Civilisational ‘ideas’, state power, and globalising ‘realities’: structuring mechanisms shaping contemporary higher education outcomes in China

Abstract

In this paper we ask: what does ‘the idea’ of the Chinese university mean at the current time, especially when the sector has been shaped by endogenous and exogenous globalising dynamics? We explore this question, drawing on cultural political economy as a heuristic to make visible the links between culture, economy and politics. We identify three key dynamics: the constitutive powers of civilisational ideas; the power of the Chinese state; and the ongoing integration of Chinese higher education into knowledge production and its circulation nationally and globally. We show these dynamics have the unintended consequence of accelerating global processes including: (i) outward and inward academic and student mobility; (ii) internal social stratification, education inequalities and injustice; and (iii) the instrumentalism of knowledge production and its circulation that emulates the neoliberal academy in the West. Despite invocations from President Xi to nurture the red gene, higher education in China is deeply entangled in global dynamics as well as a shaper of its trajectories.