While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities.
And yet, its two sets of operating principles are very different, and it’s not just because it’s the Communist Party of China that’s calling the shots in one of them. There are some basic concepts about education, society, and the public good — concepts which are central to how academia describes itself and its mission — that simply don’t translate very well between the two cultures. As a result, there’s an enduring difference in worldviews, and sometimes some very different interpretations of what higher education is all about.
These enduring differences in worldviews are the subject of a new and important book by today’s guest, Dr. Lili Yang of the University of Hong Kong. The book is called Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches.
In the book, Dr. Yang deals with five themes: first, student development; second, equity in higher education; third, academic freedom and university autonomy; fourth, the resources and outcomes of higher education; and fifth, cross-border higher education and global outcomes. For each of these themes, Dr. Yang takes a good, hard look at how the subject is framed in each of the two big traditions, and more particularly where the traditions overlap and where they simply miss each other completely.
This episode is a bit unlike any other we’ve ever done. We often try to be in the news, but Lili’s work is somewhat more theoretical. It’s no less interesting for that, though. We range back and forth in the interview across more rarefied territory than usual for this show, but I think you’ll like it anyway. Lili’s a very well-informed guide to the two very different cultures and philosophies that frame the existence of most of the world’s great universities. And with that, over to Lili.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.24 | Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Lili, thanks for being with us. Your book isn’t really about comparing two higher education systems. It’s more about comparing two worldviews, or two cultural traditions in which universities are embedded. Why is it important to study higher education at that level?
Lili Yang (LY): Cultural traditions often receive less attention in higher education studies, but they condition us. We are inevitably situated in our histories and traditions. Cultural traditions influence who we are, what we see, and what we ask. These influences are clearly manifested in what I will talk about in the upcoming questions.
A typical example is how individuals—or, in the Chinese cultural tradition, I would prefer to use the word “persons” to highlight the difference—are situated in and associated with the community. This is a very important aspect of how we understand the public, the private, the collective, the common, and the communal in our society and in higher education.
I’m happy to give another example of why we study universities in relation to cultural traditions. In addition to what we will be talking about later, the idea of equity—equality in terms of equality of what, for example equality of opportunity, equality of race, equality of gender—came much later in Chinese society. However, there is a long tradition of these ideas in the Anglo-American cultural tradition. That helps explain why there has sometimes been unease in terms of how we deal with equality in higher education.
Equality itself is a much less controversial topic in higher education, but there are more controversies when it comes to how universities relate to the state, the government, and society. I think we will talk more about that in a few minutes.
AU: Higher education intersects with the world on several different planes, if I can use that word. You talk about the individual or the family—it’s a bit more blurred in China than it is in the West—then society, the state, and I guess the market as well. The state and the market play out quite differently in different traditions.
I’d like to take these in turn. At the level of the individual, you found a great deal of similarity between Chinese and Anglo-American traditions in terms of how universities are meant to shape student self-development. Can you tell us a bit about that?
LY: You are absolutely right that the idea of family can be a blurring term in Chinese society. In fact, at least in traditional China—let’s say pre-modern China—the individual was never really there in the sense that there wasn’t a notion of an independent individual, separate from the family, the state, or society.
A person was always understood as part of a larger community, and that is how persons were defined at the time. I would say that this still has its legacies in contemporary China. When we talk about a person, it is not exactly the same as when we talk about the individual in the Anglo-American sense.
So when it comes to higher education and student self-development, the differences you see are more related to immediate practices or policies in higher education—for example, policies that promote how individuals develop themselves, such as curricular pedagogy or student support.
However, there are deeper differences in the underlying ideas and worldviews regarding how a person or a student is related to their family. There have been empirical studies highlighting that individuals are not making entirely independent decisions in the Chinese context—not only in mainland China, but also in other Chinese societies. Their decisions and actions are largely influenced by their families.
So when it comes to student development, it is not necessarily only about self-development. It is always part of a broader communal or collective development alongside the individual’s own development.
AU: In the Anglo-American tradition—at least over the last 30 or 40 years, which is short when you’re talking about Confucius and traditions that go back 2,500 years—self-development has had a very clear economic rationale. It comes from Gary Becker and ideas around human capital. If you’re developing yourself, then you should pay tuition. That’s really changed the way the Anglo-American world has thought about private returns to education.
China brought in tuition fees around roughly the same time the UK did. So I’m wondering: do these two different conceptions of self-development affect the way we think about private returns to higher education in the two systems? Or are they running along fairly parallel lines?
LY: Thank you for bringing that up. In my own view, there has been a huge mistake in the policy pathways of recent decades in places like the UK when it comes to tuition fees. The mistake lies in overlooking—or deliberately ignoring—the fact that higher education and student development contribute not only to private returns for individuals.
They also make huge contributions to society, to the state, and to the world. That is the public or common good we are talking about. If we underestimate what higher education contributes to society, then ideas like human capital theory and the new public management movement come in, suggesting that students themselves should bear the cost, or largely bear the cost, of their own education. But that is wrong.
In contrast, in the Chinese cultural tradition—and still in practice today in Chinese higher education—the longstanding relationship between higher education and the state is important. Higher education is often seen as an apparatus of the state, which makes the government the default funder of higher education.
At the same time, there is a consistent emphasis on the idea that higher education and student development should contribute to the larger good, not only to personal development in the modern economic sense of growth. It also involves contributing to social cohesion, equity, respect, and a broader sense of human flourishing, rather than a very narrow understanding of development.
AU: You brought up the relationship between higher education and society, but you also argue that the idea of society—which is kind of a public sphere that mediates between the level of the individual and the family, and the level of the state—looks quite different in the Chinese tradition than it does in the Anglo-American tradition. How does that difference shape the way universities in the two cultures approach their respective missions?
LY: There is always a major difficulty here in terms of the language we use. For example, when “society” is translated into Chinese—shèhuì—the word is more of a Western import in modern history. That’s not to say there isn’t a related notion of society in Chinese cultural tradition, but the Chinese understanding tends to place the state, or a more comprehensive conception of the state, at the centre.
In that sense, the idea of society is encompassed within the state. There was not historically an idea of a public sphere existing independently from the state. Instead, it was seen as part of a larger, more comprehensive state—something that, so to speak, takes everything under heaven within it.
In higher education, what this means is that universities are not traditionally regarded as part of an independent public sphere—like the one Habermas describes—that stands apart from the state and critiques what the government or society is doing.
However, in contemporary China, I wouldn’t say there is no society. We do see civil society and grassroots activities emerging from the bottom up. But universities are still not expected to occupy an independent sphere that openly criticizes the government.
What is positive, in my view, is that universities contribute constructively to policy discussions and debates within those circles. That is how universities participate in and contribute to the wider society and the state.
AU: Lili, you were talking about the concept of “all under heaven,” and how the state and its proper sphere of action includes a lot more of what in the West we might call society. In other words, the state is doing a bit more than what we usually think of as the state in the West. And that’s not just the result of the Communist Party being in charge for the last 75 years—that’s 2,500 years of Confucian thought at work. It’s a very long tradition.
It’s in this frame that you talk in your book about different understandings of autonomy and freedom—what we call liberty in the West and what you refer to as zhi, or free will, in China. What’s the difference between those two concepts?
LY: In terms of liberty and zhi, or free will, in China, I would say that people who are familiar with Chinese history know that there was a huge debate between liberal thinking and communism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, we all know the result: communism won, and that is how China is today.
Many people have looked for different reasons for this. I once read an article—which I largely agree with—that suggested communist ideas resonated with ordinary Chinese people. They aligned with how people viewed the world, themselves, the family, the state, and society. That resonance helped people embrace that line of thinking, and that is part of why China developed the way it did.
In terms of liberty in particular, or zhi, the concept differs from Western liberty in that there has traditionally been a separation between free thinking and free action in Chinese cultural tradition. I am speaking here in theory, not in practice, because governments in imperial times often intervened for their own interests and could restrict free thinking or free action.
But in theory, Confucian traditions insist on free thinking and free will, and they particularly emphasize the will. It is not only about how a person thinks, but about how someone dedicates themselves to something, puts that into action, and perseveres.
At the same time, there is a layer of moral requirement that comes from within the person. If someone is a benevolent person, then they would innately think and act in a benevolent and good way. So how people think and how people act are treated as distinct.
From this comes a kind of moral autonomy, which is different from the “no harm” or “no interference” principle that John Stuart Mill proposed. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s how I would describe the separation between thinking and action.
AU: Right. So how do these different understandings—liberty versus zhi—shape higher education, particularly how the two traditions understand ideas like academic freedom and university autonomy?
LY: Some people would argue that academic freedom and university autonomy should be universal principles—ideas that should be applied everywhere in the same way. However, I would say that at least in the case of university autonomy, it should be culturally bounded, because it is part of how a higher education system operates in terms of governance—how universities relate to the state and how the system functions overall.
In the Chinese context, because universities are expected to be part of this larger, comprehensive state, there is not the same idea of universal university autonomy in the Anglo-American sense—that universities should be independent and openly critical. Instead, as I mentioned earlier, universities are expected to participate in government decision-making and policy discussions, contributing constructively and critically within that process.
That, I think, underlines a major difference between university autonomy in China and in the West.
At the same time, some people argue that throughout the history of the modern university, university autonomy has been a fundamental pillar of universities and their success. However, when we look at the development and history of Chinese universities, we can see that, in certain subtle and nuanced ways, and with what might be described as a steady hand of government and governance, it is still possible to achieve strong development in universities.
This development takes place with differences from what we might call independent autonomy in the Western sense.
AU: So I’m going to ask you a question that’s a bit about epistemology here. This is a book of political theory, but I want to ask about history, because I studied history—that’s my background—so it’s a totally self-interested question.
One major difference between the two traditions is how universities were introduced in each of them. China had a completely different set of educational traditions up until, I forget the exact year, 1905 or 1906, when they got rid of the imperial academies and adopted the modern university as part of a project of technological catch-up and national salvation.
The idea was: we need to learn about technology so we can defend ourselves. Then when Deng Xiaoping came along in the late 1970s, the rationale shifted to developing higher education in order to develop economically. That’s a pretty big difference between the two traditions. So I’m wondering: to what extent do you think political theory and historical experience each explain the contemporary differences between Chinese and Anglo-American institutions?
LY: I think it really depends on how we understand what political theory refers to. If we are referring to political theory in the Western sense, then we may be talking about something different.
For me, I don’t think these two approaches—political theory and history—necessarily lead to completely different explanations or stories. Rather, they are different lenses through which we can look at the development of Chinese higher education over the past century or the past several decades.
I would also highlight that I agree with you that history is very important here. As I mentioned earlier, history and traditions are part of who we are, what we see, and what we do.
Here I would like to refer to something the Chinese writer Lin Yutang once wrote. He noted that when Westerners see an animal, they are inclined to ask whether it can be hunted, whereas a Chinese observer is more likely to ask whether it can be eaten. Behind these different questions are different horizons and assumptions about what is important or valued.
Those differences influence how people think and act in higher education as well. So even though we might say that many policy pathways in recent decades are relatively new to China—because they are modern and influenced by communism, and more recently by individualism—how people think and act within those policy processes is still shaped by a much longer history and cultural tradition.
AU: So let me ask you a related question. Over the last 50 years, both the Anglo-American and Chinese systems have undergone rapid expansion. They’ve gone through significant policy changes and become more research intensive. Two of the three countries we’re talking about have introduced tuition fees.
If you had written this book 50 years ago—well, maybe not quite 50, but let’s say in the late 1970s—do you think you would have been able to anticipate some of these policy pathways? And relatedly, do you think your current analysis holds any clues about how higher education in China and in the Anglo-American world might either converge or diverge over the rest of the 21st century?
LY: Well, that’s a difficult question. I don’t think I would have been able to foresee or anticipate these specific policy pathways, because the future is always uncertain.
But what I would highlight is that there are certain consistencies in traditions and in what we see in history. For example, in the Analects, there is a passage where someone asks Confucius whether he could anticipate what would happen in the coming hundreds of years. Confucius responded that there are certain threads running through previous dynasties and the current dynasty that can help us understand the future.
So I would say that one of those threads is the relationship between the person and the larger self—the communal or collective dimension, however we choose to describe it. There has always been an insistence in Chinese society that a person is not only pursuing their own good. There is also a larger self to which individuals are expected to contribute.
Higher education policy reflects this. If we look at universities in China, there is always an emphasis on ideas such as communal good and collective contribution as integral parts of how universities educate and nurture students.
There is also a strong expectation that the government will continue to invest in universities—not only for reasons of human capital or global competitiveness, but also because of a genuine belief that universities should contribute to broader social goods, such as equity, social cohesion, human flourishing, and even global public goods.
AU: Last question. You teach at Hong Kong University. Arguably, universities in Hong Kong sit at the intersection of these two traditions. Do you think HKU is a synthesis of the two, or does one tradition remain dominant over the other?
LY: That’s an excellent question. This is now my fifth year in Hong Kong, and when I arrived I also believed—and still believe—that Hong Kong sits at the intersection of these two traditions. When you look at the university, for example HKU, you see university seals and documents written in both languages, with excellent translation and presentation.
However, I have recently been conducting research into the public good of higher education in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, I have realized that one tradition is more dominant here—the Anglo-American tradition. This is not surprising if we look at higher education governance in Hong Kong. We have the UGC, a relatively small government role, and universities that are highly autonomous. There is even a buffer between universities and the government through the UGC.
However, what is lacking is a stronger supporter of the public good. Universities are largely left on their own, and they often do much less in this area because higher education in Hong Kong today is so focused on rankings and similar metrics.
AU: Five in the top 100. You’ve got five. Everyone’s talking about it.
LY: Yes, university leaders are happy about that. However, if we look more closely at what is happening in reality, there are faculty members who still hold strong beliefs in the public good and the common good. But they are not particularly encouraged or supported to pursue the kinds of work they have been doing for a long time.
Recent trends—such as increasing research evaluation requirements and performance metrics—are not encouraging the kinds of practices that have traditionally been part of the daily life of universities.
So I would say I’m not particularly optimistic about how Hong Kong will continue to perform in this area. But it is still at the intersection of these traditions, and that position may help us see how the two traditions could work together. If both traditions were well used and drawn upon in university and higher education development, Hong Kong could grow further.
AU: Well, thanks for being with us today.
LY: Thank you.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our readers and listeners, for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or if you have suggestions for future ones, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when we’ll be moving just a few doors down the fourth floor of the Meng Wah Complex at HKU to talk to Jisun Jung. She’s a professor there and will be joining us to discuss recent developments in South Korean higher education. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
