens the theory's potency in explaining the reality.…

The state-university's interaction and relationship has long been a key focus of scholarly discussion. A distinct strategy in China's higher education is policy experimentation (PE), which allows indigenous policy innovations to be generated at local institutions and incorporated into national policymaking. The PE approach allows power negotiation…

The reconstitution of the academic committee system is an important part of the construction of a modern university system in China. Through analysis of policy documents, it is evident that, in the historical context of the last half century or more, whenever fundamental changes have been made to systems related to academic power, these have…

This paper investigates the power landscapes within Chinese universities, against the larger backdrop of China's attempt to build modern university governance systems for developing world-class universities. Drawing upon Fairclough's three-dimensional conceptions of discourse and informed by Pierre Bourdieu's key conceptual notions of field and…

As an imprint of Confucian culture, China's education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as 'talent', an official translation of the Chinese term 'rencai' (literally, human-talent). Whereas the English word 'talent' itself denotes '[people with] natural aptitude or skill', 'talent' is currently mobilized in…

China has adopted policy experimentation (PE) as a means of introducing and testing innovative policy options for reforms in higher education (HE). This paper explores how PE plays out in the HE sector, involving state actors and university actors in a dynamic interactive process and bringing about institutional changes. This paper proposes a…

Whilst Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 has influenced education in various ways, major reforms perceived as promoting mainland control have been resisted. For two decades, Hong Kong's educational autonomy under the 'one country, two systems' formula was thus largely maintained. This changed radically with the response to the…

The key task in the establishment of a university charter is ensuring that the text of the charter is in conformity with the law, in compliance with regulations, and rational. This paper proposes a system of observed indicators for textual expression in private university charters in China, including 6 dimensions for Level 1 indicators and 20 key…

This paper proposes "perceptual multilingualism" as a research interest within the broader folk linguistic enterprise. By drawing on the geolinguistic mapping tasks popular in perceptual dialectology -- whereby participants are asked to draw and depict dialectal diversity in a given region -- we show that perceptual multilingualism can…