Governing through ambiguity in the normalizing society: The lesson from Chinese transnational higher education regulation

ABSTRACT

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. Specifically, when the production of desirable subjects implicates clear target/norm-setting, ambiguous expressions are persistent in policy documents. To explicate this contradiction, this article firstly traces back to the foundation of Foucault’s critical approach to policy analysis – socio-linguistic studies, to demonstrate the inevitable existence of ambiguity in language. It then continues such interdisciplinary efforts by combining research in public administration, politics and international relationship, to explore the positive effects of equivocalness in policy texts. Empirically based on China’s regulation over transnational higher education, this study argues ambiguous expressions facilitate modern states, especially those fraught with conflicting discourses to mask the discursive conflict and leave negotiation room for innovative policy enactment. The vague norms of subject production are thus both inevitable and intentionally employed in policy developments.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• critical policy analysis
• discourse
• ambiguity
• policy enactment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here power mainly refer to the state power for two reasons: first, this study’s focus are the national policy documents; second, the state now appears ‘not simply [as] one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power—even if it is the most important—but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control’ (Foucault 1983, 224)..

2. Refer to Bacchi (2010) for the great discussion on the positivist paradigm of evidence-based approach in policy-making..

3. While critical discourse analysis is credited by its exploration of linguistic devices and tropes, its interpretation of discourse as ontologically stems from/resides in texts and its belief in revealing the pre-existing power relationships for the emancipation of oppressed groups (Fairclough 2009; Anderson and Holloway 2020) follows essentialism in portraying human beings as sovereign subjects who grasp meaning, takes power as oppressive instead of productive, and to some extent, consider the resistance of certain discourses that animate the norms of political conduct as emancipating from power relationships (quite the opposite, power and resistance are mutually constitutive (Davidson 2001)). Anderson and Holloway (2020) have conducted detailed discussions and distinctions about the usage of discourse in current policy analyses..

4. Studies in public administration area, for instance, such as Chun and Rainey (2005) also point out that valid, objective performance indicators are not always available for government agencies, whose responsibility are to produce (quasi-) public goods/services, pursue value-laden politically goals..

5. Thus, policy enactment in China not only involves the macro- and micro- politics (Ball 1990), but also needs to consider the meso-level (Han 2019) when Chinese local bureaucrats assume the positions of practitioners: China’s political systems do not distinguish between politicians and civil servants (the political/bureaucratic system) as the Chinese politicians are not elected (Li and Gore 2018) but are appointed by higher authorities..

6. It deserves notice that NYU Shanghai represents a special case. The reasons why it could achieve the relatively balanced student ratio are various, including but not confined to the high global ranking of NYU, the small quota for recruited students at NYU Shanghai and NYU’s global campus network. Other Sino-foreign cooperation universities may not utilize the ambiguous expression ‘mainly’ but try to attract potential students in other ways (for example, lower the tuition fee when compared with that of NYU Shanghai). Thanks for the reviewers for pointing this out..

7. Although ‘reasonable payback’ has been deleted in the revised Regulations on the Non-state Education Promotion Law in 2021 (State Council 2021), there are no updates accordingly in TNHE policies—the newly approved transnational activities continue to be differentiated according to the criteria that whether the operators require for ‘reasonable payback’ (MOE 2022)..

8. Not always stick to the principle of efficiency and effectiveness, but the standards could be changed according to the central government’s (occasionally changing) political interests in filtering local practices (Zeng 2015)..

Additional information

Funding

No Funding support is reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Xiao Han

Xiao HAN is a Beiyang Associate Professor at School of Education, Tianjin University