For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a "lingua…

Purpose: The goal is to explore the role of international education in a developing country's nation building in a mostly indigenous process. Design/methodology/approach: This study reviews China's history of international education set in the larger context of different nation building tasks in the past two centuries. Findings: The unique case of…

Adult literacy and literacy education have long been a global agenda. China's literacy education has been developing amid the backdrop of international commitments and goals of adult literacy. Since the founding of new China in 1949, adult literacy policy in China has been continuously evolved within the changing political, economic and social…

China has had an ambivalent policy for the learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) over much of its history. The explicit and implicit implementation of language policy has had a significant impact on the content of EFL textbooks and the ideologies underlying them. However, studies exploring such ideologies remain sensitive…

Recent years, research on curriculum-based ideological and political education has been one of hotspots in the field of higher education in China. Using both literature analysis software of CiteSpace and VOSviewer, visual analysis and information collection have been carried out on 429 papers of Chinese curriculum-based ideological and political…

The nature of the New Policies in China (1901-1911) has been hotly debated for decades. While scholars doubt the sincerity of the Qing government in their pursuit of constitutional reform, there is a general agreement on the high quality of their educational reform. Some even consider their educational innovations as "genuine reform" but…

This paper charts the historical and political contexts for the evolution of Chinese adult and continuing education over the past 40 years, focusing on the national adult education reforms and relevant policies, and establishing the national lifelong education system. The progress and transformations of Chinese adult education, including how…

This paper explores power bases and power tensions among education bureaux, inspection offices, and schools in China. The six bases of social power were applied as the analytical framework to scrutinize 13 policy documents and eight interviews with inspectors. The study uncovered three types of power tensions: education bureau's informational…

This article investigates socialist China's pedagogic treatment of individuality between 1949 and 1958, with a focus on the debates concerning "all-round development" and "teaching in accordance with aptitude," two principles that clashed regarding students' individuality. It reconstructs how educational bureaucrat and theorist…

Yali College, a four-year institution operating under the aegis of Yale University, offered a US-style undergraduate education in China's Hunan province from 1914 to 1927. It developed a robust curriculum and an impressive physical plant but collapsed after a little more than a decade. This paper, drawing on new archival research, focuses on the…

Due to the politicisation of universities-within-the-state, the state's governance of higher education in China differentiates itself from other countries. This study examines how the Chinese central government adjusts its governance over universities between 1978 and 2018. Based on an extensive analysis of policy documents and scholarly research,…

Although engineering education has played important roles in China's growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and…

During the last century, early childhood curriculum (ECC) in China has undergone a series of monumental transformations, shaped by the interaction between local cultural and global forces. In this case study, we critically analyse three major waves of ECC reform in China, with a particular emphasis on the social and cultural forces that have…

This paper discusses the changing nature of China's higher education by turning to the changes that happened to China's higher education system brought about by implementing different government policies of higher education. The implementation of the policies, the restructuring of universities and independent colleges in 1952, the enrolling of…

Historically, Chinese educational philosophy has been dominated by Confucianism and, since 1949, by Marxism. However, rapid industrialization, ideological demands, and loyalty to traditions have now led to a situation where various Western philosophies have been adopted into vocational education in hopes of moving the country forward without…