Li, Y., Song, C., Zhang, X., & Li, Y. (2023). Exploring the geographies of transnational higher education in China. Geographical Research, online. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12620
Background
The accelerated growth of transnational higher education (TNHE) has received extensive academic attention and become an important topic of public policy debate. In the field of geography, scholars also have an interest to unravel the complex geographical features and developmental consequences of TNHE. Focal points of research normally include transnational mobilities of students and academic staff, offshoring expansion of higher education institutions (HEIs), transference of (commercialised) academic knowledge with the marketisation of universities, and the nexus of transnational education and regional economic development. Theoretically, researchers often deploy the concepts of educational neoliberalism and academic hegemonies to explain higher education’s transnationalisation process. The former ascribes the rise of TNHE to a series of neoliberal transformations of the modern higher education system, which have pressured HEIs to expand their global reach to access external markets and resources. The latter focuses on the unequal geographical consequences of educational globalisation; that is, the power asymmetries between countries and regions in providing education services and exporting academic knowledge. Both perspectives tend to emphasise a shift in higher education competition from the national to the global scale and, in parallel, the worldwide dissemination of Western academic knowledge and educational standards.
In this study, we provide a pioneering geographical exploration of Chinese–foreign cooperation in running HEIs. After four decades of reform and opening-up, China has established the biggest higher education market and state-run education system in the world. While many national governments are reducing investment in their HEIs, Chinese authorities continue to intervene proactively in education in view of economic, cultural, and ideological considerations. As such, TNHE in China has always evolved against the backdrop of tensions between the incentives of marketisation and state-orchestrated developmental agendas. Therefore, in this study, we attempt to move beyond widespread neoliberal or postcolonial interpretations of educational globalization to examine how the Chinese state’s developmental targets, strategic policies, and political-ideological considerations have shaped the evolutionary trajectory, geographical distribution, and cross-border connections of China’s TNHE programs. Through this systematic geographical exploration, we wanted to highlight the significance of institutional and historical backgrounds in understanding the geoeconomics and geopolitics of TNHE in specific national and regional contexts.
Methodology
In this study, we mainly used the data collected from the Information Platform for Supervision of Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools, promulgated by the Chinese Ministry of Education (https://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn/), to conduct a geographical analysis on Chinese–foreign TNHE institutions and programs. This platform lists all the officially approved, cooperatively run Chinese–foreign TNHE institutions and programs since 1991. Cooperative institutions and programs between China’s mainland and Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan were also included because they had to follow the same regulations as those between China and foreign countries. In total, 177 institutions (including 9 independent institutions and 168 institutions affiliated to Chinese universities) and 2,345 programs between 1991 and (June) 2022 were identified. Information about these institutions and programs’ names, disciplines, locations, initial years of enrolment, educational levels, and Chinese and foreign participants (including their host countries and cities) was collected from the Information Platform and the official websites of higher education institutions.
We employed a geographic information system and social network analysis to analyse the collected data. The former was used to map the geographic distribution of TNHE programs and participating institutions within and outside China’s mainland. These programs and participating institutions were aggregated and visualised according to their host countries and cities. The latter was used to reveal the patterns of transborder connections generated through TNHE programs. Each program represents a connection between two locations and a channel for disseminating academic knowledge. When several HEIs from one country, region, or city establish cooperative programs with HEIs from other countries, regions, or cities, a strong connection between them in the higher education domain is implied. Both intercity networks and province-country/region networks were created to reflect cooperative patterns at different spatial scales.
Findings and discussions
Reviewing the development of TNHE in China after its reforming and opening-up, we identify four major stages: exploration and experimentation (1979–1994), early expansion under state encouragement (1995–2002), institutionalisation and marketisation (2003–2015), and quality control and regulated development (2016 onwards). During these stages, the evolution of TNHE in China exhibits typical characteristics of the state developmentalism model. The growth of Chinese–foreign cooperative higher education programs has not only been motivated by the economic pursuit of HEIs on both sides, but also, to a great extent, has been driven by the revitalisation ambitions and modernisation strategies of the Chinese central state. As such, the target, status, scale, and discipline distribution (Table 1) of TNHE in China has frequently shifted with the reorientation of the state’s economic development agendas and political-ideological considerations, making it rather different from a purely market-centered, neoliberal-style TNHE regime.
Table 1. Discipline distribution of Chinese-foreign TNHE programs (%)
| Discipline | Before 2006 | 2006-2015 | After 2015 | All years |
| Engineering | 29.6 | 41.4 | 51.4 | 44.5 |
| Management | 30.8 | 18.9 | 10.5 | 16.5 |
| Art | 3.7 | 9.9 | 9.9 | 9.0 |
| Science | 4.3 | 7.5 | 11.2 | 8.8 |
| Economics | 13.7 | 8.0 | 4.3 | 7.0 |
| Literature | 10.7 | 4.6 | 2.8 | 4.6 |
| Medicine | 2.4 | 3.3 | 3.9 | 3.5 |
| Education | 1.8 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 2.9 |
| Law | 2.4 | 2.1 | 1.1 | 1.7 |
| Agronomy | 0.6 | 1.1 | 1.7 | 1.3 |
| History | 0.0 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| Total | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Geographically, the TNHE institutions and especially the programs identified in our database display a highly uneven spatial pattern within China’s mainland (Figure 1), reflecting both the imbalanced distribution of higher education resources and regional economic disparities. Meanwhile, state intervention, and especially support from local governments, also shapes the landscape of China’s TNHE development. For instance, the generous support from local governments has become the primary motivation for many global HEIs to cooperate with local Chinese universities in economically backward areas. Cities at higher administrative levels (e.g., provincial capitals) also have advantages in cooperating with TNHE institutions than purely economic centers. The landscape of TNHE within China highlights the government-driven approach to transnational education cooperation and the hierarchy in the country’s higher education governance system.
Figure 1. Distribution of TNHE participating universities and programs within mainland China
The overseas distribution of education institutions and programs demonstrates the extensive and pluralistic global connections of China’s TNHE. Major cooperators include not only the leading HEIs from the USA and the UK, but also those from non-English-speaking countries, such as Russia, France, Germany, Italy, and South Korea (Figure 2). The geographic features of China’s TNHE network are rather different from the global distribution of dominant education centers, which reflect the growing diversification of the sources of academic knowledge in the current global higher education and the deliberate educational cooperation strategy of the Chinese government. Overall, the geographies of China’s TNHE reveal complicated interactions between the state and the market, the global and the local, and economic and political/cultural forces.
Figure 2. Province-country/region (left) and inter-city (right) connections of China’s TNHE programs
Author’s Biography
Yajuan Li is an Associate Professor at Central China Normal University in the city of Wuhan. She earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Science, and is specifically interested in tourism and social cultural geography, transnational higher education. She can be contacted at yajuan.li@ccnu.edu.cn
Xu Zhang is an associate professor in Human Geography and Planning at Wuhan University of Technology (China). He holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Amsterdam (2015). His research interests lie at the intersection of geography, planning and cultural studies, including but not limited to global cultural cities, urban networks, and creative economies. He can be contacted at x.zhang86@hotmail.com
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