Today kicks-off Chinese New Year, and so I wanted to devote some time to the subject of higher education in the People’s Republic of China.  Given the immensity of the topic, the usual one-off, “Better Know a Higher Ed System” piece seemed inadequate – hence, I’ve written a series of posts, which I’ll be publishing over the next 15 days (the duration of Lunar New Year celebrations).  Enjoy.

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China is one of the few places in the world that has an indigenous version of the university – namely, the Imperial Academy, or “Taixue” (later “Guozijian”).  The first of these was set up in the first century BCE in order to prepare the bright and upwardly-mobile for appointment to the Imperial civil service. In later dynasties, a system of examinations (mostly concerned with Confucian moral philosophy, with a bit of poetry sometimes thrown-in) was introduced to govern entrance to the civil service, and schools for degree-holders and aspirants spread throughout the empire. Though their stature would rise and fall as dynasties grew and collapsed, they still existed in some form or another right through to the early twentieth century, when their abolition (in favour of western-style universities) fatally turned most of their suddenly-futureless students against Empress Cixi’s tottering Manchu regime.

There are two notable things about these academies, which are important for understanding modern Chinese universities.  The first is that they were significantly more open to people of humble origin than their medieval European contemporaries.  During the Tang dynasty, there were separate academies based (roughly) on class origin. The lowest of these was the largest (but also worst funded), admitting 1300 students per year.  Yes, stratified and therefore bad.  But also: open to talent from below, which for the time was strikingly unique.  Higher education has, in a sense, always had an access mandate in China because of the Confucian commitment to meritocracy.

More important, however, is the specific way that the concepts of universities, high-stakes exams, and desirable jobs interact.  Recall that the exams came before the university – that is to say, the purpose of universities was to get people to pass the exam, and into desirable jobs.  There has, in other words, never been a conception of higher education in China that wasn’t related to the job market.  Even though the curriculum was highly – even aggressively – humanities-focused (lots of poetry and philosophy, with a smidge of mathematics and astronomy), it was still all “applied” in the sense that the goal of higher education was about putting people into specific types of employment – though higher studies in Confucian societies do also confer on a student an aura of “virtue”, distinct from the acquisition of jobs or titles.

Thus, in China, the belief that meritocracy requires broad access to higher education, and the belief that universities are about passing exams and getting jobs, both have roots going back to before the birth of Christ.   Given this, it’s no surprise that they continue to exert a major influence on the region’s policy, today.