The growing importance of the privateness in education: challenges for higher education governance in China

Abstract

The economic transition in China since the late 1970s has led not only to drastic social transformations but also to rapid advancements in science and technology, as well as the revolution in information and communications technology. In order to enhance the global competence of the Chinese population in coping with the challenges of the knowledge‐based economy, the higher education sector has been going through restructuring along the lines of marketization, privatization and decentralization. Responding to the globalization challenges, the Chinese government has opened up the education market by allowing private/minban higher education institutions and overseas universities to offer academic programmes in China. This paper sets out in this wider policy context to examine the growing importance of the ‘privateness’ in higher education provision in China, with particular reference to the policy implications for quality assurance, the public–private boundary, and tensions between the state and newly emerging private/minban education institutions.

Keywords:

• privateness in education
• minban education
• second‐tier colleges
• transnational higher education
• changing regulatory regime

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the reviewers for providing constructive comments for improving the paper. Thanks are also extended to the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation for supporting the research project of which the paper is reporting the findings and analysis.

Notes

1. The present research adopts a qualitative approach in data collection. Findings reported in this article mainly come from an intensive literature review of the privatization of higher education, together with a critical policy analysis, in‐depth field interviews and the author's field observations conducted in China. Since the core research focus of the present project is related to the policy processes and policy implications of the rise of minban/private education in China, the author has therefore conducted field interviews in Beijing, Zhejiang and Guangdong areas, three major places having more minban educational institutions, from 2004 to 2007 to talk to key stakeholders. Since China is a huge country with populations from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and the regional differences are substantial, the author has no intention to make any claims that the present findings represent the whole of China. Nonetheless, the observations and the analysis discussed in this article can considerably show how higher education institutions in urban China, particularly in those coastal cities, have experienced rapid transformations along the lines of privatization and marketization.