1.2.1 Background of Sino-Foreign Cooperation Unive...
The higher economic growth rate between 1978 and 1997 has fundamentally changed Chinese citizens’ demands for knowledge and skills， which in turn put pressure on the domestic education system （OECD， 2001）.Following Deng Xiaoping’s pronouncement that ‘Education should be facing to the modernisation， facing to the whole world and facing to the future’ in 1983， major higher education reforms in 1985 were nationally implemented by allocating a greater degree of autonomy to local governments and individual universities.In 1992， further reforms strengthened the importance of social needs， global market forces and institutional autonomy.In the 1990s， with the implementation of ‘Project 211’[1]and ‘Project 985’[2]and the expansion and innovation of higher education， more and more new minban （nongovernmental， 民办）， duli （independent， 独立）， and Sino-foreign cooperation higher education institutions emerged and shared the higher education market in China.By May 2015， according to the official statistics from the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China （http://www.moe.edu.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_229/201505/187754.html）， there were 2845 higher education institutions in China， including 447 minban， 275 duli， and seven Sinoforeign cooperation higher education universities.These Sino-foreign cooperation universities were The University of Nottingham Ningbo China （2004[3]）， Beijing Normal University-Hongkong Baptist University United International College （2005）， Xi’an Jiao-tong Liverpool University （2006）， Wenzhou-Kean University （2012）， New York University Shanghai （2013）， Duke Kunshan University （2014）， and The Chinese University of Hong Kong， Shenzhen （2014）.
Chinese universities initially explored the construction of Sinoforeign cooperation institutions in 1978, and started to cooperate with some foreign universities in the mid-1980s.Renmin University of China and Fudan University were the first two pioneers in collaboration with American universities, establishing an economics training course and a law training course respectively.From the end of the 1980s to the early 1990s, Sino-foreign cooperation institutions dramatically increased.Yet between 1992 and 1993, there were no such institutions allowed to be set up in China due to poor institution-level management, as well as the chaos of the Chinese educational market caused by the emergence of unauthorised or ‘fake’ Sino-foreign cooperation institutions.In 1995, the State Education Commission (SEC), which was renamed the Ministry of Education (MoE) in 1998, issued ‘The Provisional Regulation of Sino-Foreign Cooperation Institutions’, to resume and guide the marketised establishment of Sino-foreign cooperation institutions under the national law.By 2015, over 800 foreign-affiliated educational institutions had been running in China (http://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn/index.php/default/approval/orglists/2); among them, the seven Sino-foreign Cooperation universities, as mentioned above, have been licensed to operate independently, with the autonomy of issuing bachelor’s or higher degrees in China.
Accommodated to the globalised and localised trends, Sino-foreign cooperation universities emerged and became ‘a commodity provided by competitive suppliers; educational services are priced and access to them depends on consumer calculations and ability to pay’ (Yin & White, 1994, p.217).The changing socioeconomic needs and the complexity of skills and capacities pushed local governments into global competitiveness and markets for their higher education (Marginson, 2007).As such, Chinese educational reforms inevitably put emphasis on decentralisation, privatisation, and performance (Carnoy, 2000; Mok & Welch, 2003; Mok, 2005), as well as commercialisation, expansion and marketisation (Ennew & Yang, 2009), owing to a combined impact of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and linguistic-ideological forces in the process of globalisation.Chinese higher education unavoidably has been marketised, which is not only evidenced by the emergence of private educational institutions and the rise of domestic competition among education institutions, but also by the other features of the adoption of the fee-paying principle, the shift of government responsibility in educational provision to individuals (Mok, 2005).
However, many Chinese people were against higher education being marketised in the early 1990s.They worried about the negative impact on Chinese traditional social values, and the unequal distribution of domestic educational resources and opportunities.This worry could be evidenced by the 25th item of Education Law of the PRC at that time (e.g., Lao, 2005), which stated that any non-national organisations or individual-established educational institutions were banned to be established in China.Unfortunately, rather than bringing benefits to Chinese education performance and development, this put the Chinese education market in disorder.For example, some Chinese people take risks to examine loopholes in the relevant laws, or to get access to alternative educational provisions in order to seek for more or better, as they imagined, educational opportunities.Noticing the negative effect of the phenomenon, the Chinese government realised the importance of decentralising the education structure in the domestic market.In 1995, Education Law was promulgated and legitimised the establishment of private, independent or joint educational institutions by those non-state organisations, private enterprises, and individuals who were qualified.Since then, Chinese citizens have had more flexible education choices.