From Carp to Dragon
The Shanghai List and the Neoliberal Pursuit of
Modernization in Chinese Higher Education
Jeremy Cohen
School of International Service: B.A. International Studies
College of Arts and Sciences: B.S. Economics
University Honors
Advisor:
Dr. James H. Mittelman
School of International Service
Spring 2012
2 FROM CARP TO DRAGON: THE SHANGHAI LIST AND THE NEOLIBERAL
PURSUIT OF MODERNIZATION IN CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION
Do global university rankings reflect an assimilation of widely held transnational views about
education or are these rankings the product of historically and culturally contingent national
experience? This study examines how the emergence of the first global ranking—the Shanghai
Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)—reflects the
intermingling of dominant global discourses about higher education with Chinese realities and
asks what role ARWU has played in the restructuring of power and knowledge in Chinese higher
education under conditions of globalization. A number of methods are employed—including the
historical contextualization of ARWU, a critical review of its methodology, and interviews with
Chinese students and scholars. The analysis demonstrates that ARWU is both a product and an
instrument of neoliberalism in the Chinese context. Allied to a specific discourse of excellence
and quality in higher education, it reproduces the national narrative of modernization that is the
hallmark of Chinese neoliberalism. ARWU also builds legitimacy for policies that restructure
higher education in China and institute neoliberal techniques of governance including the
introduction of contract relationships and forms of self-evaluation.
3 Contents
I. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................1
Understanding the Globalization of Higher Education ...............................................................1
Global Rankings and the Restructuring of Higher Education .....................................................3
Neoliberalism...............................................................................................................................6
Neoliberalism in the Chinese Context .......................................................................................10
II. HISTORICAL LINEAGES OF PRESENT-DAY CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION..........13
Establishing the Modern University: 1860-1949.......................................................................14
Universities under Mao: 1949-1978 ..........................................................................................19
Chinese Universities and the Era of Neoliberal Reform: 1978-2003 ........................................23
ARWU .......................................................................................................................................28
III. ARWU METHODOLOGY: A CRITICAL AND COMPARATIVE REVIEW ....................30
Rankings and the Creation of Reality........................................................................................31
The Methodological Basis of ARWU........................................................................................34
ARWU in Comparative Perspective..........................................................................................40
IV. ARWU AND THE GOVERNANCE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: EXCELLENCE,
QUALITY, NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND THE STUDENT-CONSUMER ..................43
Legitimizing “World-Class” Discourse: ARWU and Project 985 ............................................44
Changes in Governance and Knowledge...................................................................................48
Changes in the Role of Students: Incomplete Consumerization?..............................................53
V. CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................................57
Changing Modernity..................................................................................................................57
Which Interests? Which Knowledge? .......................................................................................58
Implications ...............................................................................................................................62
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................65
1 I. INTRODUCTION
Globalizing processes are fundamentally changing the field of higher education. Over the
past three decades, what it means to be a university, a professor, or a student has been redefined
not only in the specific roles that each of these institutions or actors plays in society (whether
local, national, or global), but also in the host of changing expectations, pressures, and needs of
other forces—notably markets and the state—acting on them. One of the symptoms of the
globalization of higher education has been the rise, since 2003, of global university rankings.
The rankings, which began with the publication of the Academic Ranking of World Universities
(ARWU) by the Institute for Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, seek to create
comparisons of the relative strengths of universities worldwide and, as such, can be seen as the
product of the larger forces contributing to the globalization of contemporary higher education.
Since 2003, the number of global rankings has exploded, with new rankings coming from the
private, public and academic sectors in Europe, North America, and other sites in Asia.
Understanding the Globalization of Higher Education
There are numerous ways to look at the globalization of higher education. Simon
Marginson, who has written extensively on what he calls the “glonacal” (global, national, and
local) nature of higher education, holds that action in the global sphere of higher education plays
out on three levels: economic competition, status competition, and networks of open source
knowledge.1 Marginson’s analysis is useful on a number of levels. First, it helps to understand
the ways in which higher education actors perceive the field in which they operate. It accounts
for both competition and cooperation in the field of higher education and it acknowledges a
1
Simon Marginson, "Imagining the Global," in Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, ed. Simon
Marginson, Rajani Naidoo, and Roger King (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), 13.
2 multiplicity of motivations for action within the field. However, the heuristic is limited by its
insistence that we look at each of these levels of the global field as somehow separate.
Rather, it is clear that all of these forces interact with each other. Thus, while it is
undoubtedly true that economic and status competition exist in the global sphere, the two
phenomena are linked by the logic of neoliberal globalization. For instance, neoliberalism, and
the neoclassical economic theory on which it is based, conceives of higher education as a market
good and students as investors in human capital.2 In turn, human capital growth and innovation
have become the cornerstones of new economic growth theory.3 Neoliberal approaches proceed
from the assumption of individuals as rational economic actors and seek to explain social
phenomena in market terms. As national policymakers feel the pressures of neoliberal
globalization, they must continue to provide the market with what it needs—highly skilled labor
that can promote growth. The presence of status competition, partly related to the question of
who will be considered skilled and qualified—thus cannot be delinked from economic
competition. Similarly, status is likely to influence which institutions will receive funding and
survive in the effort to “rationalize” higher education in accordance with the logic of economic
efficiency. The existence of networks and open-source knowledge are seen as the cooperative
side of the globalization of higher education in Marginson’s heuristic. But these, too, may be
related to efforts to raise status (for instance, partnering with high-profile universities abroad) or
to issues of economic logic (university-industry partnerships).
We also must be careful—and here I think that Marginson is successful—in not viewing
these levels of the global field as essential aspects of higher education. Much of the restructuring
2
See, for instance, Gary S. Becker, "Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis," Journal of Political
Economy 70, no. 5 (October 1962).
3
See Paul M. Romer, "Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth," Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 5 (October
1986).
3 of higher education is the result of forces of globalization that cut across different fields of social
relations. One such force is the role of ideas, in particular the dominant position of neoliberal
ideas in the world today and in the field of higher education in particular. In turning to the
question of ideas, it is also necessary to address the issue of power. The question of power arises
because it is quite clear that knowledge and power, as Michel Foucault reminds us, are not
separable, but:
[R]ather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it
serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that there is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.4
So it is with the field of higher education. But the question of power and knowledge in
this sense is not simply a question of the a priori existence of a field known as “higher
education” and relations of power within it. It is also about how power creates the knowledge
that becomes its reality, and how much of the knowledge generated about higher education
comes to reproduce certain power relations within the field.
Global Rankings and the Restructuring of Higher Education
What role do rankings serve in this global space of higher education that Marginson
describes? Rankings are an effort to govern the higher education space. Those who have been
involved in the creation of the ranking systems argue that they are necessary for a number of
reasons including the enhancement of education and research quality,5 and to compare the
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 27.
International Ranking Expert Group, "Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions," IREG
Observatory, accessed March 31, 2012, last modified May 20, 2006, http://www.ireg-observatory.org/
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=41&Itemid=48.
5
4 strengths of national higher education systems.6 Rankings have been identified, along with
international organizations (the World Trade Organization and Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development), national quality assurance organizations, and civil society
groups as a primary mode of the governance of global higher education.7 Following this logic, by
providing more information to prospective students and their families (consumers of higher
education) on the relative strength of different institutions, competition between institutions for
the best students will lead organizations to voluntarily increase their own quality in order to
move up in the rankings and have access to a better pool of student-consumers.
It is not difficult to see that such a view is deeply rooted in the neoliberal view of
education. What quality and excellence are in higher education are normative concerns. In
contrast to the purveyors of rankings, Niilo Kauppi and Tero Erkkilä hold that the creation of
rankings is in itself a political choice.8 For them, rankings are “tools of symbolic power” that
reproduce dominant discourses about quality and attempt to represent an objective reality of
higher education.9 Thus we must be concerned with how rankings govern higher education and
how they come to say what higher education is (and therefore what it should be).
The stakes of ranking go well beyond higher education institutions themselves, to
students, academics, and national policymakers. With the rise of what has come to be known as
the “knowledge economy,” higher education credentials have become more important in finding
employment for individuals and in attracting business to employ individuals for national
economies. On the former front, Hazelkorn has noted that global rankings have the power to
6
Nian Cai Liu, Ying Cheng, and Li Liu, "Academic Ranking of World Universities Using Scientometrics: A
Comment to the 'Fatal Attraction,'" Scientometrics 64, no. 1 (2005): 101.
7
David D. Dill, "Governing Quality," in Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, ed. Simon Marginson,
Rajani Naidoo, and Roger King (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), 440.
8
Niilo Kauppi and Tero Erkkilä, "The Struggle Over Global Higher Education: Actors, Institutions, and Practices,"
International Political Sociology, no. 5 (2011).
9
Ibid., 317.
5 affect the global division of labor, with Dutch and Danish immigration law linking skilled labor
immigration visas to diplomas from universities above a certain threshold on ARWU or the
Times Higher Education (THE) ranking.10 Of course rankings have been found to change the
calculus of university funding and strategic priorities as well.11
Many of these studies on higher education rankings focus on how the rankings have
helped to restructure the global dimension of higher education and on the global roots of
university rankings. However, globalization is a multimodal set of processes that operates on
many different levels simultaneously, including the local, national, regional, and global. Thus
while rankings are clearly a symptom of globalization, each ranking is also a product of its
national and/or regional environment; it is conditioned by historical and cultural factors. In
examining a ranking, we see not only the impact of global ideas, pressures, and constraints, but
also national and cultural values and priorities, which are not always the same under conditions
of globalization. Here, I seek to bring the national context back in to the discussion about the
globalization of higher education by looking at the national roots of ARWU and the ways in
which it has contributed to the reform of Chinese higher education.
ARWU is a product of neoliberal ideas and a process of neoliberalization that have
operated both in the global space and in China during the reform period, intensifying in the postTiananmen Square era. It is also an instrument of neoliberalism that expands the marketization of
Chinese higher education. Methodologically, this paper draws on the history of higher education
in China, the methodology of ARWU, and interviews with Chinese scholars and students to
show how ARWU came into being—the neoliberal context that gave rise to it—and the ways in
10
Ellen Hazelkorn, "Measuring World-Class Excellence and the Global Obsession with Rankings," in Handbook on
Globalization and Higher Education, ed. Roger King, Simon Marginson, and Rajani Naidoo (Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2011), 509.
11
Ibid., 503-6.
6 which it has reproduced and extended this environment. Before doing so, however, I turn to a
discussion of neoliberalism in general and then in China in particular.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a social movement,12 an ideology,13 a policy
prescription,14 or a discourse.15 Much depends on the theoretical traditions on which authors rely.
Today, neoliberalism is all of these things, though this was not always the case. Whether we look
at neoliberalism as an ideology or a discourse, it is clear that both sides identify similar patterns
in defining what neoliberalism is in practice.
First and foremost, neoliberalism is about the introduction of market logic into all forms
of social relations. It involves the restructuring of what was considered the public sphere under
the welfare state or Keynesian consensus, what David Harvey refers to as “embedded
liberalism.”16 Such logic involves the rolling back of state welfare programs, of the public
financing of education and health care, and the end of state interventions in the economy.
Neoliberalism extends this logic into all parts of social relations by broadening privatization,
contractual relationships, and competition. On the global level, its purveyors advocate free(r)
trade and few(er) barriers to capital, what has been characterized as the “hyper-financialization”
of the global economy.17 The state, importantly, does not disappear, but it is restructured and
12
Steven C. Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
13
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
14
Bob Jessop, "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective," Antipode 34,
no. 3 (July 2002).
15
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Essence of Neoliberalism," Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998, accessed March 31,
2012, http://mondediplo.com/1998/ 12/08bourdieu.
16
David Harvey, 11.
17
Ward, 32.
7 oriented toward neoliberal ends and to smooth over what Harvey and others have identified as
the contradictions of neoliberalism.18
Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell argue that neoliberalism is a dynamic process that has
evolved over time.19 In effect this is a journey from ideology to policy prescription to discursive
deepening. The process began when a group of intellectuals quietly challenged the Keynesian
consensus beginning in the years immediately following World War II. For these intellectuals,
motivated by the work of Austrian political economist Friedrich von Hayek, the roll-back of the
welfare state was a necessity not only because markets were far more efficient and rational than
state provision, but also because the interventionist state was a threat to freedom itself. The
central importance of achieving individual freedom through a forced retreat of the interventionist
state and the application of the rules of the market can be seen in the titles of works like Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.
From here neoliberalism became a political program in Chile under Pinochet and then in
Britain and the United States under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The policies
implemented by both leaders—waves of privatization in Britain and the introduction of lowinflation monetary policy in the United States—were in keeping with the recommendations of
neoliberal intellectuals and rationalized under the slogan of economic efficiency.
Following the rollback of the state in the 1980s, neoliberalism faced the challenge of
building its own regulatory structures. In the wake of the rollback of the Keynesian state, the
inner contradictions of neoliberalism became a major reason for building new neoliberal state
forms and regulatory structures. These contradictions include the tension of market power,
market failure, inequality in the access to information, and the dislocating nature of rapid
18
19
David Harvey 21.
Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, "Neoliberalizing Space," Antipode 34, no. 3 (July 2002).
8 technological change in service to the market.20 Perhaps the most profound contradiction,
though, is that while neoliberalism claims to value free association, neoliberals tend to fear
collective groupings and social solidarities. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu has identified neoliberalism
as “a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives.”21 In the face of these
contradictions and challenges, neoliberalism has “focused on the purposeful construction and
consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance and regulatory relations.”22
This has meant the reproduction and entrenchment of neoliberal ideas.
There are two primary aspects of these neoliberal state forms, modes of governance and
regulatory relations that inform this study. The first is what Bourdieu has identified as a tendency
of neoliberalization, namely that is has “the means of making itself true and empirically
verifiable.”23 Neoliberal state forms, like the neoclassical economics from which they draw their
ideological raison d’être, favor the quantification and manipulation of data. Statistics, from the
German for “descriptions of the state,” have been a powerful tool in the building of the modern
state. For Foucault, the modern state is characterized by the notion of “governmentality,”
whereby the state constantly brings into being new fields to be governed.24 It is no surprise that
Foucault links the development of governmentality to the re-centering of the concept of economy
away from the household and in to the rationalities of the state. Governmentality is also allied to
the introduction of the widespread use of statistics and quantitative measures.25 The creation of
quantitative measures of performance, including university rankings, then, constitutes a certain
reality about higher education that makes it amenable to intervention by forces of governance
20
David Harvey, 67-9.
Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism.”
22
Peck and Tickell, 384, emphasis original.
23
Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism.”
24
Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102.
25
Ibid., 99.
21
9 (whether by the state or other actors).26 In this manner they have become one of the means by
which neoliberalism “makes itself true.”
The second aspect of neoliberal state forms, which draws on the power of these
quantitative tools, is the rise of what has come to be called the new public management (NPM).
As with the neoliberal project as a whole, NPM has sought to introduce market mechanisms and
the managerialism of the corporate world into the apparatuses of the state. Its goal is to replace
the traditional Weberian bureaucracy based on professionalization and hierarchization with
competition, orientation of public agencies toward marketization by repackaging the citizen as
customer, and constant (self-)evaluation and (self-)assessment to determine who will rise and
who will fall in the ranks of state agencies.27
Thus under neoliberalism and NPM, Western universities, according to Ward, have
moved from an orientation based on a “broader set of ideals and ethics” (substantive rationality)
to one based on practical outcomes and applications (technical rationality).28 This has been
accompanied by the introduction of a host of new performance measures, including university
rankings and internal assessment strategies designed to constantly review university
competitiveness under conditions of marketization. In addition, the nature of university
governance is shifting, with newly trained educational mangers taking the helm of universities
where academics used to lead.29 NPM draws on the ideological/discursive basis of neoliberalism,
that of market logic, and becomes a mechanism through which this logic is insinuated into the
operation and identity of higher education institutions. Such changes in governance exist side by
26
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, "Political Rationalities and Technologies of Government," in Texts, Contexts,
Concepts: Studies on Politics and Power in Language, ed. Sakari Hänninen and Kari Palonen (Jyväskylä, Finland:
Finnish Political Science Association, 1990), 168.
27
Ward, 52-3
28
Ibid., 66.
29
Ibid., 68.
10 side with the institutional restructuring of higher education along neoliberal lines through
strategies relating to marketization, the introduction of competition, deregulation, and
privatization.30
Neoliberalism in the Chinese Context
As with all forms of globalization, the globalization of ideas must be understood not only
from the standpoint of the hegemony of a certain set of ideas, but also from the standpoint of
how hegemonic ideas are assimilated to national contexts. Neoliberalism has been an important
principle guiding China’s reform period, particularly in the period following the Tiananmen
Square protests of 1989. Beginning with the ascent to power of Deng Xiaoping, China’s reform
period has been characterized by the adoption of a neoliberal project. For those who associate
neoliberalism only with its “roll back” variant, it is hard to see how China is a clear example of
neoliberalization in action. The party-state continues to exert authoritarian control over the lives
of 1.3 billion people. Yet, if we come to understand neoliberalism as a project for insinuating the
market mechanism into all aspects of social relations, it is quite clear that China has made the
turn towards neoliberalism.
Beginning in 1978, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Deng began a period of
experimentation with private enterprise in the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) along China’s
southeast coast. Aided by ethnic networks with Chinese in Hong Kong and elsewhere in
Southeast Asia, the SEZs were phenomenally successful. The first decade of reform (until the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989) was characterized by this somewhat cautious approach to
marketization. Yet there were also fundamental changes in the realms of decentralization of
30
Rajani Naidoo, "Global Learning in a Neoliberal Age: Implications for Development," in Global Inequalities and
Higher Education: Whose Interests are we Serving?, ed. Elaine Unterhalter and Vincent Carpentier (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Rajani Naidoo, "Rethinking Development: Higher Education and the New
Imperialism," in Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, ed. Simon Marginson, Rajani Naidoo, and
Roger King (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011).
11 authority, privatization, and the introduction of market mechanisms even into the state-owned
enterprises (SOEs).31 Notable also was the heightening of income inequality as the urban,
industrialized sectors of China were liberalized and privatized. What this amounted to according
to Wang Hui, was the transformation of inequality in industrial production, which had existed
under the imposed urban-rural divide of the Mao years, into more pronounced income
inequality.32
Following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which can been seen as a response to
the consequences of the neoliberalization of the Chinese state—namely, the rollback of social
protections and rising urban unemployment as a result of the economic “rationalization” of the
SOEs—Deng embarked on a tour to the south of China and a visit to the SEZs which had driven
China’s reform experiment. The trip was an effort to shore up support for his economic reforms,
which had been called into question by the events of 1989. Deng, declaring that, “It doesn’t
matter if it’s a white cat or a black cat, as long as it catches the mouse,” appeared to be
successful in accelerating neoliberal reforms. Following his tour, the pace of liberalization of the
SOEs was intensified, and the economic flexibilities allowed in the SEZs were extended to the
nation at large.33 The post-1992 period has been characterized by Barry Naughton as the period
of “reform with losers” as increases in inequality of income and opportunity accelerated.34
But Chinese neoliberalism is not necessarily motivated by the same historical legacies as
its Western counterparts. Rather, the adoption of neoliberalism by Chinese intellectuals and
policymakers is part of a longer historical legacy of the struggle to create a “modern” China. The
question of modernity has held a prominent place in Chinese thought since China was forced
31
David Harvey, 126.
Hui Wang, China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 51.
33
David Harvey, 125.
34
Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 91.
32
12 open by Western imperialists in the nineteenth century. Indeed, one could argue that many of the
transformations of Chinese society that have occurred over the last century or so—whether the
1911 Revolution, the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic, or the reform era—have been
related to this question of what it means to be modern and how China can be assured never to
have to relive its “century of national humiliation.”
For Wang, the question of modernity plays itself out in the tendency of Chinese
intellectuals and policymakers to view the world through a set of false binaries such as
China/West and tradition/modernity.35 Chinese neoliberalism, then, sees itself as a response to
the failures of socialism to produce Chinese modernization. Adherences to Western modes of
capitalist modernity, as encapsulated in neoliberalism, then become the means of escape from
tradition into modernity. There are many implications of this ontological perspective, which I
will continue to examine throughout this paper. The modernization informs much of the way the
Chinese state views higher education at the national level and vis-à-vis other actors on the global
level. It is also essential to understanding how ARWU is intimately linked to the national
context. Indeed, the history of the relationship between higher education and the state in China
charts in many ways the history of the modernization projects of the last century and a quarter. It
is to this changing relationship that I now turn.
35
Hui Wang, 134.
13 II. HISTORICAL LINEAGES OF PRESENT-DAY CHINESE HIGHER
EDUCATION
It may be tempting for any effort to contextualize the present higher education reform
efforts in China to take as a starting point the mid-1990s, when the current large-scale reforms
began with the effort to move to a mass higher education system. Others might contend that we
should begin with 1978 and the start of the period known in Chinese as gaige kaifang (reform
and opening up). It is my contention, however, that we must look back even further—to the final
decades of the nineteenth century, when the first modern Chinese universities came into being—
to truly understand the cultural and historical legacies which have impacted the present round of
reforms. By examining continuities and discontinuities between different periods of higher
education reform in China, we can better understand the distinct characteristics of the present
round of reform—in particular the role of neoliberalism—and the context that shaped the
emergence of the first global university ranking system.
In doing so, it is not my intention to (re)write an authoritative history of Chinese higher
education since the waning days of the Qing dynasty. Rather, I am interested in general changes
in the relationship between higher education and the state across different periods, as well as the
role of foreign influence and perspectives—and the ways in which they are translated to local
realities. In doing so, we will be able to see how the state-education nexus that existed in varying
forms in late imperial, nationalist, and socialist China gave way during the period of market
reforms to a more complex state-market-education relationship and the policies and ideas that
gave rise to ARWU.
At the outset, it is important to identify a number of patterns that seem to characterize the
history of Chinese higher education. The first of these holds true with only some exception for a
period of history dating back long before the establishment of the first modern universities at the
14 turn of the twentieth century and continues to the present namely, that higher education in China
is inextricably linked to the state. Antonio Gramsci held that the state is an agent of education,
creating the means of educating a vast array of “organic intellectuals” who can perpetuate the
hegemony of the dominant classes.36 For China, this has meant different things in different
periods as the state has been redefined many times over the course of the twentieth century. It is
clear, however, that the state has been a powerful agent of education, whether creating canonical
bodies of knowledge, regulating a hierarchical structure of higher education institutions, or
perpetrating new forms of knowledge governance. The state’s role in education is not
disinterested, but rather prioritizes certain forms of knowledge that tend to maintain the existing
order.37
The second pattern, which itself is an extension of the first, is the relationship of higher
education to Chinese conceptualizations of modernity and modernization. The modernization
question is central to understanding much of Chinese history since the end of the nineteenth
century. Higher education has been an important site of the modernization drive and the
struggles over higher education throughout the twentieth century have reflected debates about
how China should become modern and what modernity in the Chinese context means. In turning
to actual events, it is important to keep these two issues—the role of the state and
modernization—in mind.
Establishing the Modern University: 1860-1949
The establishment of the first universities in China is inextricably linked to the
modernization drive that arose with the Self-Strengthening Movement (ziqiang yundong) of the
36
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2010), 10-12.
This might be aligned with what Robert Cox has called “problem-solving” theory, which seeks to address
problems arising within the existing social order without questioning the nature of the order itself. Theory, and
indeed ideas and knowledge, as Cox reminds us are “always for someone and for some purpose.” See Robert W.
Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory," Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 128.
37
15 late Qing dynasty. Following the defeat of the Chinese in the Second Opium War, the attention
of intellectuals and the Qing court turned to the strengthening of China through the application of
Western military technology. The official line of the period held that modernization was not
simply the wholesale adoption of Western knowledge, but rather the application of Western
knowledge to the renewal and maintenance of the traditional Chinese state. Zhongxue weiti,
xixue weiyong (Chinese learning as the fundamental principles, Western knowledge for practical
application), was the motto of the era.38 Under this reigning motto, many Chinese intellectuals
travelled to Japan, Europe, and the United States to study at Western universities.
Upon returning to China, many advocated for the reform of the system of higher
education along more Western lines. Of course, any reform to higher education would involve
the application of Western principles of academic freedom and autonomy to the prevailing
realities on the ground in China. Until the beginning of the Self-Strengthening Movement, the
two major institutions of higher education in imperial China were the Imperial Academy (taixue
or guozijian) and the shuyuan. The Imperial Academy was intimately linked to the system of
imperial examinations. Young men from across the empire could compete to become the scholarbureaucrats of the various Chinese dynasties at the local, provincial, or central level. The most
successful candidates were selected to become part of the prestigious Hanlin Academy, from
which advisors to the Emperor were chosen. The system of imperial examinations and the
Imperial academy were deeply rooted in Confucian principles and texts. It was the duty of the
scholars of highest rank to offer interpretations of the Confucian texts, the canonical knowledge
that would regulate entrance to their profession and legitimate the reign of the Emperor. They
38
Richard A. Hartnett, The Saga of Chinese Higher Education from the Tongzhi Restoration to Tiananmen Square
(Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellon, 1998), 8.
16 exercised what Ruth Hayhoe has called a “scholarly monopoly” over the bureaucracy.39 These
scholar-bureaucrats, and the institutions of higher learning they ran, were clearly part of the state
apparatus, and did not inhabit autonomous space for the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s
sake as in the case of the classic Humboldtian university. The highest ranking scholars of the
Hanlin Academy, though, could criticize the Emperor for failure to govern in accordance with
the Confucian texts.40
In contrast to the system of imperial examination, the other institutions of higher learning
in Imperial China were the shuyuan. These were small private institutions, often geographically
distant from centers of state power that provided education in non-Confucian texts and had a
vibrant history of open history and debate. Their autonomy and freedom was tenuous. At times
they were brutally suppressed by the central government and at other times they were deputized
into the service of training young men for the imperial examinations.41 It was thus in the context
of these two types of institutions, one an integral part of state power, the other with some
measure of autonomy, as well as in the context of an intellectual movement to acquire and apply
Western knowledge in the service of strengthening the Chinese state, that the first forms of
modern higher education arrived in China.
After spending time in the West many Chinese intellectuals returned with ideas about
how to reform the Chinese system of higher education and how to introduce Western learning to
China.42 The first modern university, which was to become Tianjin University, was founded in
39
Ruth Hayhoe, China's Universities 1895-1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict (New York: Garland, 1996), 12.
For a lengthy comparison of Western and Eastern notions of the University see Hayhoe, China’s Universities
1895-1995, chapter 1.
41
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 12.
42
Cheung and Fan provide insights into what Chinese travelling abroad to visit and study at Western universities
were most interested in. According to them, scholars were most interested in (1) university organization and
curriculum and in comparing these to the tradition of the shuyuan and (2) “practical” and applied knowledge that
could be used in service to the state. See Chan-Fai Cheung and Guangxin Fan, "The Chinese Idea of University,
1866-1895," in Transmitting the Ideal of Enlightenment: Chinese Universities Since the Late Nineteenth Century,
40
17 1895, with the institution that was to become Shanghai Jiao Tong University established a year
later, and Peking University established on the remains of the disbanded Imperial Academy in
1898.
The state response to the establishment of these universities was mixed and partly related
to the immense control that the imperial court had wielded over knowledge and education until
this point. Thus, while Peking University was established during the Hundred Days’ Reform,
which itself was designed to reform the examination system through the introduction of western
schools of thought, the reform—as its name implies—was short-lived. Despite the conservative
backlash that ensued, many of the institutions managed to survive until the end of the Qing
dynasty, when a new phase in state-government relations was to begin. Under the dictates of the
reigning view of the late Qing dynasty, which saw Chinese knowledge as the base of all reforms,
the reforms that led to the creation of Peking University in 1898 did not call for the creation of
autonomous universities in the Western sense. Rather, they re-envisioned the system of state
control and canonical knowledge to include a synthesis with Western knowledge and placed
Peking University at the top of this hierarchy.43
The Nationalist period, from the fall of the Empire in 1911 to the end of the civil war in
1949, also exhibited a somewhat tense relationship between state and higher education.
However, it was during this period that Chinese universities gained what was arguably their
largest amount of autonomy from the weak Nationalist government. Many point to the tenure of
Cai Yuanpei, President of Peking University during the early part of this period, as the leader for
more modern (or Western form of education). A scholar-official admitted to the Hanlin
Academy, Cai Yuanpei had taken numerous study trips to Europe and in particular to Germany,
ed. Richard K.S. Mak (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009).
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 35.
43
18 a nation whose university model he admired—some might say to the point of idealization44—and
sought to emulate in China. As President of Peking University Cai introduced a democratic
structure of faulty governance, forming the first faculty senate in China, introduced meritocratic
promotion systems for professors, widened the offerings of the university to include Western
subjects along with Chinese classics, and attempted to achieve an institutional separation
between government and the university.45 It is with this last goal, and its varying degrees of
success, that I am most concerned.
Cai’s reordering of Peking University as an institution that would seek the pursuit of
knowledge and knowledge alone—he strongly criticized professors for their relationship to
government in his inaugural address and demanded that they choose between the university and
the state—was reflected in other legislation of the early Nationalist period which broadened the
autonomy of the university, called for faculty governance, and sought to separate theoretical
knowledge in the arts and sciences and professional knowledge in engineering and business into
separate institutions.46 Much of this was the work of Cai Yuanpei as Minister of Education in the
early Nationalist period.
However, even during periods of greater academic freedom and autonomy, such as the
one under discussion here, the role of the state still loomed large and played an important role in
the constitution of knowledge. Indeed, the goal of introducing Western models of education for
their ability to bring about modernization in this period was part of a larger intellectual effort to
build the Chinese state. The New Culture Movement (which ended in the May Fourth
44
Richard K.S. Mak, "The German Intellectual Tradition, Cai Yuanpei and the Founding of Peking University," in
Transmitting the Ideal of Enlightenment: Chinese Universities Since the Late Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard K.S.
Mak (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009), 44. Mak offers a detailed description of Cai’s views
through an analysis of his seminal essay Deyizhi Daxue di Tese (The Characteristics of German Universities) and
argues that Cai preferred to ignore issues in the German model including faculty disengagement and high levels of
centralized control amongst certain faculty as well as tensions between state and university.
45
Ibid.,48.
46
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 43.
19 Movement) sought to replace all that was “backward” in Chinese tradition with the scientific
rationality of the Western Enlightenment. We see here two of the false dichotomies that Wang
has pointed out—China/West and tradition/modernity. Thus the reforms introduced by Cai
Yuanpei and others into the higher education system were very much interested in the state and
how that state could be built. They were also influenced by certain misconceptions about
Western culture, Western models, and their applicability to the Chinese situation.
Following a brief period of growth in the number of institutions immediately after the
May Fourth movement, the Nationalists reasserted control over higher education, mandated the
teaching of official Nationalist ideology, and a refocus on applied science.47 The government
also began to institutionalize control through the introduction of a system of examinations for
university entrance that would somewhat widen the availability of university education, while
still maintaining its elite status.48 Thus the government came to exercise governance under its
own Ministry of Education and to, for the first time in the post-Imperial period set standards for
what types of knowledge should be taught and who should be admitted to degree programs. The
control exercised by the Nationalists again exerted a top-down structure on Chinese higher
education and reasserted state power in saying what modernization was and how it should be
obtained.
Universities under Mao: 1949-1978
Higher education during the Mao era can be characterized by alternation between
periods of extreme centralization (influence by the Soviet model) and radical egalitarian
decentralization (the Cultural Revolution). The former in particular, can be seen as part of the
larger project of socialist modernization that was one of the aims of the period. The state
47
48
Hartnett, 107.
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 54.
20 throughout exerts strong control over forms of higher education, deputizing it for its purposes,
whether to train industrial labor and socialist cadres or to pursue the destruction of old forms of
education and ways of learning deemed inimical to the Maoist course. The differing organization
of higher education, as in the Nationalist period, reflects in many ways the priorities of the state.
The close relationship that formed between the new People’s Republic and the Soviet
Union following the establishment of the former on October 1, 1949, spread also to the
organization of higher education. An influx of Soviet specialists recommended the
implementation of their model for higher education. The Soviet model maintained strict
government control over universities and a strict separation of basic research and teaching.
Universities would continue to perform the latter function, though universities were to be
reorganized and separated into narrow specializations. A telling sign of the role that universities
were expected to play in the new order was that all but the few top-tier comprehensive
universities (which would later become those selected for the most financial assistance during
the reform period), were to come under the control of the ministries who dealt with their
specialty.49 For instance, special agriculture and forestry universities were to be governed by the
Ministry of Agriculture. In contrast, basic research in science and social science was largely to
be carried out in a special national academy (the Chinese Academy of Science or CAS).50 These
were seen largely as places that would research the question of how to lead China down the
modernization path.
49
Hartnett, 207.
It should be noted that the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) was the umbrella organization for all basic
research and that the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) was not established until the reform period. Social
science research was carried out under a division of CAS. The organization of CAS, and the relegation of the social
sciences to a small department within it are powerful statements of what was valued in the early Mao era, namely
basic and applied science for modernization of the state. These values remain quite similar in the reform period
though the logic undergirding them changes as I argue in the next section. For more on the founding of CASS and
its precursor in CAS, see Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, The Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS): Shaping
the Reforms, Academia and China (1977-2003) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chapter 3.
50
21 In contrast, universities were simply places for the transfer of specialized knowledge
from teacher to student. The university system was led by Renmin (People’s) University in
Beijing, which was designed to provide training for party cadres in the administration of the
state, and which was responsible for articulating social science knowledge under the ideological
rubric of Marxism-Leninism.51
There are a number of important lessons to be gained from this. First, we see a return to
the highly centralized forms of canonical knowledge that had characterized an earlier period of
Chinese higher learning and a clear sense not only of education in service to the state, but of
education as an extension of the state, whereby the state is primarily responsible for the
constitution of knowledge through mechanisms such as Renmin University. Second, the
separation of different forms of knowledge and the specialization of knowledge created different
realms of knowledge to be constituted and controlled separately, but always under the auspices
of the state. Thus the role that different ministries played in running “their” universities came to
connote a sense of ownership on behalf of different state interests.52 The subsuming of the
economy into the state meant that university education in these institutions led to employment in
work units under these ministries and were intimately tied to the flow and control of labor,
reflecting the Maoist position that education and production should be linked. The separation of
basic research and teaching functions between CAS and the specialized universities was, as
Hayhoe has noted, ironic given Karl Marx’s call for the unity of theory and practice.53 Third, the
composition of the higher education system intimately reflected the priorities of the state,
namely, economic modernization. The Communist leadership, assembling for the first time to
address the issue of higher education in June 1950, following the establishment of the People’s
51
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 76.
Ruth Hayhoe, China's Universities and the Open Door (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 19-20.
53
Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895-1995, 76.
52
22 Republic, declared that the goal of the higher education system should be to “serve the economic
construction, which is the foundation for all the other construction.”54 Thus below Renmin
University in the hierarchy of Chinese university specialties were the polytechnic universities
with their focus on engineering and applied science.
Higher education in the Mao era would experience a number of turbulent events,
particularly during the period of the Cultural Revolution (wenhua dageming). As a large-scale
ideological project, the Cultural Revolution sought to rid China of any backward traditional or
capitalist elements. Denounced as socialist imperialists, Mao sought to distance himself from the
Soviet Union. On the educational front, Hayhoe sees the roots of this in the highly centralized yet
highly atomistic nature of the Socialist higher education model.55 Following this theory, the
revival of the informal, popular-education socialist schools that had been characteristic of the
Red Army of the civil war period and the struggles and purges of the period were a reaction, in
part, to the highly atomistic nature of the Soviet educational model, which had no precedent in
Chinese educational culture. This may certainly be the case, yet this argument largely ignores the
role of ideologies and state power. The state had not relinquished control over education, but
had merely repurposed it. It now became the center for the dissemination and actualization of a
new ideology and a new form of knowledge. Secured to Maoist thought and the cult of
personality that arose around Mao, education was still in service to the state. Thus while the
changes in education may have been facilitated by reaction to the cultural unsuitability of the
Soviet model, they were also largely the result of a reorientation of the state, temporarily, away
from economic modernization, and toward an ideological program.56
54
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 101.
56
Mao’s thought on modernity is difficult to discern. There is no doubt that many of his programs, for instance the
Great Leap Forward, sought a type of modernization or altermodernization (i.e. a way of achieving noncapitalist
55
23 The state-education nexus therefore never quite disappears over these two periods.
Rather, changes in the orientation of the state seem to be reflected in changes in higher education
over almost the entire period.57 The pattern, as we shall see, continues into the reform era and up
to the present day. Yet in order to understand the new state-university nexus in the reform period,
we will have to introduce a third element—markets. Market logic, and its insinuation into ever
more realms of social relations, are, as I discussed in the introduction, the driving forces of
neoliberalism and have come to predominate even in China’s socialist market economy during
the reform era.
Chinese Universities and the Era of Neoliberal Reform: 1978-2003
The turn toward markets in China following the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping was not
limited to the economy—now beginning to be conceptualized as a sphere that should be
meaningfully, if not entirely, distinct from the state—but also in other sectors of society. Higher
education was seen as a major avenue through which the pursuit of socialist modernization
would take place. In May 1985, the Central Committee of the CCP issued its second “Decision
on the Reform of the Educational System,” which stated in part that the “key to the reform of the
success in the higher education system” is to “enable the institutions of higher education to take
the initiative to meet the needs of economic and social development.”58 While this may seem
merely like a continuation of higher education in service to the state and modernization, there is
modernity). Events like the Cultural Revolution also point to the modernity side of Wang’s tradition/modernity
binary. The question of how to achieve such an altermodernity in the Chinese space was strongly linked to Mao’s
thought on contradiction (also the name of one of his most famous essays) and may have led to the disastrous
consequences of the Cultural Revolution and its radical rethinking of higher education. For more on this, see Arif
Dirlik, "Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong's Marxism," in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's
Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997).
57
The possible exceptions here are the periods of increasing university autonomy and academic freedom in the early
Nationalist period and during the Western retreat of Chinese universities during the Japanese occupation. As I have
argued though, the role of the state as a normative question was still a large concern amongst intellectuals and
universities during these periods.
58
Quoted in Qiping Yin and Gordon White, "The 'Marketisation' of Chinese Higher Education: A Critical
Assessment," Comparative Education 30, no. 3 (1994): 218.
24 an important difference. Whereas during the Mao era, higher education was absorbed into the
structures of the state, and served the economic modernization as an integral part of the state,
during the Reform era, the Chinese state was itself undergoing a restructuring along neoliberal
lines. In service to markets and economic growth—the two primary logics of neoliberalism—
higher education would continue to be governed by the state but in ways consistent with
neoliberalism and that would serve, as the above quote suggests, the burgeoning market
economic needs of the nation above all else.
During this period, the restructuring of Chinese higher education was characterized by
attempts to “rationalize” the structure of higher education in order to seek greater “efficiency.”59
Indeed much of the focus in this period was on the consolidation of institutions of higher
education in order to achieve economies of scale, and decentralization of financing and
governance. The World Bank pushed the consolidation focus in large part during the 1980s when
it ran eight higher education projects in China.60 The project of decentralization of governance
follows a larger strategy during the reform period of devolving authority to successively lower
levels of government. The idea here is that if localities compete with each other, the economic
system is likely to realize increases in both efficiency of production and quality of output. In the
case of higher education, decentralization was also justified on the ground that if China were to
continue to expand enrollments and increase the human capital endowment of its labor force—
something necessary for economic growth under new economic growth theory—the central
government would be unable to finance the project by itself. With their new tax-raising powers,
provincial governments would be able to assist in the financing of higher education.
59
Qiang Zha, "Understanding China's Move to Mass Higher Education from a Policy Perspective," in Portraits of
21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (Hong Kong: Springer, 2011), 26.
60
Hayhoe, China’s Universities and the Open Door, 159.
25 However, provincial governments, too, did not necessarily have the financial ability to
support universities, and universities began charging tuition. Tuition payments have been rising
ever since and continue to make up a large part of the budgets of Chinese universities
(particularly the vast majority of universities that are administered at the provincial level). The
portion of university budgets that come from student fees nearly doubled for students at
nationally funded universities and more than doubled for students at locally funded institutions
over the decade ending in 2004 (standing at 19.2 percent and 40.1 percent, respectively in
2004).61
The retreat of the state from financing all but the most elite Chinese universities has
meant that market mechanisms have caused universities to compete for fee-paying students. It
has also meant that Chinese universities have increasingly turned to other activities to raise their
own funds. One that is of particular interest is university-industry alliance. Officially sanctioned
by the state in order to achieve technology transfer, universities have encouraged the
commercialization of academic research through the acquisition of patents, developed their own
businesses to offer technical consulting and other services, and developed public-private
partnerships with industry whereby profits made from the commercialization of universitycreated knowledge are shared between stake-holders.62 This raises a number of issues. First, it
tends to favor applied research over basic research. Second, it leaves up to the market, and not
academic and professional communities, the decision on what knowledge is important and what
knowledge should be taught. Third, in a world where indicators of quality research and quality
higher education are two of the primary forces driving the decision-making processes of higher
education actors, the emphasis that is placed on providing applied knowledge to the marketplace
61
Zha, 48.
Hong Liu and Yunzhong Jiang, "Technology Transfer from Higher Education Institutions to Industry in China:
Nature and Implications," Technovation, no. 21 (2001).
62
26 may distract from the goal of quality teaching. Finally, a funding strategy based on the ability to
conduct high-level research disadvantages those universities that are not major research
universities, and are not designated to become so by the Chinese government.
Another feature of marketization is the introduction of private institutions of higher
education, known in Chinese as minban (or people-run) colleges. These institutions are an
important consequence of the neoliberal logic of state fiscal constraint in the area of education.
Despite the private nature of minban schools, the state often provides material and financial
support for the operation of some minban colleges.63 With even more limited support from
government funds than national or local universities, minban colleges must raise more money
from their students. Of course, since the neoliberal myth of the student-as-human-capital investor
has taken root amongst policymakers in China, the advent of tuition fees is seen as
unproblematic as long as it does not threaten social stability. Ka Ho Mok quotes a university
official from Guangdong Province who says that people support student fees because they
“believe that higher education is an investment.”64
Just as the issue of university-owned business and university-industry partnerships raises
the issue of what will be taught, so too does the devolution of authority for curriculum changes to
universities themselves (though often still approved by the state at the provincial or central
levels). On its face, this seems like a good idea. Letting universities decide what should be taught
is akin to asking professors and academics to take a lead role in designing university curricula.
The first issue with this is that faculty governance is still an emerging phenomenon in China.
While the tradition goes back to Cai Yuanpei’s tenure at Peking University, the reconstitution of
faculty governance has been disjointed and incomplete during the reform era. Shanghai Jiao
63
Ka Ho Mok, "Marketizing Higher Education in Post-Mao China," International Journal of Educational
Development, no. 20 (2000), 117.
64
Ibid., 116.
27 Tong University, the creator of ARWU, and a candidate for so-called “world-class” status, did
not gain an academic council until 2008.65 Until recently, it is quite possible that party secretaries
and university presidents have made most decisions.66 Either way, in the competition for feepaying students, the market will again determine what sorts of courses are offered and what types
of knowledge are prioritized. This is because the market has powerful feedback effects.
University education is seen as the key to well-paying employment. It used to be a guarantee of
employment, housing, and social services provided by the state. Without secure prospect of
employment, students are likely to choose majors in fields that are hot, prestigious, make money,
or have plentiful job offerings. Universities are eager to offer the programs that students want as
they are competing for their fees. Thus, economic management and finance were popular early
additions to university curricula, as were foreign language and culture and tourism courses,
which are cheap for universities and offer many job prospects in China.67
The management of faculty and personnel has also changed under the pressures of
neoliberalism. Tenure is rapidly disappearing for many and decisions on the re-appointment of
professors are made through performance evaluation measures where factors like research,
teaching, and service to society are quantified. Professors’ self-evaluations become part of
constant monitoring of their performance by university administrators.68 Re-appointment
procedures, along with incentivized remuneration that rewards publishing and service
encourages professors to make choices based on what is valued by administration (representing
in part the state and its market orientation), and to self-evaluate informally.
65
Qing Hui Wang, Qi Wang, and Nian Cai Liu, "Building World-Class Universities in China: Shanghai Jiao Tong
University," in The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities, ed. Philip G.
Altbach and Jamil Salmi (Washington: World Bank, 2011), 43.
66
It should be noted that today, Party Secretaries of Chinese universities are supposed to play the role of what would
be Chair of the Board of Trustees at an American university, except in matters relating to the Party. Given the nature
of politics in China, “matters relating to the Party” are not always clearly defined.
67
Yin and White, 229.
68
Ibid., 231.
28 These changes have permeated the entire reform period. However, following Deng’s
1992 Southern Tour, which consolidated support for the neoliberal turn, the Chinese government
embarked on a rapid expansion of higher education enrollment and a formal decision to stratify
the system further by selecting a number of institutions for intense funding that would rise to the
level of “world-class universities” (shijie yiliu daxue). In May 1998, at a celebration for the
centennial of Peking University, then General Secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, announced the
formation of Project 985. The project initially funded only Peking University and Tsinghua
University, but soon admitted seven other universities. These original nine have come to be
called the C9 League, often termed “China’s Ivy League.” It was in this effort, and against the
backdrop of the neoliberal restructuring of Chinese higher education, that ARWU came into
being.
ARWU
First published in June 2003, ARWU is the brainchild of Professor Liu Nian Cai of
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Though he is today the dean of the Graduate School of
Education at SJTU, at the time of the development of the rankings he was Professor and Vice
Dean of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. SJTU had just been included in
Project 985 when he began the task of benchmarking Chinese universities against international
peers. It should be noted that the original benchmarking was against U.S. institutions only and
that this, along with ARWU’s bias toward American institutions, are powerful indicators of the
goals of China’s higher education restructuring.69 The creators of ARWU have consulted with
69
Nian Cai Liu, "The Story of the Academic Ranking of World Universities," International Higher Education, no.
54 (2009): 2.
29 the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) on the relative position of Chinese universities vis-àvis universities in other part of the world.70
It appears that the Chinese definition of “world-class” is largely analogous to the picture
of higher education quality and excellence that ARWU creates. In a recent study, Brian Yoder
spoke with officials at the Ministry of Education, who spoke often of “publications in Nature and
Science,” which are one of the criteria of ARWU.71 It should also be noted that SJTU is
historically an engineering and natural science university, thus betraying part of the bias toward
the “hard” sciences in ARWU. I analyze the ARWU methodology in the next section.
ARWU continues to be published annually and has spawned variations—notably, a
ranking by subject field. ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, an organization that claims
independence from any government or corporate interest, now publishes it, though it is still run
by Professor Liu and his colleagues.72 I investigate ARWU’s history and its implications for
higher education in China in Section IV.
70
Ibid.
Brian Yoder, "Adaptation of Globally Held Ideas About Research in China's Universities," in Crossing Border's
in East Asian Higher Education, ed. David W. Chapman, William K. Cummings, and Gerard A. Postiglione (Hong
Kong: Springer, 2010), 114.
72
ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, "About ARWU," Academic Ranking of World Universities,
http://www.arwu.org/aboutARWU.jsp.
71
30 III. ARWU METHODOLOGY: A CRITICAL AND COMPARATIVE
REVIEW
The introduction of ARWU has led to widespread debate, both in China and elsewhere,
about its advantages and disadvantages. As the first global ranking, ARWU was exposed to
criticism of its conceptualization and methodology almost from the start. Critiques of ARWU
appear to fall into two broad camps. The first camp sees little wrong with the concept of global
university ranking and seeks only to refine the “scientific” nature of the rankings themselves. For
those in this camp, the “world-class universities” discourse is relatively unproblematic. The need
to create widely respected research universities is seen as a way to create the “human capital”
that will advance economic development and growth. The second camp questions the merit of
ranking itself. For those in this camp, the rankings are part of a hegemonic project to define what
the university should be on a global basis. In failing to take account of the multiplicity of goals,
missions, and objectives that exist at the departmental, institutional, national, or regional level,
rankings seek to replace this diversity with a singular model based on research performance and
reputation. Rankings are also inextricably linked, then, to the neoliberalizing processes and to the
new modes of governance (or governmentality) that neoliberalism gives rise to.
I begin this section by showing that the arguments proffered by the latter camp are far
more persuasive and also by drawing on literature that suggests that the line between these two
camps may not be as clear as I have just drawn it. In doing, so I will review many of the critiques
that have surfaced about global rankings in general. I next turn to an investigation and analysis of
the ARWU criteria and methodology using a framework adapted from Tero Erkkilä and Ossi
Piironen’s study on governance indicators.73 Finally, I look at ARWU’s methodology in
comparison to those of other rankings. In doing so, I show that ARWU’s definition of university
73
Tero Erkkilä and Ossi Piironen, "Politics and Numbers: The Iron Cage of Governance Indices," in Ethics and
Integrity in Public Administration: Concepts and Cases, ed. Raymond W. Cox III (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
2009).
31 excellence is strongly influenced by the Chinese experience and the role that modernization
discourse has played in China’s last century or so of history.
Rankings and the Creation of Reality
Most writers on the subject of university rankings connect their rise to the emergence of
higher education markets. However, those who fall into the camp of scholars that supports the
overall goal of rankings, see the rankings as a necessary step to address the changes that this
marketization and globalization have brought to the higher education field. Indeed, the creators
of ARWU have argued that the rankings are a way of defining what a “world-class” university
is.74 Others have raised the issue of quality, arguing that rankings close an information gap, by
providing information to students and families on the differences in higher education institutions.
In so constituting and empowering these consumers of higher education, universities will be
spurred on to improve their standards to attract better quality students, thus raising the quality of
higher education institutions overall.75
What the second argument ignores, and the first argument hints at, is that the process of
defining quality and “world-class” is an inherently political one. It is not a surprise that, as the
creators of ARWU note, there is no agreed-upon definition of “world-class.” This may explain,
in part, the rapid proliferation of global rankings. With different historical and cultural legacies,
different countries and regions may have different factors that they value in higher education.
These factors may not be present in rankings created elsewhere. Witness, for instance, the desire
74
Nian Cai Liu and Qi Wang, "Building World-Class Universities in China: A Dream Come True?" Chinese
Education and Society 44, no. 5 (2011): 3.
75
Hongcai Wang, "University Rankings: Status Quo, Dilemmas and Prospects," Chinese Education and Society 42,
no. 1 (2009).
32 of the European Union to create its own rankings following the relatively poor performance of
European universities in ARWU and the THE rankings.76
There are, however, other reasons that may have motivated the creation of alternate
rankings. The stakes of rankings are high. In an era of increasing student mobility and declining
government funding of higher education, the ability to attract students is vital to institutional
success and functioning. Indeed, the economic dimension of neoliberal globalization and the
globalization of higher education operate through complex interactions that create feedback and
feedforward pressures. For instance, institutions must attract quality students to move up in the
rankings. The recruitment of quality students and the rise in reputational factors may also affect
the employability of these graduates. Not coincidentally, the employability of graduates and the
thoughts of employers on university reputation and quality are metrics that are then employed in
some rankings, including THE.
At the level of national policy, the presence of world-class universities is seen as
necessary to the creation of what Harvey has called a “good business climate.”77 Thus neoliberal
globalization entails the restructuring and reorientation of the state to seek economic advantage
in an increasingly competitive global environment. Seeking to create a pool of high-skilled labor,
sometimes called “talent,” is an important factor in realizing economic advantage in a
“knowledge economy” that is characterized, according to Deane Neubauer, by “the assignment
and trading of values” that are new, rapidly created and destroyed, and of enormous magnitude.78
It is in this context that many concerns about the (mis)alignment of current higher education
institutions with new forms of social and economic organization come to be regular features of
76
Kauppi and Erkkilä, 321.
David Harvey, 79.
78
Deane E. Neubauer, "The End of the University as We Know It?" in The Emergent Knowledge Society and the
Future of Higher Education: Asian Perspectives, ed. Deane E. Neubauer (London: Routledge, 2012), 206.
77
33 higher education discourse at the national level.79 Such concerns about (re)aligning higher
education systems to current realities, i.e. the reality of what Karl Polanyi termed “market
society”80—become an integral way in which not only the state, but higher education
practitioners and students, become oriented towards the neoliberal project and adopt its tropes of
“talent,” “salability,” “quality,” “excellence,” etc.
That the drive for high rankings is related to these discursive elements of quality, talent,
and excellence is unsurprising. But rankings do not only create this competition for talent,
quality, and excellence—they also define what quality and excellence are. Despite the political
nature of university rankings, then, they appear to constitute objective reality about global higher
education and what constitutes excellence and quality.81 The channels through which rankings
come to constitute reality are manifold. One such way is the reproduction of certain ideas about
quality and excellence held in the professional communities of higher education leaders and
scholars. As Kauppi and Erkkilä note, these ideas, which come to be represented in the rankings,
appear objective because they represent expert knowledge, which has historically been
associated with the constitution of certain standards of objectivity.82 However, expert knowledge
itself tends to “reproduce certain structures of social domination.”83
The creation of objective reality also lies in the quantification of information on
university “performance.” Quantification has come to be a powerful tool for the creation of
apparently objective information and thus the constitution of reality. Statistical discourses are a
79
Ibid.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2001), 3.
81
Kauppi and Erkkilä, 317.
82
Ibid. See also Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) for a discussion of professional objectivity.
83
Ibid., 315. There is again a connection to Cox’s distinction between problem-solving and critical approaches. See
note 37.
80
34 way of constituting the social phenomena that preoccupy government.84 Indeed it is unlikely that
there would be such concepts as unemployment rates and crime rates had they not been
measured and quantified by administrative bureaucracies of the state.85 Quantification and
statistical measures, including university rankings, then become an important form of
governance or what Miller and Rose call “technologies of government, ways of entering reality
into the calculations of government by means of inscription techniques that make them amenable
to interventions.”86 Yet despite this ability to create reality, to act as a force for
“depoliticization,”87 quantitative measures are challenged. This has certainly been the case for
university rankings. Indeed, criticism of rankings may in large part be responsible for their
proliferation.88 ARWU’s methodological limitations have given rise to criticism and alternatives,
which have in turn spawned new rankings.
The Methodological Basis of ARWU
In their study of government indices, Erkkilä and Piironen identify three methods to
“examine the normative assumptions or aspirations” behind the indices.89 First is to investigate
how the concepts that the creators attempt to measure are defined. Second is to examine the
indicators that are employed. Third is to investigate the “actors, their connections, interests, and
intentions.”90 All of these factors are important in truly understanding how ARWU works as an
instrument of Chinese neoliberalism and its modernizing discourse. I will begin by looking at the
first factor and then investigating the measures that are used: how are these conceptions and their
84
Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
85
This point is raised in Porter, Trust in Numbers and Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers.
86
Miller and Rose, 168.
87
Erkkilä and Piironen, 126.
88
Kauppi and Erkkilä, 317.
89
Erkkilä and Piironen, 136.
90
Ibid., 137. In doing so, Erkkilä and Piironen draw on Munck and Verkuilen’s study on democracy indices. See
Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative
Indices," Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 1 (2002).
35 definitions operationalized? What do these first two categories tell us about the meaning of
university excellence and quality in the Chinese case?
ARWU’s creators were adamant that they should “rank research universities in the world
by their academic or research performance based on internationally comparable data that
everyone could check. No subjective measures were taken.”91 ARWU’s methodological criteria
are laid out in Table 1 below:
Table 1
ARWU Criteria
Criteria
Quality of Education
Quality of Faculty
Research Output
Size of Institution
Indicator
Alumni of Institution Winning Nobel
Prizes and Fields Medals
Staff of Institution Winning Nobel Prizes
and Fields Medals
Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject
categories
Articles Published in Nature and Science
Articles Indexed in Science Citation IndexExpanded and Social Science Citation
Index
Academic Performance with Respect to the
Size of an Institution
(Performance on above indicators divided
by size of full-time equivalent faculty)
Weight
10%
20%
20%
20%
20%
10%
Source: Liu, Cheng, and Liu, 2005.
The first area of interest is that the ranking is dominated by research output. This is in
keeping with the national rankings that preceded ARWU in China. For instance, the first national
ranking in China, produced by the Chinese Academy of Management Sciences ranked
universities only on citations in the Science Citation Index.92 Indeed if we look at the criteria,
91
Liu, Cheng, and Liu, Academic Ranking of World Universities, 101.
See Alex Usher and Massimo Savino, "A Global Survey of University Ranking and League Tables," Higher
Education in Europe 32, no. 1 (2007) and Ying Yu and Jingao Zhang, "An Empirical Study of the Credibility of
China's University Rankings," Chinese Education and Society 42, no. 1 (2009) for a comparison of China’s
domestic ranking systems.
92
36 research rankings account not only for the 40 percent weight given to the “research output”
criterion, but also to half of the total weight (an additional 20 percent of the total score) for the
“quality of faculty” criterion. This is 60 percent of the overall score for a university.
Additionally, since the final criterion, “institutional size,” is derived in part from the 60 percent
discussed above, research counts for the vast majority of an institution’s score. The rest of the
criteria have to do with faculty and alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
The research that ARWU values, is not any kind of research, but rather research in the
sciences and social sciences (mainly economics). Particularly telling is that while this table—
reproduced from an article by the creators of ARWU—simply states the number of Nobel Prizes
won by staff and alumni, the actual calculation of scores omits Nobel Prizes for Peace and
Literature.93 I would argue that this is related to the ways in which China sees its economic
modernization. Science is to bring forth a booming economy.94 As in other parts of the world,
“innovation” and “talent” dominate much of the discussion on economic policy.95 Science-asmodernization also play key roles in current CCP thought and propaganda. The reform era began
with Deng Xiaoping’s call to realize Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernizations (sige xiandaihua). Since
that time, the leaders of the CCP have called forth new principles that square with this drive for
modernization. Current Chinese President Hu Jintao has called his governing doctrine the
“Scientific Development Perspective” (kexue fazhanguan). While this viewpoint has often been
93
Liu, Cheng, and Liu, 103. As David Harvey notes, the “Nobel Prize” in Economics is not actually part of the
original bequest of Alfred Nobel and was instead created later by the Swedish Central Bank and for years
recognized mostly neoliberal economists. See David Harvey, A Brief History.
94
See Ministry of Education, "Action Plan for Vitalizing Education for the Twenty-First Century," Chinese
Education and Society 34, no. 4 (2001). The Action Plan specifically links higher education and the goal set forth by
the CCP to “develop the country through science and technology.” It contains provision for the expansion of
research activities at universities and the expansion of university-industry alliance.
95
See for instance China’s most recent (12th) Five Year Plan. The Seventh section which deals with creating an
“innovative” and “talented” nation has two parts that deal with attracting and developing a pool of “talent” in China
and one part that deals with education reform. The educational reform section particularly calls for the strengthening
of applied science. People's Republic of China, Guomin jingji he shehui fazhan di shi'erge wunian guihua gangyao
(quanwen) [Outline of the National People's Twelfth Five-Year Guidance for Economic and Social Development
(Full Text)], http://www.gov.cn/2011lh/content_1825838_8.htm.
37 aligned with its supposed goal—the creation of a harmonious society (hexie shehui)—it also
seeks to guide development through the managerial “rationalization” of the bureaucracy and
seeks to “proceed from reality.”96 Of course, to proceed from reality, one must say first what
reality is. In the higher education field, ARWU provides this window to “reality” for China.
Moving from how excellence and quality are defined—research—to how this is
quantified provides insight into how quantitative data can embed certain forms of power
relations, even when appearing objective. The information that the creators of ARWU used is, in
principle, widely available and thus makes their findings appear less subjective and more
“scientific” in their verifiability. However, a number of concerns have been raised about the
ways in which the data are used, particularly the application of bibliometric data from the
citation indexes. It should be noted from the outset that bibliometric statistics used in this and
other rankings are maintained by a small number of companies that have an interest in making
rankings a regular business. Indeed, Thomson Reuters, one of these companies, is a sponsor of
the THE rankings.
Despite the availability of the data, as many have noted, the data are incomplete and may
themselves reproduce certain inequalities and types of dominance within the global system of
higher education. For instance, while non-English journals are included in the citation databases,
they are often not included in rankings. Even if they were, because the rankings count the
number of times a work has been cited by others, English publications tend to be favored.97 Thus
English-language journals (and by extension universities in the United States and Britain) come
to dominate a raking system where 60% or more of the weight is assigned to the content of these
96
See Joseph Fewsmith, "Promoting the Scientific Development Concept," China Leadership Monitor, no. 11
(2004) for a further discussion of the Scientific Development Perspective.
97
Anthony F.J. van Raan, "Fatal Attraction: Conceptual and Methodological Problems in the Ranking of
Universities by Bibliometric Methods," Scientometrics 62, no. 1 (2005).
38 journals. Additionally, much of the information in the databases is not clearly linked to a single
institution. Foreign names, university consortia, umbrella organizations for different universities
(i.e. the University of London) all present problems in the matching of citations, authors, and
institutions.98 As with many other quantitative scientific endeavors, the ranking of universities is
driven by the data that are available. That the data are controlled by private firms, that they are
incomplete even in what they attempt to measure, and that they thus reproduce “common-sense”
notions about relative strengths and forms of dominance in higher education demonstrate the
political nature of ARWU.
Even if we are to accept that some measure of objectivity is indeed attainable in the use
of this data—if we were to forget for a brief moment Foucault’s insight on the mutual
constitution of knowledge and power—we might be surprised by this statement by the creators of
ARWU in explaining their methodology: “For institutions specialized in humanities and social
sciences such as London School of Economics, N&S [Nature and Science article publications] is
not considered, and the weight of N&S is relocated to other indicators.”99 Since no information
was collected from universities on what their mission or specialization was, it was up to the
researchers to decide this. In other words, LSE was exempted from the criteria that largely
emphasize scientific research no doubt because the creators felt it should be well represented on
their ranking list. It is thus not only through the use of numbers, whose abstraction belies their
power, that rankings perpetuate structures of dominance. The creators of rankings themselves see
what they want to see. Yet there is also a further limitation. Because rankings seek the
acceptance of government officials, students, parents, and other practitioners, they also cannot
interfere with deeply held popular beliefs about which universities are the “best”—beliefs which
98
99
Ibid.
Liu, Cheng, and Liu, 102.
39 are often widely held prior to the formation of rankings and which rankings themselves
reproduce and deepen. Because “best” is so often synonymous with elite in the field of higher
education, there is even further reason for rankings to perpetuate certain power relations. For
instance, one Chinese student, who attended Peking University and is now studying for a Masters
degree at Yale, told me that she had a high opinion of Zhejiang University because “I see many
of their students at schools in the U.S. like Yale. Of course, there are many Beida, Tsinghua
students here. But I also see a lot of students from this school [Zhejiang University].”100 This
student had never used ARWU (which does rank Zhejiang University in the top 10 in 2010), yet,
much like ARWU, she defined excellence relative to U.S. institutions.
It is also not clear why the creators decided to use alumni winning Nobel Prizes to
operationalize quality of education. It cannot be that those who have not won Nobel prizes have
not received a quality education (or that quality education is impossible in institutions that have
not produced a Nobel Prize winner). In part, this reflects the rankers desire for an easily
accessible “non-subjective” way of representing what is a contested concept. It also, though, is
related to the Chinese desire to create universities that truly win the status competition in higher
education. Chinese leaders have been talking about Nobel Prizes almost since they began
focusing on the task of building “world-class” universities.101
Despite the issues with data already noted, there are further problems related to the way
in which the indicators are aggregated and presented. It is not quite clear why the indicators have
been assigned the weights they have.102 Nor is it necessarily accurate to rank universities in order
when the differences in score are negligible in many cases. For instance, in the 2010 ARWU, the
100
Interview with Chinese student at Yale University, 15 March 2012.
See below, Section IV, and the discussion by Min Weifang on first-class universities in China.
102
van Raan, 138; Lee Harvey, "Rankings of Higher Education Institutions: A Critical Review," Quality in Higher
Education 14, no. 3 (2008): 191.
101
40 institution ranked second (UC-Berkeley) had a composite score of 72.4 and the third ranked
institution (Stanford) had a composite score of 72.1. The ranking thus creates the illusion that
there are actual differences between these two institutions, though even by the rankings own
standards, these are insignificant.
Overall, the ARWU rankings, with American universities representing eight of the top
ten global universities, 17 of the top 20, and 54 of the top 100 represents much of the Chinese
outlook on higher education and has played an important role in the neoliberal rationalization of
higher education. Before turning to an analysis of how ARWU’s methodology is intimately
linked with government policy, I would like to briefly compare ARWU with some other global
rankings to draw a distinction between the Chinese view of educational quality and excellence
and those held elsewhere. In doing so, it is useful to bear in mind that many of the criticisms
leveled at ARWU are equally applicable to these other global rankings.
ARWU in Comparative Perspective
I have chosen to compare ARWU to two other global rankings: the THE ranking and the
Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan’s (HHEACT) ranking. I
selected these two in order to compare ARWU with another global ranking that represented a
different region of the world as well as another Asian ranking to see regional similarities and
differences. I summarize the criteria of the most recent rankings in Table 2 below.
41 Table 2
Comparison of ARWU, THE, and HEEACT
ARWU
THE
HEEACT
Criteria
Education Quality, Faculty
International Outlook,
Research productivity,
Quality, Research Output
Industry Income,
Research impact,
Teaching,
research output
Citations/Research
Measures
Nobel Prizes (excluding
Reputational Survey,
Number of Articles,
Literature and Peace) and
proportion of PhDs,
Number of Citation/HiFields Medals, Indexed
research income (and
Cite Publications
Publications, Hi-Cite
specifically from
Publications
industry), international
students, research output
and impact
Source(s) Citation Indices, Nobel Prize
Higher education and
Citation Indices
and Fields Medal Data
disciplinary expert
opinion, University selfreports, Citation Indices
Sources: Liu, Cheng, and Liu 2005; Baty 2011; Altbach and Salmi 2011.
THE
The THE rankings are produced by Times Higher Education, a British-based publisher, in
cooperation with Thomson Reuters, the company that controls major citation databases used by
almost all rankings. THE has come under criticism for wild changes in its methodology that have
caused wild fluctuations in university rankings from year to year (far exaggerating the pace of
actual institutional change).103 The first thing to notice about THE is that its criteria are much
broader than either ARWU or HEEACT. Perhaps the best-known part of THE is its reputation
rankings, which survey global scholars identified by THE on university’s teaching and research
performance. In this way, the THE assures itself of reproducing dominant power structures in the
field. Its teaching quality category is otherwise proxied by student-faculty ratios and graduateundergraduate ratios. The largest portion of the weight is given to research, both volume and
influence. THE also has indicators for international outlook and industry income. Indeed THE’s
103
See for instance Lee Harvey, 194.
42 focus on income, including research and industry income, is a good example of the marketoriented framework for the neoliberal university.
HEEACT
HEEACT is a Taiwanese organization established to evaluate university performance. It
is associated with the Taiwanese Ministry of Education and consults with the latter on
shortcomings and improvement in the Taiwanese education system. It is arguably even more
research-oriented than ARWU, with all of its indicators relying on the citation indices. This
poses an interesting regional variation that may also be an institutional variation. ARWU and
HEEACT seem to have much in common in the way that they conceive of “excellence” in the
context of a university. Both of these rankings come from Asian—indeed Chinese—contexts.
Unlike THE, which is published by a private company, both of these rankings were created by
public entities with varying degrees of ties to their governments. These are contexts in which
science is particularly valued for the economic benefits it will bring and for the promises of
modernization that it offers. It is clear here that we see a continuation of the model of the
university in service to the state—the neoliberal state. The restructuring of the Chinese state—its
desire to create a highly educated workforce, a pool of talented people, heavy investment in
applied science and technological investment—demonstrate an acquiescence to the neoliberal
discourse of the knowledge economy. The rhetoric of competition that inheres in the knowledge
economy discourse, and in the nature of neoliberal globalization, is recaptured in the ranking list.
ARWU then, is not merely a representation of the standing of Chinese universities vis-à-vis their
global peers (particularly American peers) but also a narrative device in China’s framing of its
place in a global system and its aspirations within that system. It is this discursive framing that
offers clues to ARWU’s genesis and influence in China.
43 IV. ARWU AND THE GOVERNANCE OF HIGHER EDUCATION:
EXCELLENCE, QUALITY, NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND THE
STUDENT-CONSUMER
The global impacts of ARWU, examined to a certain extent in the preceding section, have
already been well documented. In giving rise to a global ranking phenomenon, ARWU and its
competitors have solidified certain notions about what quality higher education is, a viewpoint
that, as has been argued here and elsewhere, is indistinguishable from what it should be. In so
doing, ARWU and those that followed have also legitimated and reproduced the knowledge
economy discourse. Here, certain types of knowledge become necessary preconditions to the
achievement of economic growth under a neoliberal globalization characterized by the mobility
of capital and high-skilled labor. As a result, the preference for certain types of knowledge
(applied science, in particular) that will contribute to a nation’s competitiveness have become
key concerns for policymakers the world over. And rankings themselves have continued to
insinuate neoliberalism and market mechanisms into higher education—university administrators
in many parts of the world admit to carrying out policies designed to increase the rank of their
university on global lists. There is a complex nexus between status at the institutional level and
the pursuit of certain forms of knowledge and innovation in the quest for economic growth at the
national level. This is similar then, to Marginson’s “economy-knowledge-status” model of global
higher education, though it insists on drawing deeper linkages.104
Despite the prominence of global level analyses of ARWU, there has been little attempt
to understand its domestic implications. Doing so is important, given that impacts from global
rankings are not merely felt at the level of global restructuring but also at the domestic and
institutional level. Local conditions will impact the ways in which this restructuring is felt at the
institutional level in various places. In looking to China, we can see that while much of the
104
Marginson, “Imagining the Global,” 30.
44 neoliberal knowledge economy discourse has been adopted in China—along with human capital
and new economic growth theory—the ways in which neoliberal governmentality have been
implemented in the sphere of higher education are not always analogous to those in the West. At
the institutional level, many of the effects of neoliberal governmentality have been felt in
reforms of personnel systems and university governance. This entails, as we have seen, a retreat
of the state in terms of direct control while encouraging new forms of self-governance and selfdiscipline in line with the precepts of neoliberal ideology. Yet, in turning to the student
experience, it is difficult to see the ways in which ARWU has contributed to the constitution of
students as consumers—a process typical of neoliberal governmentality on higher education in
the West, yet limited in development in China. In investigating the effects of rankings and
quality discourse on Chinese universities, it is possible to get a sense not only of how far
restructuring has gone, but also of its limits.
Legitimizing “World-Class” Discourse: ARWU and Project 985
It is impossible to remove ARWU from the large discourse of which it forms an integral
part. It is thus necessary to first investigate this discourse in China and its major policy
implements, particularly Project 985 (985 gongcheng). In doing so, we also gain a better
understanding of the ARWU-government nexus. What is their relationship to each other? This
has been a somewhat murky question, and I hope to tease out some threads of information that
might help us to better understand this relationship. In doing so, it becomes clear that ARWU has
largely served as a tool to legitimize the government’s quest to create “world-class universities.”
ARUW, allied to this movement, has contributed to the importation of governance techniques
from American universities, to the legitimization of a hierarchical system of higher education,
and to the heightening of existing inequalities.
45 China’s drive for world-class universities began in 1993 with the creation of Project 211,
which funded over 100 universities with central government funds and aimed to create
universities of international distinction. Funding was distributed relatively equitably in terms of
geography and aggregate amounts.105 That changed in 1998. In May of that year, following a
speech by then-CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin, commemorating the centennial of Peking
University, the Ministry of Education approved a program recommended jointly by Peking
University and Tsinghua University for heavy investment in each of these universities to build
them up to “world-class” status. Although Jiang is often credited with the creation of the
program, it is important to note that his speech calling for greater investment to improve the
standing of Chinese universities was written for him by Peking University.106 The title of Jiang’s
speech is telling: “Mobilization of Rejuvenating the Nation Through Science and Education.”107
As we have noted, the obsession with increasing science output in China is particularly strong
and is linked in some respects to Chinese history (the century of national humiliation) and to the
heavy bias toward “modernization” in the CCP’s development orientation. It is also reflected in
ARWU’s criteria.
The first round of funding for Project 985 was a massive investment in Peking and
Tsinghua Universities. The following year an additional seven universities were admitted to the
program: Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harbin Institute of Technology,
Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, and
105
Mei Li and Qiongqiong Chen, "Globalization, Internationalization, and the World-Class University Movement:
The China Experience," in Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, ed. Roger King, Simon Marginson,
and Rajani Naidoo (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), 245. It should be noted that while funding was
geographically diverse, the program implemented a key Chinese educational development strategy—the creation of
“key” schools to act as models for other universities. This is something that Project 985 and ARWU also
accomplish, the latter somewhat less explicitly.
106
Ying Cheng, "A Reflection on the Effects of the 985 Project," Chinese Education and Society 44, no. 5 (2011):
21.
107
Ibid.
46 Xi’an Jiao Tong University. In total, since 1998, the program has funded thirty-nine universities
through a combination of central and provincial government funds. It should be noted, however,
that the original nine universities, which have now formed the C9 League, called the Chinese Ivy
League, receive the vast majority of central government funding with most other universities
required to obtain matching funds on their own from provincial level governments or other
funding sources.108
Project 985 thus contributed to the stratification of Chinese higher education. As central
government funding was increasingly diverted to the few schools selected for the project, other
universities had to turn to other sources of funding—particularly student fees. Paradoxically,
schools that would have the least to offer their graduates in terms of reputation and education
would come to cost the most.109 But it also had as its goal a complete transformation of the ways
in which universities carried out their business—a restructuring of governance at the institutional
level that was befitting a world-class university. This meant turning to American models of the
governance of higher education. The pervasive belief in the American model is clear from an
address on world-class universities given by Min Weifang, then-Party Secretary of Peking
University, a few months before the publication of ARWU on the web:
While studying at Stanford University, I frequently went to such famous universities as
the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Columbia University, and I
had the occasion to come in contact with their school leaderships and teachers, but I
rarely heard them bring up this subject [world-class universities]…I believe this may be
108
109
Li and Chen, 246. Note the use of “Ivy League” as a proxy for excellence.
See Zha, “Understanding China’s Move to Mass”
47 because higher education in the developed nations has already gone beyond this phase in
its development.110
Min goes on to discuss some issues relating to higher education development in Britain and to
the prominence of German higher education in the second half of the nineteenth century. But
much of his speech relates to the prominence of American universities. Being like Harvard, MIT,
and Stanford are the measure of quality. It is thus not surprising that ARWU reflects this view.
Harvard and Stanford are the goals to be reached under this teleological view of development.
Min also spends much time talking about Nobel Prize recipients, one of the ARWU criteria as
well. Much of the “common sense” underlying ARWU was already clearly established.
ARWU burst onto the global scene a few months later, and legitimated the Project 985
drive. While the creators of ARWU claim to have pursued their undertaking on a personal whim,
and indeed there is no reason to believe this was not the case, particularly given that Professor
Liu was at the time a chemistry professor and not an education scholar, there are clearly links
with the reigning common-sense view of what university quality and excellence are—namely
research output, which is the most measurable quantity to be found in any of the definitions
given by Professor Min or others.111 Additionally, ARWU’s creators have consulted with the
Ministry of Education. It is not clear in which direction the ideas regarding world-class
universities flowed. What is most likely is that they were widely held on both sides. Yet the drive
for research and status that began when the government chose favored universities to build up
into world-respected universities and which was legitimated by ARWU, managed to influence
the way that business was conducted at these universities.
110
Weifang Min, "Address Regarding First-Class Universities," Chinese Education and Society 37, no. 6 (2004): 9.
Professor Min does include such elements as academic atmosphere, though the creators of ARWU have rejected
the use of anything “subjective.”
111
48 Changes in Governance and Knowledge
One Chinese education scholar, who teaches at one of the non-C9 Project 985 schools,
insisted that the rankings had not had a large effect on Chinese higher education and that very
few people took them seriously.112 On one level this may be true. Project 985 and ARWU have
encouraged competition only amongst a small group of universities. The members of the C9
League are charged with becoming world-class universities, the other thirty universities are
charged only with becoming well known in China and known in the world. This is a designation
made by the government and universities not in the C9 League may not set goals related to
becoming world-class universities.113 Thus competition has been acute among high-performing
schools, whose orientation is global competition, and less so among others. The competition
relates to who will be ranked third, as Peking and Tsinghua must take the first two spots for the
rankings to maintain legitimacy. These two institutions then compete with each other. In
explaining the Peking University personnel reform, a contentious issue that arose in late 2003
and early 2004, after the publication of ARWU, Zhang Weiying wrote that part of the reason
why reform was so important was that Tsinghua had recently had more articles indexed in the
citation databases than Peking University.114 In this way, ARWU acts as that most fundamental
of the “technologies of governance,” the benchmark. It only, however, allows some Chinese
universities to participate. Only twenty or so Chinese universities are actually ranked.
On the other hand, ARWU, in legitimizing the world-class universities discourse and the
stratification of Project 985, has shifted the structure of Chinese higher education. The Peking
University personnel reform shows an extension of the logic promoted by ARWU. First, its
112
Interview with a Chinese higher education scholar, 6 April 2012.
See Yoder, “Adaptation of Globally Held,” 114.
114
Weiying Zhang, "Explanations by University Presidential Assistant Zhang Weiying Regarding the Second Draft
for Soliciting Opinions of the Plan for Reforming Beijing University's Engagements and Promotions System,"
Chinese Education and Society 38, no. 2 (2005): 15.
113
49 model is the American research university. Zhang Weiying’s response to concerns about the first
draft of the new personnel system at Peking University constantly refers to the American system:
“There is no need to hide that these two features put together constitute the ‘tenure-track’ system
practiced at American universities…The U.S. education and research would not take first place
in the world if not for this system;”115 and “If the postgraduate education we provided came up to
the level of that provided by the best American universities, more of the best students would
choose to study for Ph.D.s in Beida instead of going abroad to do so.”116
Second, the system created does indeed introduce many of the aspects of the American
system into the reforms at Peking University. It creates what is essentially a system of tenure.
The system has clearly been introduced to provide a competition mechanism for the faculty,
including those already employed. Under this system, faculty will be hired only under short-term
contracts until they reach the level of full professor. Those who have not reached this level will
be competing with those from both inside and outside the university for promotion. Of course,
such a reading of tenure as the competitive mechanism that made U.S. universities “great” is
only one part of the history of tenure in the United States, which also exists because of the need
to protect academic freedom—something that is far from being assured in China. Additionally,
the function of tenure may have changed over time. In other words, whereas the initial impetus
for tenure may have been the assurance of academic freedom, by bringing new factors into the
tenure decision (research income brought in, for instance), administrators and policymakers
begin to redefine the purposes and uses of tenure. Additionally, the short-term nature of these
contracts is not in keeping with most traditional tenure systems in the United States. It also
remains to be seen whether Peking University will create enough tenure-line faculty or if a vast
115
116
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 15.
50 pool of non-tenure track faculty will emerge as has occurred in the United States. What is clear is
that such a decision orients the faculty members’ attention toward marketing themselves in the
quest for promotion rather than toward the pursuit of knowledge, which China’s policymakers
say is necessary.117
Third, the personnel reforms link research output not only to the survival of the careers of
individual faculty members but also of individual departments. Thus there is a general
competition for funding amongst all of the departments and units. Those units that consistently
rank below the top ten in China will be offered a time to reform or will be closed by the
university.118 This is interesting, particularly given the concern of Chinese scholars and
policymakers on creating interdisciplinary and comprehensive universities. Closing departments
that underperform (likely smaller departments that did not have enough resources to start with) is
likely to skew the range of disciplines offered.
There is ample evidence that these types of reform are occurring at other universities as
well. Part of the power of the market mechanism of competition is the ease with which it is
internalized. This internalization leads to the sort of self-regulation in Foucault’s sense that is the
hallmark of governmentality in the neoliberal era. The introduction of competition in hiring
procedures leaves each person oriented toward the goals of the administration or the
departmental committee that makes decisions on these matters. Likewise, research performance
has come to be incentivized in other ways as well. At Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
international publication is rewarded with a subsidy or bonus over the regular academic salary.
The 10000RMB awarded for “high quality” papers is about 10 percent of the base salary being
117
118
See Min, “Address Regarding First-Class Universities”
Zhang, 20.
51 offered to recruits by SJTU.119 It is not quite clear how “high quality” is determined. But
professors are likely to be influenced in the projects they undertake as a result of this.120
At the institutional level, a number of trends have emerged. Benchmarking has become
increasingly commonplace at universities such as SJTU. ARWU itself is a form of
benchmarking. And there is clear indication that Project 985 universities, those likely to be
included in ARWU are using similar metrics—namely, citation indices—to position themselves
and their progress against their competitors, as we have seen in the case of Peking University and
SJTU. This is quite clear in the way that research is prioritized and incentivized. However, as
noted, there are a number of issues with this type of metric including language bias, and the
orientation of research toward widely acceptable topics and toward using dominant theories. This
may be less problematic in the development of science and technology but may be quite
problematic in the social sciences where dissent and criticism do not necessarily become highly
cited research.
There is also evidence of the vocationalization of higher education even at these elite
schools. It was recently reported that the central government planned to shut down majors at
public universities if fewer than 60 percent of graduates from those departments find
employment over a two-year period.121 Additionally, there has been a rise in the professionalteacher. SJTU for instance has created industry alliances where corporate professionals train
119
The 10000RMB figure comes from Wang, Wang, and Liu, 50. Salaries for new full-time advanced career recruits
at SJTU amounts to 100000RMB. The research award thus likely amounts to an even larger percentage of annual
salary for junior faculty. See Shanghai Jiao Tong University, "SJTU Accredited Professors Recruitment," Shanghai
Jiao Tong University, http://en.sjtu.edu.cn/join-us/ faculty-positions/chair-professors-and-accredited-professors/
sjtu-accredited-professors-recruitment/.
120
The issue of awards and their ability to become a form of administrative control over knowledge has not gone
unacknowledged by Chinese scholars. See for instance Guangcai Yan, "Thoughts on the Role of Government in the
Development of World-Class Universities," Chinese Education and Society 44, no. 5 (2011).
121
Laurie Burkitt, "China to Cancel College Majors that Don't Pay," China Real Time Report-WSJ, last modified
November 23, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/ chinarealtime/2011/11/23/china-to-cancel-college-majors-that-dont-pay/.
52 graduate students.122 Such a program has obvious benefits for both universities and industry:
universities save money on hiring staff and allow their graduates a better chance at employment;
industry gets to insure that an entire cohort of students is trained in its methods. Students no
doubt support such programs because they increase the chances of employment, thus seeming to
create a sort of market endorsement of their existence. Yet, these benefits also conspire to change
the calculus of which subjects will be taught and who will teach them.
It is possible that many of these institutional reforms would have taken place without
ARWU. The governing principles of the CCP—the Scientific Development Perspective and the
view that development can be properly “managed” using the best techniques—would likely have
insinuated these forms of governance and restructuring into higher education institutions. Yet
ARWU provides an additional level to this project. It reorients it outward towards seeking not
only institutional status on the global level, but also toward achieving national status at the global
level. Contrary to Western scholars, who sometimes seem puzzled by the incorporation of Nobel
Prizes among ARWU’s criteria, the Nobel Prize is linked to a long discourse of what success
means for China and its education system, as we have seen in the remarks from Professor Min.123
The paradox, of course, is that in pointing the way forward to American-style excellence,
ARWU must reproduce the secondary status of China’s top universities on the global level. The
task then becomes how to become more like Harvard. The answer: adopt forms of governance
and institutional structures more in keeping with the Harvard model and accelerate funding.
Crucially, in keeping with the “best practices” of managerialism and market thinking, Chinese
122
Wang, Wang, and Liu, 51-2.
Top-tier Chinese universities have been hiring Nobel laureates for a number of years now. For instance, the
Chinese American Nobel laureate Franklin Chen Ning Yang is affiliated with Tsinghua University and the French
Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier is a professor at SJTU. This can raise rankings but is also no doubt part of a larger
national quest for a Chinese Nobel.
123
53 policymakers conduct a selective reading of the American model, which is really many models
and incorporates far more than systems of tenure and autonomy.
ARWU, with its heavy emphasis on research output also tends to reinforce the
modernization drive and its links to China’s socialist market economy. This is certainly the case
with university-industry partnerships and government support for university-industry knowledge
transfer. As Neubauer notes, much of the concern about educational quality is linked to the
question of whether higher education and economic needs are properly aligned with economic
and social realities.124 In China, this has been a conscious goal of policymakers who see higher
education as a tool to, in the words of Jiang Zemin at the centenary of Peking University,
“rejuvenate the nation through science and education.” In a Gramscian sense, this goes one step
further, and higher education is to produce “talent” or “capable people” who will drive forward
the market modernization of China.125 The state continues its educational function.
Changes in the Role of Students: Incomplete Consumerization?
The empowerment of students as consumers is one of the promises of college rankings.126
The hope arises that students will make more informed decisions about where they go to school
and that as the best students flow to the best schools, other schools will increase the quality of
their education. The creation of students as consumers is also one of the primary technologies of
124
Neubauer, “The End of the University?” 206.
It should be noted that Chinese contains two phrases for educational quality. The first is jiaoyu zhiliang, which
refers to the quality of the education system. The other, more complex concept is suzhi jiaoyu. The phrase is
translated variously as “quality education” or “education for quality” and relates to the role of education in
cultivating the “quality” of individuals and the population at large. As Kipnis points out, suzhi is a word without a
direct English translation and it is often used to discuss the “quality” of different people, institutionalize social
hierarchy, and to legitimize the rule of the CCP as the agent that will cultivate the “quality” of the Chinese
population and raise them up into a strong nation. See Andrew Kipnis, "Suzhi: A Keyword Approach," China
Quarterly, no. 186 (2006). Zhou Yuanqing, a Chinese education official, links the quality of the system (jiaoyu
zhiliang) to suzhi jiaoyu and the role that universities play in cultural production and national strengthening. See
Yuanqing Zhou, "Tigao zhiliang shi jiaoyu gaige fazhan de guanjian [Improving Quality is the Key to the Reform
and Development of Education]," Zhongguo gaojiao yanjiu [Chinese Higher Education Research], no. 11 (2011): 45.
126
See International Ranking Expert Group, “The Berlin Principles”
125
54 neoliberal governmentality in the realm of higher education. As Miller and Rose have noted, one
of the rationalities of neoliberal governance is the reconstitution of social relations to create
citizens as consumers—empowered to make choices on the individual level.127 Such a shift has
changed the nature of the state from a classical Weberian bureaucratic one to one in which the
public relations and “customer-oriented” behavior of government agencies becomes of
paramount importance.128
In higher education, following the logic of neoliberal governmentality, we would expect
that ARWU and the discourse of world-class universities would participate in the constitution of
students as choice-makers in a market of higher education services and products. This appears to
be the case with student “voice” initiatives in the UK and Ireland.129 However, the extent to
which ARWU has been successful at doing this is somewhat questionable. None of the students
interviewed for this study reported consulting ARWU or any other national ranking in China.
(Though they had heard of all of the rankings, suggesting that they have some influence in
China). The general sentiment, however, was that my interviewees already knew which
universities were the best in China. There was no need to consult rankings. While this does
indeed indicate an individual assimilation of the dominant discourse on Chinese higher education
and the power structures within it, it does not mean that students have been constituted as
consumers in the traditional Western sense. To the extent that they have, ARWU seems to have
played only a minor role.
127
Miller and Rose, 178.
Ward, 54.
129
See Sara Bragg, "'Student Voice' and Governmentality: The Production of Enterprising Subjects?" Discourse:
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28, no. 3 (2007) and Luciana Lolich, "...and the Market Created the
Student to its Image and Likening: Neo-liberal Governmentality and its Effects on Higher Education in Ireland,"
Irish Educational Studies 30, no. 2 (2011).
128
55 Part of the reason for the incomplete reconstitution of students as consumers in China is
that university choice is still largely restricted. Students who take the National Higher Education
Entrance Examination, colloquially known as the gaokao, can only choose a set number of
choices in particular categories, with top-tier national universities in one level, top-tier provincial
institutions in the next and regular institutions of higher education in a third. Admission is
strictly by score and regional quota. Thus, there is not even the illusion of choice for most
students.
In addition to the restrictions on university admission, there is still a large sense of ties to
one’s own region in China. One student from Zhejiang Province attended college in neighboring
Shanghai at Fudan University. While she stated she would have gone to Beijing to attend Peking
or Tsinghua, she wanted to stay near to her home. She also noted that this might affect the ways
in which different people viewed different universities. People from the Northeast might rank
universities differently than those from Shanghai130. Thus while there clearly are preferences and
choice does exist to a certain extent, there are also limits to this choice imposed officially, by
custom, and by family, that prevents student choice from being a fully operable way of
governing the higher education sphere.
On the other hand, student choice does interact with many of the governance reforms
already seen. The market exhibits powerful feedback effects. Thus, while the Peking University
reform might eliminate underperforming departments, underperforming departments are likely to
not be those oriented to the market. As many students acknowledged, there are a number of “hot”
majors in China at the moment, including finance, computer science, and engineering. The two
reasons why these majors are considered “hot” are revealing of both the power of the market and
130
Interview with a Chinese student at American University, 21 March 2012.
56 the insinuation of neoliberal governmentality into higher education, and the limits of neoliberal
governmentality as an explanation for developments in China.
The first reason is that these majors are considered “practical.” There is a clear link to
demand for jobs in the field and a hope that money can be made. Students are thus encouraged,
individually and by their families, to seek viable employment. What sectors of the economy are
booming? Where will I be needed? Thus students are expected to constitute themselves as
rational economic actors in the neoliberal sense and continue to insinuate the preferences of the
market into higher education decisions and the structure of knowledge.
The second reason is that some majors are considered more appropriate to building up the
nation. Practicality is also a factor here. For many, one interviewee told me, these “hot”
disciplines are seen as ways of making a valuable contribution to the development of their
country.131 Here, we may need to introduce nationalism into the neoliberal governmentality
framework. It is the nationalism of a neoliberal state with Chinese characteristics and of the
rhetoric of science, technology, and talented people for national development. It is therefore not
surprising that these disciplines are thought to be the applied sciences and economics. This syncs
easily with the narratives put forth by the Chinese state. But it is also a distinct feature of the way
in which neoliberalism operates in the Chinese space. As the state restructures and reorients
itself, its people are doing so along with it. And it may be the power of the central state, applied
to the neoliberal project, that reproduces market forces in higher education at the same time that
powerful reorientations of the individual—governance of the self—begins to take form as the
market mechanism becomes internalized.
131
Ibid.
57 V. CONCLUSION
Changing Modernity
I began this study by looking at the beginnings of the “modern” university in China.
While the word “modern” seems relatively innocuous, it should be investigated further. The first
issue that arises is that Chinese higher education has a history that stretches back thousands of
years before the turn of the twentieth century. I have mentioned the shuyuan and the system of
imperial examinations. These were both integral parts of Chinese civilization and culture. The
second issue arises from the fact that “modern” in this context seems to mean “Western.” The
many Chinese intellectuals who travelled abroad and brought back the lessons of higher
education from Europe, Japan, and the United States, and the students and intellectuals involved
with the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, seriously questioned the use of Chinese
cultural practices in the face of imperial humiliation. The third issue is that modern is a moving
target. The modernity that Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun and the students at Peking University sought in
the second decade of the twentieth century differed both from the (alter)modernity sought by
Mao and the modernity that the current CCP seeks.
Yet modernity has been a powerful motivating force in China throughout this period.
Education has played a major role in this drive and changes in education have reflected the
shifting understanding of what it means to be modern in the Chinese context. Chinese parents
often express the sentiment that through education wangzi chenglong—they hope that their child
can become a dragon. The saying derives from the origin myth of the dragon who, according to
Chinese legend, was once a carp. This hope—for a transformation from humble fish to powerful
dragon—might characterize the motive force behind the various modernization movement of the
current era.
58 The dragon has a long history as a symbol of China, but the question of modernity brings
to bear other forces on Chinese higher education and knowledge production. Indeed today’s
quest for modern higher education sets up the objective goal of creating within China universities
that look more like the most respected American universities. ARWU, then, becomes not only
the tool of governance that encourages China and Chinese higher education institutions to reach
this goal but an instrument that also defines the goal to be obtained. This is not new.132 Though
there is a tendency to think of globalization as a recent phenomenon—the creation of the first
universities in China occurred during an earlier period of globalization, when Chinese thinkers
turned to the West for answers on nation building and higher education.
Which Interests? Which Knowledge?
ARWU and its conceptualization, then, are indicative of the mixing of ideas and views
that occurs in a globalizing world: a Chinese teleology of modernization and development allied
to neoliberal ideas about the efficiency of markets and economic growth. This is a political
project. As with any political project, certain interests will be advanced. It then becomes
necessary to ask, which interests?
First, the interests of the market are the primary driving force behind much of the “worldclass” restructuring that has occurred in Chinese higher education. These forces of the market are
often allied to the state—either because the state in China still owns large swaths of the economy
or because the neoliberal state is responsible for creating, in Harvey’s words, a “good business
climate.”133 The use of new types of management including benchmarking, self-assessment,
contract relationships, and performance evaluation have helped to insinuate market mechanisms
132
See Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17-19
on historical epochs of globalization.
133
David Harvey, 79.
59 into the operation of Chinese higher education—often, as in the case of the Peking University
personnel reform, because it was necessary to increase competitiveness and flexibility.
Second, though not necessarily inseparable from the first, ARWU advances the state’s
interests. These are of course the interests of the neoliberal or market-oriented state. But they are
also the interests of the Chinese party-state. Many believe that economic growth is the basis of
legitimacy for the CCP.134 But stability is also undermined by large-scale “mass actions” or
protests and the inequality of neoliberal policies. ARWU can serve two purposes then. It can
serve the goals of economic growth through market-orientation that builds consent for CCP rule.
It can also act as a powerful nationalist narrative device about the rising status of China. Nobel
Prizes and world-class universities are part of this narrative. As Harvey notes, these nationalist
responses help to smooth over the contradictions and problems of neoliberalism, even as they
create new ones.135
The question of whose interests are advanced also tells us something about how
knowledge will be valued. ARWU and other rankings have much to say about what knowledge
will be valued, primarily by linking that knowledge to where it is produced.136 But the question
of where knowledge is produced is not simply the question of which institution; it is also the
question of in which county and which market. Status competition—linked to the drive for
economic growth (and in the Chinese case, modernization)—arises at the national level as well
as the institutional one. Knowledge that is valued is the type of knowledge that will be published
in highly cited journals, it is scientific (both basic and applied), and it is technological knowledge
134
See, for instance, Minxin Pei, "Will the Chinese Communist Party Solve the Crisis?" Foreign Affairs Snapshot
(blog), March 12, 2009, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64862/minxin-pei/ will-the-chinese-communistparty-survive-the-crisis?page=show.
135
David Harvey, 85-6.
136
Simon Marginson, "The Knowledge Economy and Higher Education: A System for Regulating the Value of
Knowledge," Higher Education Management and Policy 21, no. 1 (2009): 7.
60 that can be commodified and that has the power to transform and accelerate market competition.
The drive for market power is also seen as part of the drive for national power on the world
stage.
The problem that arises, however, is that it is not always clear that knowledge itself is
intended to be a market good, despite the great lengths that governments—including the Chinese
government—have gone to encourage such commodification. University-produced knowledge
may also have a public function as well as a private market one.137 Knowledge at times comes to
be what Polanyi—referring to the land, labor, and money inputs of classical economics—called a
“fictitious commodity.”138 Beyond commodification lies the question of what role critical and
non-market oriented knowledge will play.
Status competition and university rankings are by definition, then, elite areas of concern.
But in providing the logic that governs higher education, they necessarily leave many behind. In
attaching value to knowledge by place of education, ARWU also creates the values that will
attach to different people’s skills. Thus nobody disagrees that graduates of Peking University and
Tsinghua University will have an easier time finding jobs both because of the extent to which
their alumni are placed in positions of power within the state and business, but also because of
popularly held beliefs about their superiority. But what of those who have not gone to Peking
University, Tsinghua University or another top university? For those in the rural areas of China,
the national examination system makes it difficult to attend the most prestigious universities in
China because the educational preparation is not as well-developed and widely available as it is
in the cities, and because of regional quotas. Local universities, the backbone of China’s mass
education system, also rely more on student fees for operating income than the prestigious
137
138
Ibid., 6.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 75.
61 national and provincial universities. But the value that attaches to those degrees is negligible
when compared to those from coastal universities or inland key universities. As one Chinese
student who attended Fudan University, a top-tier university said, “Many rural people know this
and so will not go [to university] and will go to the city to find a job instead.”139 These people
then join China’s large and insecure floating population (liudong renkou), the engine of China’s
economic growth during the reform period. In creating values for skills, ARWU also participates
in the legitimization and perpetuation of not only educational inequalities that exist in China
today, but also inequalities in social standing, opportunity, and labor.
In addition to those who are left out, the privileging of certain types of knowledge implies
the exclusion of others. What types of knowledge are excluded from ARWU? Social science and
humanities knowledge are a prime example. It may be hypothesized that the “sensitivity” of
social science knowledge (with the possible exception of economics), the perceived non-marketoriented nature of the humanities, and the ability of both to inspire critical thought, are reasons
for their exclusion from ARWU, as is the difficulty of quantifying achievement in these fields.
These fields are not unimportant in the view of Chinese policymakers; they provide invaluable
insight into how CCP rule might be sustained and an important role in cultural reproduction. Yet
their sensitive nature means that the government will likely continue to closely control them.
Despite their close control, the social sciences still draw largely from their Western counterparts.
A student studying for her Ph.D. in international relations at American University echoed this
concern: “There are no truly Chinese social science theories that address China’s needs and
experience.”140 The consequence of seeking a Western-oriented modernity in Chinese higher
education is the challenge of finding space for Chinese knowledge.
139
140
Interview with a Chinese student at American University, 13 March 2012.
Ibid.
62 The danger to the current regime of creating indigenous knowledge is that it could
challenge the status quo. This is the crux of the appeal of neoliberalism in the Chinese context.
As Bourdieu reminds us, the strength of neoliberalism is that it has the ability to make itself
true.141 The detached and self-evident empiricism of neoclassical economics and the logic of the
market establish themselves as best practices, beyond criticism. The introduction of
managerialism and new technologies of governance promise accountability even as they fail to
deliver. This is not uniquely Chinese, but the illusion of detached objectivity that surrounds these
approaches can be quite appealing in an authoritarian context. ARWU then, points the way to the
correct type of schooling, the best practices model, which will ensure the continued marketorientation of education, faculty, and students.
Implications
The in-depth analysis of ARWU raises a number of important issues for the study of the
globalization and governance of higher education. The first is the need for multi-level analysis.
While analyses of the restructuring of higher education at the global, regional, or national level
are important, globalization is a process that occurs at all of these levels. We cannot be content
with a ceteris paribus analysis as the forces that come from and play out in each level mix
together to form a complex whole. Global rankings may well have taken off even if the creators
of ARWU had not published their results in 2003. Yet, as Marginson notes, ARWU now enjoys
“first mover advantage” in the field of global higher education rankings.142 While ARWU does
indeed represent globally held views about excellence in higher education, it is also a product of
the Chinese experience: the drive for modernization through technology and science, for national
status from Nobel Prizes, and for a preference for the American model. These indicators say
141
142
Boudieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism.”
Marginson, “The Knowledge Economy,” 9.
63 something about the dominant discourse of higher education excellence, but unlike Western
counterparts like THE, play down subjective notions of prestige. The Chinese context has thus
been central to the institutionalization and politicization of defining university excellence.
Another major concern, related to the level-of-analysis question, is the question of how to
understand which voices and people are marginalized in the rush to stratified, elite education.
Conceptualizing mass and elite higher education as distinct spheres is again problematic. The
ways in which rankings legitimate and attach value to status differences in universities has real
consequences for the livelihoods of individuals and the opportunities they might have. This does
not necessarily mean an end to status. But in the case of China, and perhaps other national
contexts as well, it does mean providing some legitimacy through the state or otherwise to mass
forms of higher education that can address the educational disadvantages faced by the poorest in
light of the retreat of the state from educational provision.
On the governance front, it is important to draw links between rankings and the policies
that insinuate neoliberal technologies of governance into higher education. It is also important to
understand the limits of neoliberal governmentality—a theory developed in the West—to cases
like China. The limits imposed by the college examination system on students in their role as
“consumers” of higher education is fundamentally different than the restructuring of student
choice and student voice in Western educational settings, though they are both powered by
similar market feedback effects that encourage students and universities to more closely align
curricular offerings with the market. So, too, is the very hands-on role that the state plays in
educational decisions and in picking institutional winners and losers.
Finally, the question of alternatives to the current rankings arises. In many cases this
means the creation of more rankings. It is likely that rankings will be with us for a long time to
64 come. But that does not mean that we must live with the rankings as they currently stand. One
important issue on this front is who will govern the rankers? One place to begin is with the
Berlin Principles. These are a set of principles that rankers put together themselves. There are
many strengths in the Principles that, if actually employed, would help to address some of the
issues of the reproduction of power that current rankings face. For instance, they suggest that
differing national contexts and missions be taken into account and that rankings be one of many
ways of evaluating higher education. Rankings could be published every few years, rather than
every year to prevent them from inflating changes in the field.143 Additionally, government and
university projects could seek to benchmark higher education institutions against their own
histories rather than against an American or European model. The question is how to create
forms of accountability. Rankings appear to be a fact of life for many universities, but they also
create dilemmas and problems of administration. If universities can argue for greater input into
how rankings are constructed and governed then, it is possible to redefine the role that rankings
play. There is nothing inevitable about the impact global rankings have had on higher education
since the release of ARWU or about the higher education and knowledge value realities they
create.
143
See Kris Olds, "Bibliometrics, Global Rankings, and Transparency," GlobalHigherEd (blog), June 23, 2010,
http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/ 2010/06/23/bibliometrics-global-rankings-and-transparency/.
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