It’s hard to think of a higher education system that has changed more dramatically over the past half-century than China’s. In the space of just two generations, the country’s gone from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to building one of the world’s largest and most influential university systems, complete with world-class research institutions and mass participation.
It’s achieved all this while, at the same time, working with a system and institutional culture that’s quite different from that of most Western universities. It has a distinctive approach to governance, a highly centralized administration system built around the Gaokao exam, and an increasingly strategic focus on aligning higher education with national economic and technological priorities.
With me today to discuss all of this is Gerald Postiglione. He’s professor emeritus at the University of Hong Kong. He’s one of the leading experts on Chinese higher education. He’s also just written a book called — wait for it — Higher Education in China, published by Johns Hopkins Press. His book is not only a good history of the last half-century, it’s also an excellent guide to the key challenges that currently face the system: meeting the skill needs of the new economy, improving student equity, and getting university governance right. It also contains, by the way, one of the most informative pieces I’ve ever read about the Hong Kong higher education system and how it interacts with that of the rest of China.
I don’t want to give anything away here, so without further ado, let’s turn things over to Gerry.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.33 | How China Built a Higher Education Superpower
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Gerry, it’s May 2026. We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976. What was the higher education system like 50 years ago, and what were the big moments that have made it change since then?
Gerard Postiglione (GP): Oh, that’s a great question, Alex. You’re obviously aging me. I was there forty-five years ago, so you probably think I’m five years older than I am.
But let me say that it’s a question which is often asked. That period before the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, approximately 1966 to 1976, was the era referred to as the Cultural Revolution.
At that time, universities were basically closed for the first couple of years or so, and after that they were highly politicized. We could call it hyper-politicized until 1978–79, when Deng Xiaoping assumed leadership and there was a depoliticization of the universities. That was the period of reform and opening, during which, over the next forty years or so, the country went from an eighty-eight percent poverty rate to technically zero poverty, depending upon how you measure it.
So there was a tremendous amount of progress, and I had the advantage of being on the Chinese mainland every year from 1981 through to the present, observing education first in rural areas in the western regions of the country — basic education — and then gradually technical and vocational education, and then higher education.
I was at the Great Hall of the People when President Jiang Zemin announced on May 4th, 1998, that China would build world-class universities. Of course, at that time, the rankings of world-class universities were emerging. That was a turning point and a really interesting time to be in China.
AU: It’s under Jiang Zemin that you have the start of the 211 Project and the 985 Project, which was really the start of China’s research dominance. So, why doesn’t Jiang Zemin get the credit he often deserves for this?
GP: Well, the presidents who followed Deng Xiaoping — Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and of course Xi Jinping — in some ways operated on the shoulders of Deng Xiaoping, because Deng Xiaoping really opened the country. It was an extremely pivotal move that Deng made. He was a very good politician and knew when and how to bring the country into a trend of prosperity. So perhaps that’s why.
But of course, I mentioned Jiang Zemin several times in the book, and you’re right that Deng basically restarted the Gaokao exam and put an emphasis on academic achievement. Then, of course, Jiang Zemin made that announcement which really moved the 985 program of the thirty or so universities ahead.
Hu Jintao carried through the massification period because 1999 was really an important moment in the expansion. So your question about President Jiang Zemin — certainly he was also very important.
Most of the central ministries had colleges and universities under them. During his period, many of those colleges and universities were transferred to provincial authorities, so it was a kind of decentralization. The Ministry of Education kept a certain number of the very highly ranked universities, and the rest were devolved downward.
What also happened under Jiang Zemin was a push to achieve economies of scale, because most colleges had two or three thousand students. Now they have fifty, sixty, seventy, or even eighty thousand students.
So, in short, yes, Jiang Zemin deserves a lot of credit for his time as president in terms of education policy. But each of the former presidents had a major impact.
AU: People have noticed that in this growth period, Chinese universities don’t look like Western universities. It’s come to everybody’s attention that it’s a different kind of model.
Now, you work in Hong Kong, and many people have suggested that Hong Kong represents a kind of synthesis — where universities with an Anglosphere background or Anglosphere connections connect with Chinese universities. Is Hong Kong a synthesis? Is it easy to say it’s fifty-fifty, or is it something new that’s growing up in Hong Kong right now?
GP: Well, there has been a very interesting discourse and debate within the academic community about the China model of higher education. Of course, from the academic perspective, it’s much more cultural than political. But from the state’s point of view, there’s an important political dimension to the China model, and that goes back and forth.
But if you go to universities in China — and Alex, I know you travel quite a bit there and see the universities — they all have campuses and presidents and vice presidents for finance and student affairs. They have departments, faculties, schools, graduation criteria, and different kinds of degrees. So in that sense, they operate very similarly to Western universities.
For me, the one major difference is deference to authority. I think that’s a major distinction. It’s cultural, and perhaps also political.
Now, your question is about Hong Kong. Hong Kong has had its own traditions. The first university was established in 1911, under British administration, so the culture of Hong Kong developed differently. That’s part of the reason — along with the economy — why Hong Kong became so important for China.
There was also a new constitution, or sort of a sub-constitution for Hong Kong, under the “one country, two systems” framework. That makes Hong Kong’s universities much more Western — or you could say mainstream global — in orientation. It’s more of a German Anglo-American model there.
So that’s the difference. Of course, we could go into that in more detail. It’s certainly much more academically free than the mainland, much more internationally engaged, I think — though you could argue about that — but certainly institutionally more autonomous.
AU: But, certainly more attractive for Chinese universities to work with, right? They recognize that there’s some Chineseness to the Hong Kong system, and that’s why they’re working together with Hong Kong universities so much.
One of the things I learned about in your book was this huge growth in cross-border cooperation to create the Greater Bay Area. I guess they don’t use the term “higher education region,” but that’s really what it is. How’s that going? How did that come about, and what have the results been of that cooperation?
GP: I should say that since the reform and opening period of approximately 1979–80, right up to 1997 when the British administration ended, the universities in Hong Kong — and there were largely two of them for most of that time, my university, the University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong — were engaged with mainland universities.
We had all sorts of exchanges, programs, and cooperation, though of course not as much as now. So this is part of a longer trend. In fact, there’s a book published on the University of Hong Kong and its engagement with the mainland from 1979 through 1997 across different fields.
But what has happened more recently is partly connected to a new geopolitical background. The global order has been shifting from unipolar to multipolar, and we’re still in that process. The changing US-China relationship has put Hong Kong in a new position. For example, there is no longer a Fulbright program. Hong Kong previously had special policies with the US for trade, finance, and commerce, and those disappeared during the 2019–2020 protests and with the introduction of the 2020 national security law.
So this supplemented an integration process that was already underway — the integration of Hong Kong with what we call the Greater Bay Area in southern Guangdong. There had always been movement and integration, but now it has sped up for practical reasons: trade, finance, and the economy. China now has the second-largest economy in the world, and Hong Kong is pivoting off that economy. A great deal is happening every day on that front.
So, to answer your question in short, yes, Hong Kong’s universities have become much more integrated with the rest of the higher education system.
AU: Gerry, in your book you focus on three fundamental areas — the areas that are going to define the evolution of the system. The first of those is skills, right? Can China get the skills mix of its system right?
China has a reputation for being very aggressive about making sure skills are linked to the market. We’re seeing it right now with the emphasis on AI and future-oriented programs like the low-altitude economy and mind-computer interfaces. Pretty amazing stuff.
We’re also seeing a lot of programs in the humanities being dismantled. It’s interesting that China seems to have made a very different bet on AI than the West has. I think the West is saying the humanities become more important in an AI era, and China seems not to think that’s true, which is an interesting question.
But do you think they’re getting it right? Is this level of centralized decision-making about programs likely to help or hinder the system?
GP: Well, I’ve got to unpack a little bit of what you said in terms of centralized versus decentralized. The provinces do have their own decision rights to a pretty significant extent. The central government grants those decision rights, but it also wants to measure productivity — how much income provinces generate, whether they’re borrowing responsibly, whether they’re able to repay what they borrow.
In terms of higher education, universities are evaluated on whether they’re able to expand, change the curriculum, and align with provincial industries — STEM industries, for example — through internships and other forms of cooperation.
But the whole point of the book was to say that the Party Central and the State Council have vowed to make China a leading education nation by 2035, which is going to come around pretty soon and I was trying to point out that there are three basic challenges China has to overcome in order to do that. And I believe they can.
The first challenge is the one you mentioned: skills. One of the things China has done extremely well is become the top manufacturing nation in the world. It’s great at manufacturing not only because of its infrastructure, but because the entire country’s infrastructure — including the higher education system — has developed very effectively. If you visit the universities, you’ll see state-of-the-art educational technology and so on.
Manufacturers also have a kind of cookbook for how to use equipment, whether they’re talking about robots or production targets. Ninety-five percent of all Apple phones were made in China — and probably still are. So they learned a great deal from overseas companies investing there.
The education system has those same two elements: infrastructure and a kind of rulebook for how to produce students and measure qualifications. But what manufacturing in China has — which is extremely valuable and not easy to develop — is process knowledge. They’ve worked on different forms of manufacturing for so many years. They’ve made mistakes and learned gradually over time.
The higher education system, meanwhile, expanded very rapidly. They’re up to about sixty percent participation now, which is mass higher education. I think they’re still going through that phase of developing process knowledge.
AU: What about the second area you talk about: exams? It’s really about access to higher education.
You noted that Deng Xiaoping brought back the Gaokao, which was modeled on the imperial Keju exams that go back thousands of years. Having really difficult, highly selective exams was probably a good idea in 1978, when demand vastly exceeded supply and there wasn’t much money to expand the system. You wanted to make sure the best students got the very few places available.
Now it’s a little different, right? What you’re getting now is much more of a sorting mechanism for elite higher education. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that the socioeconomic background of students in those C9 schools — the very top universities — is pretty elite. How do you create a system that supports the best students without simply supporting the children of the rich?
GP: Well, it’s a hard nut to crack in two dimensions.
First, as time goes on, it’s not as easy for rural students as it was in 1980, for example, to take the Gaokao and end up at the top universities. The economy has developed in such a way that the middle class now has a significant advantage.
In fact, there’s a great book by Jia Rui Xue and Li Hongbin, published this year by Harvard University Press, called The Highest Exam. They themselves were rural students who managed to get into top-tier universities. Nowadays, that’s much more difficult. So the equity issue is the first challenge.
The second hard nut to crack is that you’ve still got one exam dominating access to higher education: the Gaokao. Educators in China know it would probably be better to have a more diverse selection mechanism, especially because the country has moved strongly toward an ideology of innovation and creativity, which is seen as essential to driving the economy.
But that’s not easy to change. And I kind of agree with this: I don’t think it’s time to abandon the Gaokao. If you got rid of it and started relying more on interviews and other selection criteria, I think the system would become much more vulnerable to corruption than it is now.
China has been dealing with corruption as part of its rapid development, and it will take time to work through that. So it’s difficult. You have an autocratic system combined with a strong cultural legacy of the Keju examination tradition, which doesn’t always encourage creativity, while at the same time the country wants to move in that direction. So that’s where things stand today, I believe.
AU: The third area you talk about in the book is governance, and that one surprised me a little bit because, hey, this system’s doing pretty well. It’s growing in both quality and size. What’s wrong with governance in China? Why would you mess with something that seems to be working so well?
GP: Well, I was pretty tough on governance — probably tougher than I was on the other two challenges of skills, creativity, and inequity.
Part of the reason is that I’m an academic, a lifelong academic, and I’ve worked in probably the most academically free university system in Asia.
Now, I think most academics in Hong Kong would agree that while it is still probably one of the most academically free systems in Asia — particularly because Hong Kong remains much more open than the Chinese mainland in terms of communication, internet access, and internationalization — it has lost a little compared to the pre-2020 period. But it’s still a very vibrant system.
There were large numbers of academics and students who left in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but that seems to have plateaued now. And we’ve continued to recruit at a very high level. At my university alone, we’ve recruited three Nobel laureates. Even the mainland has recruited major international scholars — for example Giorgio Parisi, the Nobel physicist from Italy, to Zhejiang University.
AU: I read the South China Morning Post every week, Gerry, and there’s not a week that goes by without a story about somebody famous coming to China or Hong Kong for the universities. You’re on a roll there.
GP: Of course, many Chinese scholars are also returning from overseas, though the press emphasizes that more than it normally would. A lot of those academics are in the later stages of their careers. They want to be near their families. Their parents are older now, and they’re in their fifties while their parents are in their seventies.
And working in Hong Kong isn’t all that different from working in the West in many ways. So it’s a great place to recruit from, and we’re very lucky from that point of view.
I’m a New Yorker by birth. I’ve been in mainland China and Hong Kong for forty-five years, and I’ve seen the system grow. It’s been absolutely remarkable.
But I still carry academic values from the West — values I grew up with. And I don’t think many mainland academics, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, would say the governance system is completely satisfactory as it is now.
Of course, you could say the same thing in Canada or in the United States. Universities everywhere are going through a period where, whether because of geopolitics or something else, the academy itself is increasingly under pressure.
So call me a liberal academic, but my basic point is that the academy has to remain vibrant. For it to be innovative and creative, you need less bureaucracy and less political control. Research grants should be awarded competitively rather than for other reasons.
So to answer your question, maybe I was hard on the governance system because of the values I carry as an academic. I’d like to see the system open more. I really would.
AU: So let’s look to the future here. I think it’s pretty easy to see the best-case scenario if the Chinese higher education system adopts some of the changes you’ve recommended. You could have a still-growing participation rate, better levels of research, a more equitable system, and a more open system.
But stick with me here: what’s the worst-case scenario? Imagine there’s not enough money in the system to invest in the high-tech skills Xi Jinping wants. Imagine the Gaokao doesn’t change, and the top universities start to develop the same elitist reputation the Ivy League has in the United States. Imagine nothing changes in governance.
What’s the worst that could happen? Could something actually break? Are there pressures building up in the system, or do we just end up with a Chinese higher education system that’s a suboptimal version of its present self?
GP: Well, that’s an interesting question.
If I were worried about anything in the higher education system going wrong — or becoming a major obstacle to creating one of the best higher education systems in the world — it would be the misuse of artificial intelligence.
I don’t think we really have a good idea where we’re going with AI. There’s a major debate underway. On one side are the doomsayers, and people like Geoffrey Hinton, who probably knows more about AI than almost anyone else, and who has spoken about the possibility of a moratorium.
And if you speak to people at universities everywhere — whether in the US, Hong Kong, or mainland China — they’re all concerned about the use of DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and similar tools by students. So that’s what I would worry about more than anything else.
I’m not really worried about government funding. China has the second-largest economy in the world, and its higher education budget is around 250 billion US dollars annually. I’m not too concerned about that.
Equity is more concerning to me. Equity and graduate unemployment are always issues everywhere, regardless of the country. And in a socialist country, of course, those concerns are even more significant. So those are issues that I think will remain on the horizon.
We also need more international exchange. China is open to that. It wants to become a global center for research in science and technology. And I think, given the state of the world right now and the divisions between countries, universities still have an advantage in being places where people can talk and discuss — at the grassroots level and all the way up the system — what kind of world we want the next generation to live in.
AU: Gerry, thanks so much for being with us.
GP: You’re very welcome. And I look forward to seeing you again in Hong Kong. We met there recently, I think a couple of months ago, and I hope to see you there again soon, Alex. All the best to you, and thank you very much.
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