This is a crucial book about the essential ideas inherent in Chinese higher education. The book's title pays homage to John Henry Newman's collection of essays (The Idea of a University, Gateway Editions, 1999 [1852]) emphasizing the pursuit of knowledge for its intrinsic value and the belief that the quest for truth is a fundamental aspect of education. There are books in Chinese about the “idea of a Chinese university” (Zhongguo daxue linian), but this is the first in English to advocate a major change in course for Chinese higher education.
The subtitle, Phoenix Reborn, aligns with the great rejuvenation discourse of confidence and ideological resilience that highlights a rich and glorious educational heritage – one that deserves to be better understood by the global academy. With a focus on broader cultural issues, the book surpasses the conventional discussions around the seemingly incompatible interpretations of academic freedom and institutional autonomy between Chinese and Western cultures.
The book argues that the Anglo-American model is responsible for value chaos and confusion, cultural conflicts and a feeling of homelessness among Chinese academics in universities. For Rui Yang, fundamental epistemological differences prevent Chinese higher education from assimilating with its hegemonic Western counterpart, namely the Anglo-American-German model found almost everywhere. But he believes there is a space in the global academy for a dignified integration of Chinese and Anglo-American higher education. Reading between the lines, the preference would be for a harmonious integration. Given the many references in the book to cultural conflicts, the alternative would probably be an impact-integration. Whatever form of integration takes place, it had better trigger an explosion of ideas and innovations to address the global crises of our age, including climate change, poverty and inequality, safety and food insecurity, and health and nuclear proliferation.
The five chapters of this book should be required reading for scholars and scientists who plan to engage with Chinese higher education in the coming years. The book is well argued and clearly written. The first chapter provides a concise coverage of the cultural legacy and historical essence of educational institutions, including the taixue, guozijian and shuyuan, as well as the influence of Chinese ideas on Korea and Japan. It traces the educational heritage of a civilization that led the world economy for more than a dozen centuries with a system of educating, examining and promoting talent to serve state and society. Confucianism may have produced a complacency that responded ineffectively to the incursion of West, but what stands out overall is the stubborn resistance and dogged persistence that explains the vulnerability and resiliency of Chinese higher education.
The first chapter also highlights the close relationship since antiquity between education and the government. In the Chinese civilizational state, higher education institutions are a subsidiary body of a bureaucratic system. The second chapter reviews the perceptions toward foreign universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as new ideas began to anchor themselves in China. The third chapter looks at the academic discussions among Chinese and foreign scholars about the ideals of higher learning in China. The fourth chapter describes the manner in which convergence occurred with the Western model as told by the voices of Chinese academics who work in universities outside of the Chinese mainland.
The fifth chapter, the jewel in the book, is comprised of new data – the varied voices and nuanced perspectives of contemporary Chinese academics, administrators and senior managers in different Chinese mainland universities with diverse educational backgrounds. The way the interview data is presented and analysed to build theory leaves no doubt in the concluding chapter that the Chinese model will continue to resist mainstream higher education, especially the catch-up mentality and foreign-designed ranking systems. The root of the problem, as Yang sees it, is that Chinese universities “are patterned after the Western model without integrally linking to their indigenous cultures” (p. 113).
It is perhaps ironic that the Anglo-American model of higher education also finds itself under siege both internally, by cultural minorities struggling to re-indigenize it, and externally, by conservative state governments in the US to exorcise what are perceived to be dangerous liberal ideas. Despite the epistemological dissonance referred to in the book, Chinese students remain the most numerous foreign students in Anglo-American universities. William Kerr of Harvard University credits more than ten per cent of US inventions today to Chinese heritage scientists. That might persuade some to argue that cultural conflict and epistemological dissonance are the lifeblood of universities.
Hong Kong is often referred to in this book as an illustrative case – a Western bilingual university system anchored in a Chinese society. With a near equal number of academic staff from Hong Kong, overseas and the Chinese mainland (most with degrees from foreign universities), five Hong Kong universities rank among the world's top hundred. It is befitting that the book is published by Hong Kong University Press, which belongs to the most international university in the world (according to Times Higher Education).
This book speaks to higher learning everywhere and reminds the global academy that no one civilization has the lock on the ideas about equality, rights, autonomy and sovereignty that guide higher education. The thousands of years of Chinese experience recounted in this book provide lessons on how ideas never cease to be claimed, and that it is the struggle to uphold these ideas that matters most.
As the world faces potentially existential challenges, there is a danger of myths abounding about the sacred nature of the Anglo-American or Chinese ideas of higher learning. They are both “exceptionalism” in different ways. It is better that exceptionalism is rooted in culturally anchored values rather than weaponized for culture wars. Declaring exceptionalism does less to inspire than to actually be exceptional.
