Situating Higher Education in China: From Universal History to the Research Paradigm

Abstract

From the 1840s on, China began to follow the societal development model created by the Western countries in the seventeenth century. Consequently, China gradually developed into modern countries with the emergence of modern cities, factories, modern transportation, telegram, electronic productions, and so on. A modern educational system was also established. Since the 1980s, under the influence of modernization theory which was developed by Western scholars as a new research paradigm for interpreting and analyzing worldwide societal evolution, then broadly used by economists, socialists, and historians, and introduced into China in the early 1980s, most Chinese scholars who are interested in educational history prefer to perceive the history of modern higher education in China as part of China’s modernization process, and believe that education not only has composed of but also facilitated China’s modernization since the 1840s. However, the establishment of modern higher education in China is a slow but complex process, full of different kinds of confusions such as the complex relationship between Chinese traditional education and its modern one.