Community colleges in China's two systems

Abstract

This chapter compares community college development in Mainland China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic. Hong Kong is important because it is considered the most international and wealthiest part of China with two official languages, a common law system, and formidable global financial clout. Unlike the Mainland system with rich natural resources and large-scale industries, Hong Kong is a service economy that relies singularly upon human capital. China's one-country and two-system policy provides Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy, including in education. This helps to explain why community colleges in Hong Kong and Mainland China differ substantially. Thus, a comparison of the two Chinese experiences with community colleges can provide a perspective on how the concepts and features of community colleges are institutionalized within societies that share a common cultural heritage, but operate relatively autonomously from each other. For example, while the concept of community in Chinese culture may be similar in Hong Kong and Mainland China, each government has a different view about the control of civil society and its educational institutions. When we speak about Mainland China in this chapter, we are largely referring to the urban regions compatible with Hong Kong, especially major cities in the eastern coastal regions. This chapter argues that features of the American community college have been readily adapted to suit the rapidly changing needs of each Chinese system. In the case of Hong Kong, community colleges were used to weather a financial crisis in tertiary education but became a major component of the tertiary education system in a short time. The Chinese Mainland used community colleges to refine the features of its existing system of vocational-technical colleges. In the process, neither system saw the need to popularize the US view of community colleges as a means to champion the values of democracy and equality. In fact, the Mainland and Hong Kong took a multinational approach in studying and adapting innovations from many other counties. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.