Abstract
Higher education has been continuously growing, changing and developing since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in China. With development of more than 30 years, Chinese higher education has achieved many breakthroughs. Meanwhile, it has been facing some new situations – demographic changes, economic development and massification itself – which all have direct influences. Some policy choices have been made responsively, including reforming the college entrance examination system, improving the quality of higher education, developing modern university system, promoting marketization and internationalization, and enhancing the quality guarantee system, which are currently the priorities of Chinese Government. There are also a number of conflicts involved in the policies of higher education development as well as in the policy-making process, such as conflicts between scale and quality, values of utilitarian and non-utilitarian, centralization and decentralization, and localization and internationalization, that have already brought about and will definitely continue to have important effects to the future development of Chinese higher education broadly.