Autonomy in Education in China

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"Dancing in a Cage": Changing Autonomy in Chinese Higher EducationAuthor(s): Rui Yang, Lesley Vidovich, Jan CurrieSource: Higher Education, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 575-592Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735132 .Accessed: 25/01/2011 05:01

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High Educ (2007) 54:575-592DOI 10.1007/S10734-006-9009-5ORIGINAL ARTICLE

6'Dancing in a cage": Changing autonomy in Chinesehigher educationRui Yang ?Lesley Vidovich ?Jan Currie

Received: 2 June 2005/Accepted: 10March 2006/Published online: 3 June 2006? Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

Abstract InChina, the central government has released a series of key policy initiativesover the last twenty years to foster decentralisation of control over higher education, givingprominence to discourses of increased autonomy for both universities and academics. Thisarticle reports findings of an empirical study of changing autonomy in Chinese highereducation and it focuses on the effects of these key policy developments in two case studyuniversities. This research was part of a larger study of new power relationships emergingfrom changing policies on accountability and autonomy inMainland China, Hong Kongand Singapore, located within a broader context of the impact of globalisation on highereducation. The focus on the three regions was selected to begin to redress a Westernhegemony in such research. The larger study is premised on the principle that globalisationis characterised by ongoing tensions between global commonalities and context-specificdifferences, and that it is important not to gloss over the complex and often contradictorynational and local mediations of "global" policy trends.

Keywords Autonomy ?China ?Devolution ?Globalisation ?Governance ?Highereducation ?Policy

R. Yang (El)Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton Campus,Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australiae-mail: [email protected]. VidovichThe University of Western Australia, Crawley, West Australia, AustraliaJ. Currie

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Introduction

Globalisation, with its characteristic compression of time and space, is seen as the mostfundamental challenge confronting higher education in its history (Scott, 2000). In re?sponse, higher education systems have undergone significant restructuring (Currie &

Newson, 1998). At the core of the changes is a redefinition of relationships between theuniversity, the state, and the market. Neoliberal policies advocated a paradoxical mixtureof deregulation and regulation of higher education and put thewhole idea of autonomy foruniversities and academics into question in many countries across the globe (Ordorika,2003). However, most of the research on these changes has been conducted in Westerncountries. Thus, this article makes a contribution by reporting on research in the People'sRepublic of China (hereafter referred to as China),1 to begin to redress theWesternhegemony of research into 'global' trends in higher education.As China moves to engage with the outside world and reforms its economy to adopt

market principles, one of its key policy positions is to strive to achieve 'world-class'universities. This move has significant potential to allow greater autonomy for someChinese universities. Using document and interview data from Nanjing University (NU)and Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NUST), this article analyses howautonomy has changed in these two universities. The findings presented here are basedupon fieldwork carried out by the authors in late 2003 and early 2004. The aim of the studywas to capture some of China's experiences of autonomy for universities and academics setwithin its cultural complexities. Thus, the early part of the article is devoted to contextualising the case studies within the broader scene of the higher education landscape in

China, using both primary and secondary sources. Gaining an understanding of the con?textual background for the case studies was facilitated by one of the researchers who

worked for a number of years at a Chinese University. This article, therefore, attempts tobetter understand how expanding economic globalisation and changing internationalrelations between China and the rest of the world is having implications at the ground levelfor the goals, functions and autonomy of universities and academics within that country.

Chinese higher education in historical context

China's repositioning in the global context is of major importance to the world as it isthe most populous and potentially one of the world's most powerful countries (Price,1997). By the close of the 18th century, China had developed a durable politicalsystem with a unique civilisation that had evolved during 2000 years of imperial his?tory. During this time, its influence had spread to other countries, particularly thosesurrounding it in East Asia. Over such a long historical process, China's higher edu?cation system evolved a unique set of scholarly values according to its own logic withfew external influences., The imperial examination system and the academies (shuyuan)were key elements of ancient Chinese higher learning (Hayhoe, 1996). Higher educa?tion circles confined their dissemination of knowledge to the provincial level and re?

mained isolated from the rest of the world. As these institutions lacked a liberal artstradition and autonomy to decide their own directions, they could not be calleduniversities in the western sense.

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The 19th century saw the diffusion of the European model of the university throughoutmuch of the world under conditions of imperialism and colonialism. During this period,Chinese higher education focused on training traditional Confucian scholars with littleknowledge of the outside world, and it did not introduce science and technology to pro?mote economic development. China's communication with the West was intentionally

limited. However, as China became gradually enmeshed in the West-centred worldwidedevelopments, reformers suggested that Western instructors be invited into Chineseinstitutions. Starting from the 1860s, Western style professional schools were establishedto train technicians. China's first modern university was founded in 1895 (Chen, 1986) andreforms of traditional higher learning institutions ensued. By 1905, normal and vocationalschools were established, and students were also sent abroad for training, mainly to Japan,the United States and Europe (Bastid, 1988).

Immediately after the 1911 revolution, a modern educational system was ostensiblyestablished in tune with the then prevailing world trends. The lack of central governmentfrom 1911 to 1927 provided Chinese higher education with the opportunity for vigorousexperimentation. This period saw the first real efforts to establish 'universities' in thewestern sense of their defining values of autonomy and academic freedom (Hayhoe, 1996).Different strands of China's own evolving traditions combined with various foreigninfluences, facilitated by Chinese scholars who returned from Western countries and Japan.The Chinese university of theRepublican Era (1912-1949) began to develop into amatureinstitution, achieving a balance between its Chinese identity and its ability to link with

universities in other parts of the world.In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came into power and founded thePeople's Republic of China (PRC). Subsequently, the PRC began to be isolated from the

West, leading to its leaning towards the Soviet Union. Mao Ze-dong even announced in1949 that the CCP must "lean to one side". Russians replaced departing Americans andEuropeans inChinese universities, so that by 1952, the Chinese higher education systemimitated Soviet administration, teaching methods, textbooks, and even classroom design.Ideas from other countries, especially those of the West, were actively rejected. Based onRussian experience and advice, China's First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957) focused on thedevelopment of heavy industry. Plans to reform institutions of higher education so as toemphasise technical education were finalised in 1951. Copying Soviet reliance on man?power planning, the Chinese adopted a unified set of plans for student enrolments, jobassignments and curriculum content.From 1956, China experienced political turmoil including the Great Leap Forward(1958-1966) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that devastated higher educationalong with the fortunes of a generation of teachers and students. When Deng Xiao-ping andthe 'pragmatist' faction reversed Maoist policies in late 1976 and set China on a morerational, economic-oriented path to modernisation, one of the first tasks undertaken was therestoration of the educational system (Reed, 1988). The post-Maoist changes in educationalpolicy saw the re-emergence of the old system with its residue of foreign models (Hayhoe,1984). In the 1980s and 1990s, supranational organisations, such as theWorld Bank, beganto influence Chinese higher education policy. More recently with China's entry into the

World Trade Organisation, market ideologies are permeating their universities.Today Chinese higher education is a state system without a significant degree-granting

private sector. Its institutions are of various types including general universities (naturaland social sciences/humanities), technical universities, specialised institutions (e.g. med?icine, agriculture, and foreign languages) and teacher-training colleges. Despite reforms inrecent decades, the Chinese system has remained highly centralised. The administration of

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higher education institutions follows the vertical and horizontal patterns of general publicadministration in China (Cheng, 1998). The vertical system is controlled by the central(national) government and the horizontal system is controlled by local authorities, mainlyprovincial governments. This differentiation of universities is a major factor influencingthe level of autonomy for universities and academics.

The concept of autonomyWe begin this discussion of the conception of autonomy by reviewing 'western' literature.In doing this, we do not wish to impose these concepts on to the Chinese context but toexplore their applicability to Chinese higher education. In our concluding comments, wereturn to the analysis of how autonomy appears to be developing in Chinese universities.

Autonomy is at the heart of the concept of a 'university'. Derived from the Greekwords for "self and "law or customary usage", the word describes the practice of selfgovernment that is considered a right and responsibility of colleges and universities(Snyder, 2002). Levy (1980) provided a working definition of autonomy in higher edu?cation as the location of authority "somewhere within the university" (p. 4), or "asuniversity control over components (of self-government)" (p. 7). This characterisation iscompatible with Berdahl, Graham and Piper's (1971) classical definition where autonomyis seen as the power of a university to govern itself without outside control. Berdahl et al.further suggested a distinction between substantive and procedural autonomy where theformer refers to the "goals, policies, and programs that an institution has chosen topursue" and the latter refers to the "techniques selected to achieve the chosen goals"(Berdahl et al., 1971, p. 10). More recently, Ordorika (2003) adopted a pluralist per?spective by assessing the extent of autonomy in three broad areas of institutional selfgovernment: appointive, academic, and financial. According to Ordorika, appointiveautonomy includes the hiring, promotion, and dismissal of professors, deans, rectors, andadministrative personnel; academic autonomy includes career choice policies, curriculumand course selection, establishment of degree requirements, and academic freedom; andfinancial autonomy focuses on university budgets and financial accountability.

Another way to understand autonomy in higher education has focussed on the rela?tionship between state governing/coordinating boards and universities within an interestarticulation framework. More recent approaches (Gumport & Pusser, 1995; Hardy, 1996;Slaughter, 1993; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) have focussed on political economy and thenotion of academic capitalism. For example, researchers have looked at the impact ofacademic capitalism on university autonomy and found that one of the obvious results isthe diversification of funding sources. A key argument has been that university autonomycan be enhanced and protected through diversifying university funding bases (e.g.,Goedegeburre, 1994).While independence from a single source of funding may potentiallyincrease autonomy, there is every possibility that itmay also introduce different types ofconstraints when institutions accept private funding. It may be necessary for public uni?versities to completely break away from government funding to form private institutions(as several UK universities have threatened to do, like Oxford and Cambridge, and USuniversities, like theUniversity of Virginia and theUniversity ofMichigan) to gain greaterautonomy. Another change that traditionally allowed considerable autonomy has been ashift from unstipulated or block grant funding to targeted funding, which tends to increasehigher education dependence on central governments and place additional constraints oninstitutional autonomy (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Ironically one of the side effects of

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neoliberal policies that aim to make universities more autonomous and independent ofgovernment resources is the tendency of governments to introduce more accountability

measures thereby reducing the autonomy of universities. These policies have led to widertrends towards an "audit society" or "performative society" (Amit, 2000; Ball, 2000).It is against such a global policy context that higher education became a tool forachieving an integrated global knowledge system along market lines (Ball, 1998). Thechange in governance ideology in higher education towards market principles has alteredthe ways in which universities are managed (Braun & Merrien, 1999; Currie & Vidovich,1998; Flynn, 1997;Marginson & Considine, 2000; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Arguably,

while there may be some level of enhanced administrative autonomy, increasing financialand accountability pressures continue to limit the power of universities and academics toself govern. This is arguably the case for Chinese universities.

Chinese national policy on autonomyAccording toNeave and van Vught (1994), there are twomodels of government steerage inhigher education: the state-supervised model and the state-controlled model. The Chinesehigher education system has traditionally employed the latter. In the 1950s, the central(national) government assumed the responsibility for formulating higher education poli?cies, allocating resources, exercising administrative controls, employing teaching and re?search staff, developing curriculum, choosing textbooks, recruiting students and assigningjobs to university graduates. The government-university relationship was one-way and topdown, with universities enjoying little autonomy. University operation was under thecentral government's direct control, as stated by the Provisional Regulations of HigherEducation Institutions under theDirect Jurisdiction of theMinistry of Education (MoE) inthe 1960s as follows:

The establishment, change and cancellation of programs in all these universities mustbe approved by theMoE... University teaching should be according to the syllabidesigned or approved by theMinistry...No programs, syllabi and textbooks should bechanged easily. Any substantial changes must be approved by the Ministry.(Shanghai Higher Education Bureau no date, cited inHu, 2003, p. 4)

The 1980s saw a turning point in government-university relationships in China. Thetransformation from a planned economy (imported from the former Soviet Union) to amarket economy from the 1980s under the open-door policy led to profound changes in allaspects of Chinese society. The higher education sector was no exception, and attention

was turned to reforming governance in a context of rapid expansion of the sector. Gov?ernance reforms were introduced from 1985 when the CCP Central Committee issued theDecision on the Reform of the Educational System (hereafter referred to as the 1985Decision) at theNational Education Conference, indicating that university autonomy was apriority:

The core part of the current higher education reforms is to change the central gov?ernment's tight control over institutions, to improve institutional autonomy under thenational principles and plans, so that institutions can build up their closer links toindustry and other sectors, and foster their initiatives and capacity to meet economicand social needs. (Guo, 1995, p. 69)

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In 1993, the Program for Education Reform and Development in China (hereafter the1993 Program) was promulgated to reaffirm the 1985 Decision that the central governmentwas to refrain from direct control of education. Instead, it was to act as a facilitator, givingall universities more autonomy (Mok, 1999). In 1998 university autonomy was furtherprotected by China's Higher Education Law (Sun, 1999), which legitimated the "Presi?dential Responsibility" system. According to this law, university presidents would becomeresponsible for the formulation of their own institutional policies and long-term devel?opment plans. For example, according to Article 34 of theHigher Education Law (1998)"Based on their own teaching needs, higher education institutions take the initiative indesigning their own teaching plans, selecting textbooks and organising teaching activities"(Sun, 1999, p. 62). Likewise within a university, faculties/departments are also meant toenjoy much greater autonomy in matters relating to teaching, research, personnel andresource allocation.

With a strong push towards decentralisation of higher education (Bray, 1999), includinga strengthened role for provincial governments, coupled with marketisation of the highereducation sector, the autonomy of universities was, in theory, to be increased across thedomains of teaching, research and administration. However, as reported by Wang (2000),based on his questionnaire survey of full and associate professors from more than 200universities in 2000, academic staff recruitment was the only item where more than half ofthe respondents (55%) considered their institutions had relatively more autonomy than inthe past. Autonomy in the other six areas identified in the survey was considered lacking.Specifically, the majority of respondents believed that autonomy was lacking in studentrecruitment (70%), academic programs (66%), organisational structure (65%), allocationof funds (57%), promotion (55%), income allocation (53%), and recruitment of senioradministrators and departmental heads (52%).

By the early 2000s, tuition fees were becoming widespread inChinese higher educationas a direct result of reduced government funding and policies of marketisation. The pro?portion of investment from the central government had steadily decreased. From 19931996, although the central government's appropriation rose from 13.88 to 21.07 billion

Chinese yuan due to student expansion, the proportion of annual higher educationexpenditure decreased from 83% to 70% during this period. The percentage in 2001 wasdramatically lower at 53%, demonstrating a significant proportional decline in governmentresources devoted to higher education. In 2002, the MoE set limits to higher educationtuition fees, with different caps for different majors and higher learning institutions with

different status. Thus, since the 1980s, the market has stepped into university-governmentrelations and the central government has become a "market manager". The relationshiphas taken the shape of a "trinity" (Dong, 2003). Furthermore, the role of the government isshifting from state control to state supervision. How has this affected the autonomy ofinstitutions and individual academics inChinese higher education?

The case study universities

A case study approach was adopted in this research to gain a deeper understanding ofinstitutional autonomy within individual universities in their unique settings. The univer?sities selected were Nanjing University (NU) and Nanjing University of Science andTechnology (NUST). As the main method of data collection, we conducted 21 semistructured interviews in Chinese (Davies, 1997; Punch, 1998) at the two case study sites.

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These interviews averaged 45 min and were tape-recorded. They were then simultaneouslytranscribed and translated into English.A range of respondents was selected for the interviews to gain a better understanding ofuniversity policies from different perspectives. Well before we travelled to the research

sites, contacts had been made with our Chinese colleagues, two professors who weredirectors of higher education research institutes atNU and NUST respectively, to facilitatebackground understanding and entr?e to the two universities. They are both senior scholarswith long-term service there. They helped us to locate information-rich participants.Through them, we were able to approach some managers and academics. Then, bysnowball sampling, they were asked to identify other managers and academics workingwith them. All participants were required to have at least five years' experience in theuniversity. By so doing, we were able to make sure that most participants were knowl?

edgeable about changing policies in Chinese higher education at the national level andwithin their own institutions.Efforts were made to achieve variation by gender, rank, age, and disciplines among the

respondents. Although one major consideration in selecting interviewees was their rep?resentation in the wider university population, we also wanted to interview those who knew

more about university policies and processes. The spread of those interviewed was notquite as dispersed throughout the two campuses as we would have liked but we managed tointerview quite a range of individuals and especially those who were more senior in the twouniversities and who tended tobe more aware of higher education policies. We interviewed11 full professors, 6 associate professors and 4 lecturers; there were 14 males and 7females. In terms of disciplines, 5 were from the sciences/engineering/computing and therest from law, literature, linguistics, education, and the social sciences. In terms of ages,they ranged from their 50s (7), 40s (6), 30s (5), to their 20s (3).The two case study institutions represent the twomost common kinds of universities incontemporary China (Yang, 2002), so the practices of NU and NUST may throw somelight on the general conditions at many similar Chinese universities. However, this articledoes not claim that its findings are directly generalisable to other universities inChina. NUis a national university (in the vertical system). It is one of the oldest higher learninginstitutions inChina, consisting of 17 faculties including the humanities, law, international

business, foreign studies, science, engineering, geoscience, life sciences, and medicine,with 47 departments, the Graduate School and the School of Adult Education. NU runs 70undergraduate, 180masters, 116 doctoral programs, and 18 postdoctoral centres.2 It has 75laboratories on campus, among which are 7 national key laboratories and 3 nationalspecialised laboratories. There are 28 nationally designated and 10 provincially designatedkey disciplines. In 2004, there were 38,500 students and of its 2,150 faculty members, 632were full professors, 23 were members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 3 of theChinese Academy of Engineering, and 3 were Fellows of the Third World Academy ofSciences. NU has very strong programs in the humanities and social sciences as well asnatural sciences. By contrast, engineering is relatively weak, although it is beginning tobuild engineering programs. During its long history it has consistently ranked at the top inChina, although its rank has slipped in the last few years from third to sixth and this hasbeen the source of some concern by those within the university. These rankings are

2 Post-doctoral centres began to emerge within Chinese campuses by discipline area in 1985 tomake use oftalented Doctorate holders. They are associated with leading national research and their establishment needsto be approved by the Ministry of Education. For an account of the work of the post-doctoral centres, see

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conducted by non-government organisations but are widely published and frequentlyreferred to (Liu & Liu, 2005).NUST was founded in 1953 under the direct jurisdiction of theCommission of Science,Technology and Industry for National Defence. In 2002, this Commission and Jiangsu

provincial government decided to jointly develop NUST. Its jurisdiction was completelytransferred to the Jiangsu provincial government in 2003-2004.The University has nowturned into a multi-disciplinary institution including faculties of science, engineering,information technology, liberal arts, economics, management, adult education and law,with special emphasis on engineering. It has been particularly specialised in engineering,with relatively weaker humanities and social science programs. It has 57 undergraduate, 82Masters and 33 Doctoral programs and 11 post-doctoral centres. In 2004, 29,626 studentswere enrolled, with 16,599 undergraduate and 5,626 postgraduate students. It had 3,047full-time staff, of which 1,565 were academics and 3 were members of the Chinese

Academy of Engineering. While enjoying a good reputation within the higher educationsystem, NUST does not have the status of NU, nor is it characterised by the liberalorientation evident at NU. It originated as a military college, and continues to maintainclose links with themilitary. In 2004, the year the data were collected, itwas ranked fortyfifth nationally.

Although universities in the vertical system (national government-controlled) currentlyoccupy about 5% of Chinese higher learning institutions, their officially designated highstatus makes them themost influential within the system. Meanwhile technology univer?sities in the horizontal system (provincial government-controlled) form the biggest groupamong various types of Chinese higher institutions. A detailed discussion of the policiesand practices atNU and NUST should begin to shed light on the current state of autonomyinChinese higher education.

Interview findingsIn our study, we distinguished two levels of autonomy: institutional and individualautonomy. The former refers to a university's autonomy in its context of multiple externalrelationships, especially with governments, and the latter refers to the autonomy of indi?vidual academics which is akin to the notion of academic freedom. Although there isclearly significant overlap between institutional and individual autonomy, they are notsynonymous. For example, a high degree of institutional autonomy does not necessarilyguarantee a high level of individual autonomy for academics and, in fact, universityautonomy could be exercised to reduce the autonomy of individual academics. Therefore,the views of our respondents on institutional and individual autonomy are presentedseparately.

Most of the themes to emerge about autonomy were in common across the two casestudy universities. However, where differences between the two institutions existed, theyare noted. Quotes are used extensively to allow the richness of the data from respondents tobe revealed, and an audit trail is provided with respondents numbered and identified byinstitution as NU or NUST. We start with the views about institutional autonomy.Institutional autonomy

There was almost total consensus among respondents that universities in China have moreautonomy now than a decade ago, as exemplified by: "Compared with the past, autonomy

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given by the country (national government) is much more" (NUST7). However, onerespondent argued for further enhancing autonomy by marketising more fully:

The government still uses the thinking of a planned economy. The university shouldbe totally put into the market and let themarket say if the quality of the university isgood or not. It is like farming. The MoE controls what the university should seed; butwhen there are too many plants, itwill blame the university. (NU2)Opinion was divided on international comparisons, which is reflected in these twodifferent views:Autonomy is still very little compared to overseas. (NUST3)Chinese universities have obtained all the rights, maybe more than universities in

Western countries. For example, in Germany, if the university wants to employ moreteachers, it has to be approved by theMinistry of Culture. In China it is very easy.The university has the right to decide. (NUST2)The latter quote points to the increasing autonomy of universities in appointing staff,

although there are still limitations. For example, one respondent noted that:In our province there is an official document specifying that if people from NorthJiangsu want tomove towork in South Jiangsu, itwill not be easy. Itmay be easier ifyou bring talent from abroad. The personnel file and residence registration file wasnot easily transferred. It is a little better now because you may be able to reconstructa new file, but it relies on your 'good relationship' (guanxi) with the universityauthorities, if they support you. But if this residence file cannot be transferred, itwillmake things difficult for the university to arrange an apartment for academics and fortheir children to register in schools. They (central government] emphasise nation?

wide stability...if you want to recruit staff, you are restricted within their generalplan. (NU5)Another respondent noted that "Universities still have no rights to dismiss teachers,

except if they offend party discipline and national law" (NUST7). University presidentsand secretariats are still appointed by the national and/or provincial governments butacademics from professors down are now being appointed institutionally, rather thannationally.

Universities have increasing, although still limited, autonomy over enrolments. There ispressure from the national government to link enrolments to human resource planning, which

means placing limits in some areas, and the government is also increasing enrolments overallwith its desire to move towards mass higher education. As one respondent explained:

The government encourages almost every university to accept more students, butsome don't want to because it is too much of a burden on the classrooms, teachers,dormitories, books and laboratory equipment. But the government orders us to dothat so we have to. There is bargaining between theMoE and universities. They saywe should enrol 3000, we say 2000 and they say 3000. But only where students canfind jobs does the government encourage enlargement of those fields. (NU 12)Respondents believed that national universities (e.g. NU) generally have more auton?

omy than provincial universities (e.g. NUST). The more prestigious universities tend tohave greater autonomy over the enrolment of undergraduates (NU and NUST to a lesserextent) and some universities have autonomy over enrolment of postgraduates (NU but not

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NUST). If a university has gained permission from theMoE to have a Research GraduateSchool (approximately 50 across the country), it can offer Masters places, but Doctoralplaces are still controlled by the national government, although there are some signs thatthis has begun to change. Even with some level of government control over total enrol?

ments, some universities now have more autonomy over their internal distribution ofenrolments between departments, although as one respondent at NU noted:

I think this (power to determine internal distribution of enrolments) is slightly better,but you still have to report it (department enrolments) to the MoE...You cannot makeunplanned changes, such as increasing or decreasing the number of students for acourse based on a changed situation after the National Higher Education EntranceExaminations. That's not allowed. (NU5)Almost all respondents reported that autonomy over the curriculum has increased

greatly in recent times, although again this varies across different universities. The MoEusually approves new courses. Some doctoral universities, however, can introduce newcourses themselves. Students also remarked that they have greater autonomy than in thepast. They can change majors and have some choice of lecturers. They also have more?lectives within their programs. Variation across the sector in the trend towards increasingautonomy over enrolments and curriculum is reflected in the following quote from arespondent at NUST:

Some universities have autonomy and some have not. We have autonomy of en?rolment. The national government has given some universities rights to set newundergraduate subjects out of the national undergraduate subjects' list but we are notone of them. Generally speaking the country does not give complete autonomy touniversities. (NUST5)Universities are generally free to decide on course design, content and evaluation,

except that relating to political education where the national government intervenes.3 Theissue of individual academic freedom in teaching is taken up in the next subsection.The majority of respondents noted tensions between the level of resources and the levelof autonomy, as exemplified by: "The University has lots of autonomy but resourceallocation still has problems...The government should provide enough funding, includinghuman resources. If our University cannot provide high salaries to professors, no-one willcome" (NU4).The introduction of tuition fees set by individual universities was one of the mostcommon examples respondents gave of increasing university autonomy, especially atNUST. However, this continues to be a highly controversial reform in Chinese highereducation, with many believing that fees are too high relative to the ability of the popu?lation to pay. Further, fees were seen by many respondents to breach the "rightful"responsibility of the government to invest in education for the people, as dramaticallyillustrated in the quote below:

3 "Two courses" on political education are compulsory at university (including postgraduate level). Onecentres on Marxism, Leninism, Mao Ze-dong Thought and Deng Xiao-ping Theory, and more recently onJiang Zemin's Three Representatives: (1) CCP should always represent themost advanced production powerin science and technology; (2) CCP should always indicate the future direction towards which the advancedculture of China should go; (3) CCP should always represent the basic benefits for the mass of the Chinese

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The autonomy of running the university is much more than before. In the pasteverything was planned, including tuition fees. Nowadays theMoE just sights theplan reported by the university and controls fees 'a little' because they cannot be toohigh. The reason is that this year inwestern China, a student suicided and last year aparent suicided because the family could not afford tuition fees. The media had aseries of reports and lots of people said fees should not be raised. In westerncountries the tuition fee is a limited percentage of people's income. Here peasants donot have enough to pay. (NUST8)

On the one hand, almost all respondents were largely positive about moves towardsmarket principles "freeing up" the centralised controls of the Communist past. Unlike thesituation in theWest where the decreasing involvement has been criticised, such a trendhas been welcomed in China, due to the different historical and contemporary social,economic and political contexts, in particular the longstanding tradition of reluctance toencourage a direct link between education and industry and the lingering discord caused bythe planned system.

On the other hand, many were uncomfortable with the degree of change?it was forthem too far and too fast. The following quotes reflect the tensions between centralisedcontrol and the autonomy of universities to operate more freely in a higher education

marketplace. Most of the respondents quoted here argue for various forms of compromiseor "mixed modes" of partial regulation and deregulation, although the final respondentrejects the notion of a market style corporate university as antithetical to achieving the goalof a 'world class' university.

The national government transfers the responsibility it should have to universities andparents. My view is that the country should raise the funds and the university shouldalso adopt appropriate market ways. The national investment should be over 70%, anduniversities should fund the remaining 30%. Now it is around 40%. (NUST2)

China is transferring from a planned economy to a market economy ... The universitymust create profits. However, we should not take profits as the aim because our aim

is to educate people. But it does not mean we cannot make a profit. The universityhas started to ask students to pay an annual fee; it had to be done, otherwise theburden for the country is too heavy. The university also needs the application andcommodification of research to obtain economic profit. The aim of making profits isfor the development of education. It is different from a company thatdoes everythingonly for obtaining profits. (NUST5)Universities such as Peking and Tsinghua?the best (mainland Chinese)universities?should not be evaluated according to market criteria, but the majorityof universities should be?if the products can be sold and get a good price. If thestudent graduates are not good, then the reputation of the university will decline andit should answer to the market. The market is fairer. (NUST7)I think if the university wants to be first class in the country or in theworld, it shouldnot use the administrative way of companies. The university cannot be run like acompany. The aim of a company is for pursuing maximum profits, which is the worstthing for running a university because the university is for cultivating people's spiritand it should be full of human culture. The environment should be more relaxed. The

people who want to earn lots of money should not come to university. However, theuniversity must provide an honourable life for people who arewilling to contribute toeducation. (NU6)

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Several respondents identified (unprompted) the emergence of negative implications foruniversities operating autonomously to increase their income from fees. For example:

In the last two years, extending enrolments has gone too far. Some pay more moneyto get into university but after entering they are reluctant to study and, added to notbeing very clever, this definitely results in failure. (NUST8)

Nowadays parents pay for sending children to universities, and students have startedto demand higher teaching quality...The phenomenon of a teacher being drummedout has occurred. (NUST1)On top of the tensions with the transition from centralised control to deregulatedmarkets in Chinese higher education is the complication of a political system which hasevolved from Communism, as highlighted by a majority of respondents across both uni?versities and exemplified in the following quotes:Teachers do not answer to the market, they answer to the (political) leaders. ... Iftotally following the principle of the market, public politics would be washed out.(NUST7)Economic reform is following the track of amarket economy and doing very well.Now is the problem of political structure reform. (NUST7)Several respondents from NU, the higher ranked case study university, believed that the

government should give different levels of autonomy to differently ranked universities, forexample: "Universities ranked in the first 30 should be given autonomy of curriculum setup because those universities will not do any banned things. As to lower level universities,the autonomy should not be given and the government could enhance the management ofthem" (NU2). From another respondent: "To develop education, the government shouldgive freedom to big universities and make them energetic, but control the new universi?ties" (NU10).

Overall, while institutional autonomy has clearly increased in some domains, there arestill significant limitations (including low levels of resourcing) which are the source oftensions. One respondent gave an example of the President of Nanjing University putting acase, publicly, for more autonomy from the MoE. According to this respondent, thePresident was likening reforms within Nanjing University?a "flattening" of the structureof colleges and departments?to the need for national reforms to devolve more power fromtheMoE to universities: "Last month aDirector of theMoE came here.... The President ofthis university said to him face to face that... 'We wish the MoE could decentralise power'.

He meant that we?the university?did not have such power" (NU5). The current balancebetween government control and university autonomy inChinese higher education mightbest be characterised as a "hybrid" of centralisation and decentralisation which takesvariable forms across the sector. In the next section the focus moves from the level ofinstitutions to individual academics.Individual autonomy for academics

The general trend towards increasing university autonomy in China does not necessarilytranslate into increasing autonomy for individual academics. Almost all respondents in thisstudy reported a high degree of individual autonomy or academic freedom in their re?search. For example, "Nowadays we are advocating academic freedom, and there is muchfreedom in research" (NUST5). Although some noted that research projects are very

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High Educ (2007) 54:575-592 587

dependent on scarce funds and these can carry expectations to direct the research by thoseproviding the funds. The availability of funds can also be subject toguanxi, which is a formof interpersonal relationship building where junior staff members are sponsored by seniorpowerful allies. These themes are reflected in the quotes below:

For national projects, which aim to benefit the country, scientists would not beallowed to have autonomy, and also for those projects funded by companies, youmust follow the needs of the company. (NU3)There is freedom in research except around political issues, but you cannot beguaranteed funding. Funding depends on the private relationship you have with theperson who is in charge of funding (guanxi). (NUST7)Another respondent gave examples of political research that could be too sensitive and

would not be allowed by the government:"You cannot do research on the June 4th

Incident?its merits, demerits, historical position?or on the Four Basic Principles4?whetherto stick to them or not. But you may wish to study Bill Clinton and no-one will interferewith you" (NU5).There was a high level of consensus from respondents that there is increasing freedomin teaching (except in politics where the curriculum is set and students must pass nationalexams). Chinese lecturers can generally decide what to say in class and how to assessstudents' learning as they please. Beyond this, the national government now rarely inter?feres in curriculum design: "Now ismuch better than before. Previously theMoE con?trolled too many things such as the curriculum...Now we just need to provide the studentoutcomes" (NU6).

However, autonomy to universities from the MoE does not necessarily always translateinto autonomy for individual academics to decide on curricular and pedagogy issues. Some

university departments can be very prescriptive over these domains. One respondent at NUgave examples of restrictions applied at both administration and department levels:

At the beginning of the semester, our department (linguistics) will hold ameeting. Itwill decide on what kinds of materials (such as texts) and teaching methods shouldbe used. If you do something special, you will be criticised. ...Some of my colleaguestried to give students more American movies to practice their listening (in English).Others didn't think itwould work because they thought that students would only lookat the Chinese characters (subtitles) instead of listening to the dialogue. My col?leagues were criticised by the teaching administration department. (NUI)One respondent atNUST observed that where individual teacher autonomy does exist,

it is not always taken up, often because instituting changes to longstanding practices is verytime consuming. For example, although this respondent felt there was freedom to choose

how to evaluate students, in reality there was almost exclusive use of examinations, al?though nascent changes were emerging: "The way of examinations is changing gradually.Teachers do not want to change theirways because they feel it is simple to give a test. The

workload is heavier with the other ways such as oral tests but the government does notinterfere and require them" (NUST9).

4 Deng Xiao-ping introduced the "Four Basic Principles", or "Four Cardinal Principles", in 1979. Theyare: "We must keep to the socialist road. We must uphold the people's democratic dictatorship. We mustuphold the leadership of the Communist Party. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism-Mao Ze-dongThought."

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588 High Educ (2007) 54:575-592

Despite widespread acknowledgement among respondents of increasing autonomy forinstitutions and individual academics compared with the past, a significant number ofrespondents noted that increased accountability accompanies increased autonomy. Further,several respondents noted that prescriptive accountability measures can force a conver?gence of university structures/functions towards a single model. The "dangers" of a singlemodel are colourfully described by the following respondent:

A famous university must be all flowers in bloom and does not only follow onemodel. If there is accountability demanded by senior staff, we will do it just tomuddle through but it wastes manpower and money. The university is not amechanical factory to create standard products. It is to cultivate students. Therefore,the environment should encourage creativity and innovation. (NU6)As noted

byseveral respondents: "The more autonomy the national government gives,the higher requirement it asks for. It requires our university to be a 'world class' universityand the pressure increases" (NU9) and "The MoE gave us several hundred million (yuan),

but is always evaluating us, so how can we be free?" (NU8). Another respondent, whenreferring to the pressure on universities and academics to account for measurable out?comes, despite the rhetoric of increasing autonomy, explained:

' 'After your shackles areuntied, you are still dancing in a cage. If you undo your shackles, you will not fly away;you will dance more perfectly and more elegantly, not overcautiously or perform someunqualified dance against your will" (NU5).

Concluding remarks

University autonomy is never an absolute concept but limited by the historical context inwhich universities develop. As the economy of China moves from a planned to a marketbased economy, Chinese universities are also taking steps to open themselves to greaterfreedoms. Compared with the past, the Chinese central government has given considerableautonomy to universities. By doing this, it has shifted from a state-controlled model to astate-supervised model. In terms of the market, it has opened up its student enrolment tointernational students and its academic appointments to international recruitment. How?ever, it still operates basically within a restricted, national market for both students andstaff; and, in some cases, this becomes even more limited to a provincial market. Therecontinues to be a lack of mobility for students and staff that one might find in theUK or theUSA. The central government still has control over key aspects of Chinese higher edu?cation policy. Some of these aspects were detected in our interviews with academic staff inour two case study universities. Before summarizing these, it is important to note that thisstudy captured only one point in time in the lives of a small number of academics in two

Nanjing universities. Furthermore, our findings have to be understood within the context ofa country in a state of flux.

Having said that, we detected several significant, if sometimes, contradictory trends. Agood illustration of one of these is the paradox of policy discourses about increasingautonomy while universities also had to accept greater accountability. We would argue thatthis mixture of enhanced autonomy concurrent with increased accountability will meanthat the autonomy granted by the government will be somewhat limited. However, it isimportant to note that with China's tendency to want to preserve harmony in its society,

what may appear to westerners to be contradictory patterns may not be seen in the same

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High Educ (2007) 54:575-592 589

way by the Chinese. In other words, concepts from the West are often redefined andreconstituted in Asian societies.

Drawing upon the respondents' views, they reported a significant increase in autonomy(both institutional and individual) in the last two decades, while also identifying distinc?tions between the rhetoric of government policy suggesting a "freeing up" of centralisedgovernment controls and "the reality" of constraints they continued to experience. Forexample, there were contradictions evident when respondents said that they had greaterfreedom in terms of teaching and research and at the same time there were continuingconstraints, especially in terms of political education, sensitive areas of research and theappointment of the President and party secretaries within universities by central authorities.These examples suggest that the CCP still has considerable influence in certain areas ofhigher education.

The issue of autonomy for universities and academics inevitably raises questions aboutthe purposes of universities themselves. Institutions of higher learning have always servedtheir societies; they have never been the isolated ivory towers of popular imagination.Since their inception, they have engaged with the issues of their day, discovered anddistributed whatever was at the time deemed useful knowledge and established various,often idiosyncratic, financial relationships with patrons, donors, and governments. Over thelast two decades as the Chinese government decided to expand the sector towards masshigher education, it began to relinquish itsmonopolistic role in higher education and toallow room for non-state forces to become more involved. Policies of decentralisation and

marketisation in the Chinese context have been highly instrumental inmobilising moreeducational resources and thereby creating more learning opportunities for Chinesecitizens.

At the same time, China, like many other countries, began opening up its universities tomore public scrutiny. Greater accountability to external constituencies means that some ofthe traditional values of universities are often challenged (Kennedy, 2003). When thishappens, Kennedy suggests that the task of universities is to develop strategies thatwillretain the best of what universities have traditionally stood for while responding to newpressures and priorities. The analysis here shows thatChina is trying to do just that. It has

maintained a strong role for the state even though it is being reconstituted. The state nowworks via increased accountability and steers at a distance. Considering China's social,cultural and historical realities, the government's role is likely to remain significant. It willcontinue to act as a regulator, a facilitator and a negotiator even though it has gainedgreater faith in themarket to fulfil some of these roles.

Evidence from our research respondents suggests that the Chinese are passionatelyengaging with globalisation andmarket competition and thatmarket ideologies may be aneven stronger influence in Chinese higher education than inmany OECD countries. But,markets can also be deaf and blind (Yang, 2003) and thus theremay be a role for the statein ensuring equity. Within universities, the challenge is, as suggested by Kennedy (2003),to identify decision-making structures that allow academics, managers and governingauthorities to work in partnership. Outside of universities, partnerships can also extendbeyond the university to include external constituencies. This is a path that China hastaken. However, as Derek Bok (2003), former president of Harvard, has warned, itmay bewise to be cautious in this endeavour. While diversifying funding sources might potentiallyincrease autonomy for universities and academics, the experience from western universi?ties suggests that there are often hidden constraints that can emerge, especially withcorporate or private funding. Balancing different requirements from the state and themarket may be a difficulty Chinese universities will face in the future.

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Autonomy is associated with relationships of power and authority. Clark's (1983)distinction between state (regulatory) and market control as policy mechanisms is stilluseful here. Market-based interventions incorporate financial incentives to change thebehaviours of market participants, and the incentives can subsidise the cost of productionor change price incentives faced by market participants. Regulatory interventions use nonmarket or non-price strategies. They do this through changing regulations or legislation tofacilitate, prohibit or regulate certain behaviours. They can also introduce funding poolsthat do not give autonomy to market participants but require special submissions orapplications to access the available funds. China is trying to utilise both state and marketcontrol mechanisms. This is in line with what Coaldrake (2000) has highlighted in the

Australian context, that is, bureaucrats emphasizing regulating strategies and conservativepoliticians wanting more market practices. In Clark's (1983) terms, the effect is tostrengthen

both the market and the state, often at the expense of academic autonomyor

academic control. The challenge is to get the mix right among the trinity of the state, themarket and the university sector.In relation to general patterns of control in higher education across the globe, Ordorika(2003) identified three types of domains in which universities could have autonomy. Itappears thatChinese universities now have greater freedom in the appointive domain foracademics and in the academic domain of self-government over curricular decisions andthey also have some additional financial independence from government in the form ofprivate funds, as neoliberal policies come to dominate. But this latter freedom is a mixedblessing due to increased regulation of performance-related pay and tuition caps. Olssen,Codd and O'Neil (2004), writing about educational restructuring inEngland, point to thedangers of neoliberal policy options that tend to deprofessionalise academics by replacingautonomy and trust with new forms of accountability and control. They argue that "theessence of contractual models involves a specification of tasks and duties, which is fun?damentally at odds with the notion of delegated responsibility" (p. 186). Itmay be tooearly to raise alarm bells about the influence of neoliberal policies thatmay change therelationship between the state and universities and individual academics in China. Nev?ertheless, we can discern a shift in the nature of autonomy, resulting in some greaterprocedural autonomy but, arguably, a narrowing of substantive autonomy (Berdahl et al.,1971) with the central government at the helm in China, steering higher education toincrease its competitiveness in a context of globalisation. This has resulted in a type of

regulated autonomy that is reminiscent of one of our respondent's claims that even thoughtheir shackles have been removed, they were still "dancing in a cage".

Acknowledgements Financial support by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project is gratefullyacknowledged. We thank the reviewers for their valuable insights. We also want to thank the participants inthe two Chinese universities that gave us their time to be interviewed. Finally, we are particularly gratefulfor the assistance and the hospitality provided by Professor Gong Fang and Assistant Professor Qu Mingfengat the Institute of Higher Education Research, University of Nanjing, and Director Zhao Min of the HigherEducation Research Institute at Nanjing University of Science and Technology.

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Autonomy in Education in China