One of the things we try to do on this show is introduce people to various higher education systems around the world and the various histories that shaped those systems. In doing so we have had some marvellous discussions: with Dr. Pushkar on India, Andrée Sursock on France, Marcelo Knobel in Brazil and Maria Yudkevich in Russia. But one major system we haven’t done yet is China.

China is a hard country to a handle on. It’s massive, obviously. And its post-secondary education system has changed enormously over the past forty-five years, starting from essentially nothing at the end of the cultural revolution to the world-challenging behemoth it is today. There’s been so much change, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine that one person could be up to the challenge of describing all of it. But we found that man – it’s Dr. Gerard Postiglione, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong.

In the conversation that follows, Gerry takes us through the whole of these changes, from the initial opening under Deng Xiaoping, through the rapid system expansion under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, to the present system under Xi Jinping. Gerry’s an excellent guide to the whole system, but pay special attention to what he says towards the end about how the system is reacting to a sudden bout of extreme graduate underemployment. It will remind you that the way we in the west think about education and its role in the economy is far from universal.

But enough from me: let’s hear from Gerry.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.29 | Higher Education in China

Transcript

Alex Usher: So, Jerry, one of the things that’s most striking about China’s economic rise after 1978 is the extent to which it was accompanied by major policy moves in higher education. So, the reintroduction of the Gaokao, which is a merit examination to control access to universities, a huge expansion of scholarships for overseas studies in STEM subjects that was very dear to Deng’s heart.And to some extent significant expansion of university places, so the major expansion wouldn’t happen for another couple of decades. Most countries get rich before they start paying this kind of attention to higher education. Why did the communist party decide to put such an emphasis on higher education policy so early in the development process?

Gerard Postiglione (GP): No, I don’t think that China deviated very much from what other countries are doing. You have to remember that 88 percent of the country was in extreme poverty at that time. And the enrollment rate when Deng Xiaoping, took over the leadership and into the early 1980s was only 2 to 3 percent of the access rates. So, if you look at that, and you say that China invested a tremendous amount of money, that’s not actually true. The sense in China was that the economy develops first, and then Higher education would develop after. And of course, the World Bank had the same kind of thinking. And China aligned itself very much with the World Bank and was very much involved with the World Bank. So, I don’t think that is correct.

Now China did send a tremendous number of people overseas. Initially it was government funded and gradually it moved over to private funding. And at the beginning, it was all STEM, as you mentioned. So, I mean, the question as to why it invested, another way to look at it — there are two reasons why. Bill Kirby (Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) said something, and I remember it, he said, “What civilization has a more enduring, successful record than China of educating, examining, and promoting talent to serve the state and society?” And that is some of the reason why there was a heavy emphasis on education. And that doesn’t necessarily mean a tremendous amount of money was spent, but you have to remember, in that period of time, particularly in the transition, because as you know during the 1980s there were student movements and so on, and things slowed down toward the end of the 1980s. But in the early 1990s–92 Deng Xiaoping made his southern trip to reignite the economic reforms, and Jiang Zemin took over, and Zhu Rongji was one of the ministers. And they were basically, Deng Xiaoping, Zhu Rongji, were looking at the East Asian tigers — Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and looking at what they were doing in higher education. And that was an impetus. Basically, at that time, China followed the Asian development model. Of course, it deviated later on.

AU: So, you mentioned Jiang Zemin so let’s fast forward 20 years from when Deng came to power. Let’s go to 1998. Jiang shows up at Peking University, Beida, and announces a new program to create world class universities. And that might be the most consequential policy announcement in higher education of the last 25 years. You know, it’s the speech that launched a thousand higher education excellence programs within China itself. The program and its successors have resulted in tens of billions of extra dollars spent on higher education. Can you tell us a little bit of what came to be known as the 985 Program out of this speech, but then specifically, how were institutions chosen to participate and how was the money spent?

GP: Yes, thank you Alex. That speech by President Jiang Zemin was not at, Peking University. It was actually at the Great Hall of the People on the hundredth anniversary of Peking University. It was May 4th in 1998, and I was actually invited to attend President Zemin’s speech, along with some of the presidents of America’s and Europe’s leading universities, and universities in Hong Kong, of course, and that’s when the announcement was made by President Jiang Zemin that China would build world class universities, and that turned out to be the 985 Plan. Now, there was a 211 excellence initiative before that. That one resulted in the selection of a hundred and — it actually extended right into 2008 — a hundred and fourteen universities. And the idea was to strengthen the top tier universities. The 985 was much more selective and it narrowed down, now 114 to about 38 universities. And that’s when the investments began to have a significant effect that was noticeable particularly in the infrastructure when you started to travel around China in the early 2000s — you notice the walls, universities were often surrounded by walls, which got pretty old, old walls were down. New buildings, new laboratories, and bank programs too. Lots of loans were taking place at that time. The universities were borrowing from banks and the infrastructure was clearly visible. And, of course, you might be thinking— it was more important to recruit the top scientists around the world, and so on that was one of the priorities, of course, but without good science laboratories without offices for academic staff — in the 1980s, academic staff at the top universities that didn’t even necessarily have offices. The 985 was a significant boost. And of course, there were lots of other things happening. Jiang Zemin, began to [move] universities away from the central ministries — the Ministry of Railroads, the Ministry of Textiles, the Ministry of Agriculture. And many of them were under the authority of provincial governments. There were many things going on during that administration, which had implications for education, particularly the state owned enterprises. Many of them— there was large scale unemployment at that time. And in fact, community colleges of the U.S. style, or they call them three year higher vocational technical colleges, were growing very rapidly at that time because there had to be ways to get people employed. Large scale unemployment at that time. But 1999, you had the Asian economic crisis and China was somewhat insulated from that because of just the way its economy was run at the time. But several young economists convinced, Jhu Rongji to take the limits off of the expansion of higher education. So, the 1999, the Asian economic crisis triggered mass education in order to get households to spend money. Because in the 1990s free tuition was eliminated and students and their families had to start paying for higher education. So, it’s good to look at the 985 in relationship to the system as a whole.

AU: So, you’ve, mentioned that we have to see the 985, the excellence projects in the context of a bunch of other initiatives, in particular the expansion of access, and we’re talking about an expansion of access that was quite substantial over the course of the 2000s, 2010, there’s a 10 fold, 20 fold, depending on how you count it. And it wasn’t all paid for by the state coffers, right? And some of it came from tuition fees. And how much of it came from provincial governments? How much of it came from local governments, and did it rest on borrowing? I remember stories about a decade ago saying that universities were billions of dollars in debt. What was the financial basis of expanding institutions that quickly?

GP: Their tuition, which was instituted in around 1994 at 6,000 renminbi that— now when you consider that the access rate went from say, 4%, 8% in the, probably 96, and then all of a sudden, it’s going on to 20, 30% in the first decade of 21st century. When you consider that you’re getting 10 million and 20 million, 30 million students getting access to higher education and families are paying for that. And of course, there are other costs related to that. So, university, we’re probably getting — now I have to look this up, but I thought I heard something like 18%. The government, of course, central government had basically the Ministry of Education, the Education Commission until about 2002, [then it] became the Ministry of Education again, and it was funding those institutions, the provincial universities, that many of them came under the provincial governments. And as you know, the average enrollment rate in the 1980s at a university was about 3000 — two to three thousand students. And during that first decade it was going up to 20, 30, thousand students. So, part of that had to do with the mergers. There were at least 250 cases of colleges and universities merging to create economies of scale. There were loans from the World Bank, from the Asian Development Bank. There were economies of scale which helped to cut costs down, and of course tuition was coming in. And then you had the private institutions. Private colleges began to grow at that time. I mean, the late 80s, you had private schools, and then you had the law on the encouragement of private education in the early 2000s. Of course, that’s been amended. And yes, there was debt. And certainly — and I don’t know you know how you want to conceptualize that — but the World Bank, of course, was talking about knowledge economies at that time, and that’s when many countries began to stop limiting investment to basic education and starting to invest in higher ed. It wasn’t a question of do you have enough money? It was a question of, it’s got to be done and we’ll find ways to support it. For example, by now 25 percent of all students in higher education are in private higher education. So, you talk about how the government was able to manage such a massive expansion. One area of privatization that wasn’t limited was private colleges. Private colleges kept going. All of the private tutorial schools were closed down, were banned by private higher ed. So, if you want to get a picture of how this was funded the answer is, you just find ways to do it because it’s important.

AU: So, let’s turn now to policy under Xi Jinping. One of the things that seemed to happen when power was handed over from Hu to Xi is that the gravy train for higher education funding seemed to have slowed down pretty significantly. What had been a decade or more of 15, 16 percent annual increases in funding, shrank to 2%, 5% actually behind the rate of economic growth. What happened exactly? Did the Xi government value higher education less than the previous administration or was it something else?

GP: The Xi Jinping administration valued and continues to value higher education as much as the previous administration. The rate of expansion of higher education was bound to slow down. But we are now moving past mass higher education to universal higher education. The expansion continues. We’re up to at least 60 percent now of an access rate, and there’s no slowing down on that. As you might know, the demography is shifting toward the elderly. So therefore, it’s very important to prepare talent. As much talent as possible, high-level talent, particularly in the STEM fields. And of course, Xi Jinping has placed a special emphasis on innovation, and science and technology. Now, when I visited in the early part of his administration, and I visit universities and colleges, they would be talking about what they call an innovative class within each specialization, they would have a special group of students who are the innovation class. Now, the entire universities and colleges are emphasizing innovation. And as you can see, many of China’s companies now have market share around the world in certain fields. So, the emphasis on innovation has paid off. And your question about Xi Jinping and is he supporting higher education? If you look at the percentage of the GDP for research and development, it’s been rising steadily, and the only country that’s spent more now is the United States, and I don’t see that slowing down.

AU: Let’s talk about that because in the last few months the Xi government has been talking a lot about what it calls new productive forces. And the idea seems to be that sustained rapid growth can be returned to China, you know, go above the current 5 percent if the country takes a lead position in certain advanced fields of technology. In theory, that could be a really big boom for R and D efforts inside universities. Do you think university’s role is in this new policy push? And is it likely to make them bigger recipients of public funding?

GP: Xi Jinping has made it very clear that he wants China to be an international center for the advancement of science and technology innovation and wants to recruit from all around the world. Now, a very large number of Chinese doctoral students have returned to China because of the atmosphere of suspicion that’s penetrated a lot of the U.S. universities. In fact, some of the very top U.S. scientists — and I see them here by the way. And they come to Hong Kong, and they have left, and you can understand why — many of them have been investigated and careers have been ruined and, and no one’s really been prosecuted because the charges usually turned out to be academics and scientists not filling out the right paperwork when they’re going and cooperating overseas. But for example, if you want to be recruited and you’re a scientist and you did your doctoral study in the U.S., you want to be recruited for a university in Florida. If you’re Chinese, you have to be investigated. Whereas people from other countries, scientists from other countries, do not necessarily have to be investigated. So, for that reason, the point of this is, in terms of finance is that China’s beginning to build a long-term plan to rely much more on the Belt and Road country scientists.

AU: Well, does the new technology, the new productive forces push, is that likely to result in a bonanza for university? Like, is this a Sputnik moment for them?

GP: [I mean] the other thing, Xi Jinping has a few major initiatives, and one of them is what’s called common prosperity. And common prosperity basically is saying that look the people who are at the top tier. We may need to take your profits, take them and use them as we need to use them. Because you know, the Xi Jinping regime has found, as you know, the level of corruption after the takeoff in the late nineties and in the early two thousands, there was quite a bit of corruption.

AU: So, you mentioned the issue of graduate unemployment, and that’s great because that is my next question. It’s been quite significant. I think their numbers were in the low 20% levels of graduate unemployment before they stopped counting it. In the West, when this kind of thing happens, you get a lot of calls to shut down programs with high graduate unemployment rates, focus more on STEM programs or getting other programs with better placement rates. Sometimes you get a call to shrink universities because there’s over education. What’s been the reaction in China to this? What is the government telling universities to do in response to high graduate unemployment?

GP: China’s a little different from neoliberal economy where, you know, the demands from industry, demands from households, and demands from different governments operate in a certain way. When things get serious, the state basically tells industries, “you’re going to hire more people — be hiring more graduates”, and that’s what has been happening. And of course, the major concern for a country like China is not only prosperity, but it’s stability. And China has 1000 years of having— this gigantic bureaucracy handled the imperial examination, which was for all over the country, at the same time, it helped to ensure stability, and that’s what it does now. But the unemployment rate has— it’s certainly gone at least 20 percent and probably much higher than that. It’s not as simple as it looks because there are students who can get jobs, but they’re not taking them. If their family’s in middle class, they’ll hold off, they’ll wait. you have to look at it also that very often the statistics are gathered on graduation day. If you look at three months later, six months later— I work with the Central Ministry of Education and the Asian Development Bank on this, with Peking University a few years back, and we also, we noticed that after a year, the unemployment rate did go down. What’s happening when you get such a large expansion, what was expanded? Degree places, four-year degree places. Universities were growing tremendously. Provinces were starting new universities every month. And therefore, what happened is you had a very academic type of education. Now, what government policy did was establish what’s called these, basically polytechnic colleges. So, you can’t take away the degree places. You do have three-year diploma programs like community colleges, which are very skill based. But the policy, particularly in the West— and I work with the Asian Development Bank in two provinces, Yunnan and Gansu, and the emphasis was on what’s called application oriented undergraduate education. And I visited these colleges and I find it remarkable that there are logos of all of the companies. And the last year is often a full year of internship. So, what has happened is the emphasis now in terms of unemployment. How to address this is really through cooperation with industry — to impress industry. China wants to be the world leader in vocational education by 2035, and they’re moving very much in that direction, very skills oriented. So, I think that’s the answer that the government has for the problem of unemployment.

AU: So, there’s no equivalent of Rick Scott, former governor of Florida, saying we need fewer degrees in medieval philosophy.

GP: I can tell you that the social sciences and humanities where we study higher education, which is very much in the sociology, economics, politics of education, that those disciplines, the emphasis isn’t there — it’s on science and technology and applied universities, polytechnic universities. So that’s, I mean, how to look at that? It depends what perspective you take. In terms of, again, social stability is extremely important in China’s case, and putting an emphasis on skills based undergraduate education and putting less of an emphasis on— you know, there was a period when there was interest in the liberal arts and sciences, sciences for purposes of innovation. I would say that was in the 2010 era. I remember the NYU Shanghai and Duke University in Kunshan. Other universities in mainland were coming to see what they were doing for undergraduate liberal education to get the innovative juices going, so people in the science faculties would study history, philosophy, psychology, and so on. But that just slowed down a bit. There’s still an emphasis on innovation, but I think as China often does, it learns from what’s happening around the world and then it tailors it for its own system.

AU: Last question. The higher education system in the People’s Republic has had an amazing 40 year run expansion, deepening of research activities, but playing catch up is quite different from being one of the ones inventing the future, which I think is where China wants to go now. What do you think the next 20 year holds?

GP: Well, one of the reasons to be optimistic is I mean, from my own point of view there’s been a ubiquitous pessimism all the way through that we’re going to collapse in the 80s and 90s and so on, but don’t see that. I would be optimistic. Even given current geopolitical context. Now, I think you’re correct in terms of the advancement of science and technology for innovation has been successful. If you look at the companies, the amount of market share China has around the world now, and also within the country — how high technology for positive reasons has been successful. [There are] certain questions about monitoring and all of that, but certainly, it has. The issue is really those scientific breakthroughs at the top end that changed the world. China’s four inventions — the compass and gunpowder and printing — those changed the world back in the first few centuries. And the US in innovations in terms of not only aerospace, or the internet or, you know, top tier medical discoveries, it’s much more of a challenge for China at that very top end. And I don’t know, I don’t know why — I don’t think it’s just money and financing. At the current period, I think China’s going to be competitive with any country around the world when it comes to the sale of high technology products, manufactured products and services. But when it comes to the very top tier Nobel level, I mean, that takes a different kind of situation. You also have to draw talent from around the world. You have to put teams together. The academic research enterprise has to be very vibrant and lively. But I’m positive for the next 20 years for China’s development.

AU: Fantastic. Jerry Postiglione, thank you very much for being with us.

GP: You’re very welcome. Have a good one.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments on this podcast or ideas for future pods, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. A quick programming note: we’re not 100% sure we will have a podcast for you next week (that is, on May 16^th), but if not, we’ll be giving you a double podcast shot in one of the two following weeks. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.