Affirmative Action in China and the U.S.

Abstract

Chinese colleges and universities have adopted preferential policies to lower their cutoff points for ethnic and linguistic minority college applicants (see chapters two and four). Involving the interest of millions of people in China, these policies have had a broad impact and have received extensive scrutiny, generating criticism and controversy. This chapter analyzes how these policies have evolved, why they have been made and how they have been recently adjusted, and what they have achieved in the last half-century in China.