Higher Education and China's Global Rise

A Neo-tributary Perspective

Su-Yan Pan, Joe Tin Yau Lo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317190318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book examines the rise of China's global profile in the international higher education community, as indicated by its rise of human capital, visibility in academic publications, world university ranking, expanding international cultural influence, and becoming a study-abroad destination of international students. It identifies the diplomatic role of higher education in China's politico-economic development over a century, and how the role has been shaped by China's self-identity as a great power in the world.

Higher Education and China's Global Rise provides an understanding of linkage between higher education and China's international influence, and a scholarly discussion of what Chinese higher education tells about China's international relations, especially the aims, means, and nature of China's rise as a global power. It will help to broaden perspectives surrounding debate about China's rise that is currently dominated by Western international relations theory and comparative higher education discourses.

1
Introduction

China’s rise, neo-tributary, and higher education

The purpose and plan of this book

This is a relatively little book about a big topic: China’s global rise. There is no shortage of International Relations (IR) and China Studies writings surrounding this topic, but thus far most have some theoretical limitations. In the IR field, most explanatory frameworks for China’s power status rely mainly on realist and liberal IR perspectives inductively derived from Western experiences (e.g., Johnston, 2013; Kirshner, 2010; Nye, 2005). However, neither of the two most commonly used perspectives – conventional wisdom (derived from warlordism and European colonialism) and soft power concepts (drawn from post–Cold War American diplomacy) – for analysing China’s global rise consider the role of history in shaping China’s contemporary power strategy. China’s and Europe’s histories differ, and attempting to explain China’s international behaviour from a Westphalian IR perspective shows ‘historical ignorance’ (Jacques, 2012, p. 11). Scholars must acknowledge the disparity between Western expectations and Asian realities, and develop appropriate alternative theoretical approaches. One such approach may be to examine the impact of culture and history on diplomacy and IR, as social progress is the ‘organic expression of a society fulfilling its vision and culture in the flow of history’ (Kissinger, 2012, para. 1).

China Studies literature suggest ways to rethink the relevance of Chinese concepts to understanding China’s role in world politics. References are often made to Confucianism, which offers a philosophical perspective to understand power relationships as an ‘harmonious hierarchy’ (Smith, 2012, p. 167); the term Tianxia (all-under-heaven) is now part of a new vocabulary used to describe imperial China’s worldview, much as Pax Americana describes the United States’ hegemony as today’s global superpower (Khong, 2013). Moreover, the tributary system, most often associated with China’s dominance in East Asia and contacts with the rest of the world during the Han and Qing empires, is now manifested in China’s ‘go-global’ strategy (Shambaugh, 2013). While revisiting these Chinese concepts from a historical perspective helps explain the role of the past in shaping China’s aspirations to great power status, there is still a lack of rigorous academic research into the current mechanisms through which China engages with other polities to form relationships to its liking.

This book aims to provide an understanding of how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has used resources and opportunities created by higher education – in both Chinese and foreign universities – to restore its ancient prestige and claim a new global status. It focuses on the role of higher education as the nexus of a four-dimensional approach, through which the PRC state searches for global prominence. The first dimension is a belief in Chinese greatness, which leads China to demand foreign acknowledgement of its inherent superiority. To that end, Chinese higher education has been tasked with increasing China’s standing in the global academic community, and supplanting North American and European countries as the world’s knowledge production and distribution core. The second dimension is the intertwined trade and diplomacy underpinning China’s global economic expansion and regional geopolitical influence. Chinese higher education serves as pathfinder, forging trading and diplomatic relationships between China and its major economic partners.

The third dimension is the cultural assimilation by which the PRC state reinforces its political alliance in the region of Asia-Pacific, and expands its global economic partnerships. Chinese universities serve as cultural diplomats, using language, educational exchanges, cultural events, and conferences as academic soft power tools to diffuse China’s officially designed cultural influence, and expand China’s economic interests abroad. The fourth dimension is national image-building, which aims to portray the Chinese state as a legitimate, modern global socio-economic power, forging a positive international reception and a strong national identity among its own citizens. Cultivating students’ sentimental national pride and loyalty as citizenship attributes is a political imperative that Chinese higher education should address. The rest of the book will explore these issues.

Chapter 2 proposes a ‘neo-tributary’ conceptual framework that systematically interprets the motives, aims, and means underlying China’s claim to rising global power status, and the role of higher education in China’s great power strategy. It identifies four analytic categories for conceptualising China’s power strategy, including the mentality of Chinese greatness as motive, trade and diplomatic linkages as economic means, cultural assimilation as political strategy, and image building aimed at legitimacy defence. It argues that the mentality and strategies associated with the imperial Chinese tribute system are still manifested in China’s contemporary diplomacy and operated by Chinese higher education, in line with the PRC state’s geopolitical and economic agenda. Having developed a conceptual basis, the subsequent chapters will test and elaborate the analytical utility of the neo-tributary conceptual work, with a focus on how Chinese higher education has functioned as the nexus of a four-dimensional approach to finding China’s place in the globalised world: asserting Chinese exceptionalism, trade and diplomatic linkages, cultural assimilation, and national image building.

Chapter 3 explores and explains how the mentality of Chinese exceptionalism has shaped the fundamental function of Chinese higher education, as both the state’s diplomatic tool, and a working mechanism for the state’s domestic legitimacy. The mentality is reflected in Confucius’s (1980) assertion that the goals of higher learning (Da Xue, The Great Learning) are ‘cultivating oneself’, ‘managing family’, ‘governing the country’, and ‘ensuring security all under heaven’ (xiusheng qijia zhiguo ping Tianxia). Modern Chinese higher education has continued to serve the state, and to manage the relationship between domestic and foreign affairs, and between the state and citizens. Throughout Chinese history, the visions and missions of Chinese higher education have been shaped by Chinese rulers’ worldviews characterised by a set of distinctive binaries – Tianxia /boundary, Zhong/Xi, tradition/modernity, civil/military, friend/enemy, China/world.

Chapter 4 examines the role of Chinese higher education as pathfinder for the PRC’s diplomatic and economic outreach, which not only ended China’s Cold War–era isolationism, but also reconnected it to the global knowledge-based economy. Although the existing literature often attributes the renormalization of the diplomatic relationship between China and the West to China’s opening-up policy, evidence shows Chinese higher education was its true vanguard. With reference to China’s education-abroad policy between 1978 and 2009, this chapter unfolds how the PRC state shaped the flow of Chinese students and scholars, both from and into China, to pave the way for brain gain in four major aspects: gaining access to higher education resources in developed countries, improving the quality of human capital available to the state for the pursuit of economic prosperity, gaining the high international profile needed to increase China’s representation and influence in the international science and technology community, and preparing manpower to drive innovative technology.

Building on its miraculous economic growth, China has used international higher education to expand its geopolitical and cultural influence even further. It has developed its own paradigm for higher education, which has three features. First, universities serve to increase China’s international geopolitical influence by educating students from less-developed countries and the former socialist bloc. Second, the state-university relationship follows a patron-client pattern, which is maintained by control-incentive cycle. Third, university curricula follow the ‘red and expert’ (hong yu zhuan) education formula – i.e., higher education should produce technical professionals (experts) who identify politically with socialist China (red) (Meisner, 1977). Chapter 5 identifies how China’s higher education paradigm affects both the international higher education community and China’s go-global strategies. Three examples are selected to spotlight the patterns of and reasons for this evolution: China’s rise as a new, study-abroad destination; the worldwide expansion of Confucius Institutes; and the transition of Hong Kong’s higher education policy from its British legacy to conformity with PRC education formula, in keeping with the former colony’s return to Chinese sovereignty.

Chapter 6 sheds light on the role of Chinese higher education in China’s national image-building project. It shows how Chinese universities have managed to tackle the state’s image problem in contemporary China by reusing and reinterpreting aspects of China’s historical legacy once denounced by the socialist state. With reference to the PRC’s official’s vision of Confucian ethnics and citizenship education, this chapter shows how the Communist Party of China (CPC) uses its political power in the present enables it to shape how people interpret China’s past and conceptualise its future. The CPC’s technique of reusing history to legitimise itself is an example of the political control of history – as George Orwell (1949, p. 284) said, ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. China’s moral education curriculum still serves to compel citizens’ acceptance of the ruler as a moral leader.

Chapter 7 examines the paradoxical issues embedded in China’s educational diplomacy, including the mixed blessing of China’s educational diplomacy and strategic dependence on Western universities, the cultural clash between Chinese and Western traditions of higher education, domestic and international requests for liberal civic education in China, and the PRC’s difficulty in winning the minds and hearts of educated citizens in Hong Kong. These issues evidence the competing ideals of the university manifested in the views of the PRC state, critical Chinese scholars and students, and the international higher education community. As a result, China’s educational diplomacy has not produced its intended results.

In Chapter 8, the book concludes by crystalizing the analytical utility of the neo-tributary framework, and its implications for understanding China as a nascent global power in a non-Western hegemony. It questions the trendy assumption of exercising soft power through the diplomatic use of higher education. The characteristics of China’s international engagement in higher education and speculations on China’s future are discussed, followed by a reflection on the theoretical and policy implications of this volume, and potential areas for future research.

The main argument of this book

This book proposes an explanatory framework in ‘neo-tributary’ terms, and identifies four analytic categories for conceptualising China’s power strategy: Chinese exceptionalism, trade and diplomatic linkages, cultural assimilation, and image building. This analytical framework goes beyond hard/soft power categories, and takes account of the relations between the past and present, re-contextualized in the conditions surrounding China’s claim to global power status. It sheds light on the influence of traditional mentality in shaping the nation’s contemporary diplomacy. It considers the operational mechanisms that allow state-sponsored organisations (e.g., Chinese universities and research institutes) to act as network weavers and cultural diplomats, armed by formally or informally regulated institutions and conventions, to build up and expand the international network needed by a nation state to diffuse its economic and cultural influences.

The neo-tributary framework advances our understanding of how the PRC state adjusts its higher education policies to realise renewed international prestige, while at the same time coping with external and internal challenges to its legitimacy due to changing international and domestic circumstances. China’s educational paradigm mirrors the state’s power strategy in world politics. By serving the state’s diplomatic relations and national image building, Chinese universities have managed to increase their international profiles, but have remained continuously dependent on foreign-trained personnel for cutting-edged research and scientific publications, rather than cultivating innovation from indigenous knowledge and domestically trained personnel. Moreover, China has reasons to celebrate its ‘brain gain’ successes – i.e., the ability to import highly educated international human capital possessing the knowledge, skills, and/or potentials on which China relies for economic growth, political stability, and global competitiveness. Nevertheless, the state is trapped by its incompetence at winning the hearts and minds of its own citizens, who are unsatisfied with authoritarian governance and demand the political and civil rights, entitlements, and responsibilities found in a democratic polity. Such complications in Chinese higher education reveal the tensions and paradoxes embedded in China’s grand power strategies, and need to be satisfactorily resolved if China is to reach its full potential for global prominence.

References

Confucius. (1980) The Sayings of Confucius (J. R. Ware, Trans.), Taipei: Wenzhi Press.

Jacques, M. (2012) ‘A point of view: What kind of superpower could China be?’, BBC News Magazine, 19 October; retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19995218, May 18, 2014.

Johnston, A. I. (2013) ‘How new and assertive is China’s new assertiveness?’, International Security, 37 (4), 7–48.

Khong, Y. F. (2013) ‘The American tributary system’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 6 (1), 1–47.

Kirshner, J. (2010) ‘The tragedy of offensive realism: Classical realism and the rise of China’, European Journal of International Relations, 18 (1), 53–75.

Kissinger, H. A. (2012) ‘The limits of universalism’, The New Criterion, 26 April; retrieved from www.henryakissinger.com/speeches/042612.html, August 30, 2014.

Meisner, M. (1977) Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic, New York: The Free Press.

Nye, J. S. (2005) ‘The rise of China’s soft power’, The Wall Street Journal Asia, 29 December; retrieved from http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/1499/rise_of_chinas_soft_power.html

Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), London: Martin Secker & Warburg; in the Complete Works of George Orwell series 1987, Penguin Books 2013.

Shambaugh, D. L. (2013) China Goes Global: The Partial Power, New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, M. A. (2012) Power in the Changing Global Order: The US, Russia, and China, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

2
Understanding China as a rising power

Theoretical lenses

Since the 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: China’s rise, neo-tributary, and higher education
• 2 Understanding China as a rising power: theoretical lenses
• 3 Chinese views of the world and missions of higher education
• 4 The politics of Sino-Western educational exchange
• 5 Cultural assimilation into Chinese norms of higher education
• 6 Making discursive legitimacy for moral leadership in power
• 7 Paradoxical issues in educational diplomacy
• 8 Conclusion
• Index