Transnational higher education in China: contexts, characteristics and concerns.

Yang, Rui

Transnational higher education is a rapidly growing phenomenon that is under-researched and often even misunderstood. As the world's most promising market, China has the potential to dwarf all traditional offshore markets. Little research has been done to seriously analyse the fast growth in China. A sound understanding of the Chinese situation facilitates improvement of future provision of higher education by Australian universities, presently the most dominant force in China. This article incorporates Chinese and English literature, reviews the latest Chinese government documents, and delineates a comprehensive picture of transnational education provision in China. It locates the development in a wider social and policy context in China, examines the basic features of Chinese-foreign partnerships, and reveals some major issues of concern. It argues that China needs to form effective regulatory frameworks to govern this new development in higher education, especially in terms of quality assurance to ensure cultural appropriateness of the joint programs.

Keywords

transnational education

education markets

China

joint programs

higher education

international university cooperation

Introduction

The phrase 'transnational higher education', is increasingly used to describe exported education as an approach to international university cooperation but there remains a remarkable terminological and conceptual confusion over what transnational education means. According to the UNESCO and the Council of Europe (2001), it refers to education in which the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based: that is, any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another (McBurnie & Ziguras, 2007).While the international mobility of students is a well-established and growing feature of higher education, the transnational mobility of institutions and courses on a large scale is a novel phenomenon. During the past decade, the transnational provision of education has increased so dramatically that it is at the leading edge of the most fundamental change taking place in higher education today, evidencing the invisible hand of the market at work in allocating educational resources across borders efficiently. This is a new evolutionary phase within the global development of higher education in a context of the emerging international trade agreements for services, the opening of new education markets with insufficient capacity to meet the anticipated demands of citizens for advanced degrees, and the ever-present demand for college and universities to establish additional revenue streams.

Asia is the region with most active participation in transnational higher education (Huang, 2007).Within Asia, China and India are identified as the world's two most promising markets. China has been well documented as one of the world's largest education-importing countries, sending hundreds of thousands of students to study abroad. The Australian International Development Program estimates that total demand for tertiary education in China will rise from 8 million students in 2000 to 45 million in 2015 (Bohm, 2003; Marginson, 2004). China has, most recently, caught people's attention as a fast-growing receiver of students from overseas (Lasanowski & Verbik, 2007). Relatively few people have noticed the facts that transnational higher education is growing rapidly in China, and that China is increasingly significant and, given its size, has the potential to dwarf all traditional offshore markets. The fact that the development of for-profit and not-for-profit transnational institutions operating in an international education market is more akin to international business than traditional academic expansion is a phenomenon that has not always been well understood within the Chinese education circle. China is perhaps the world's most complex, overhyped, and under-analysed market for transnational higher education. Set in an international context, this article incorporates both Chinese and English literature, and reviews the latest Chinese government documents to delineate a comprehensive picture of the transnational higher education provision in China covering its policy context, major features and issues of concern.

The social and policy context

Transnational education emerged in China in the mid-1980s, experienced some adjustment from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, and revived after Deng Xiaoping's famous south tour in 1992. It has grown rapidly since China's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001. The development is a result of China's overall policy arrangements during recent decades of reforms. A few contextual factors have exerted direct impact on it. The first, and most fundamental, is the alignment of China's educational reforms with those in the economic sector. Since 1978, building up close links between education and the market has been the most prominent direction, together with decentralisation in finance and management in the reform of education. For the past two and a half decades, great efforts have been made to develop the function of the market in education. The role of the market has been particularly prominent in higher education, endorsed by the Decision on the Reform of the Educational Structure in 1985. As the market gained more significance in China, especially in the more developed coastal and urban areas, more substantial reform policies were introduced to make structural changes in education, including the Program for Education Reform and Development in China in 1993 and the Education Act of the People's Republic of China in 1995.

The second factor is a commercialisation of education that is related to and, indeed, an aspect of China's market-oriented reforms, reflecting radicalism in a pseudo-market. China's education policies are produced by economists to 'meet the needs of a socialist economy' (Lao, 2003). In 1992, the Decision on the Development of the Tertiary Industry stated clearly that education was part of tertiary industry and those who invested in it would own and benefit from it. The government raised the idea of education as a stimulus for economic growth in the Decision on Further Educational Reform to Promote Quality Education in 1999. Private investment on education was strongly encouraged. The Decision on Reform and Development of Basic Education in 2001 and the Decision on Further Reform of Basic Education in Rural Areas in 2002 provided further basis for ownership transfer from the public sector to the private.

The third factor is China's bid to enhance its international competitiveness in a globalising world. To achieve this, the Chinese government has implemented some major projects to enable a handful of its national flagship higher education institutions to become world class. Realising the intensified global competition among leading universities and feeling the pressure for better ranking in global university league, China plans to develop its own knowledge production capacity by strategically identifying key research bases and establishing major national laboratories on the one hand, and import good practices from foreign universities on the other. China thus allows overseas universities, in collaboration with local institutions, to jointly develop academic programs in China to help Chinese institutions to quickly build up their own capacity, status and innovative abilities (Garrett, 2004).

For the Chinese government, transnational education is seen as a means to rapidly boost the capacity of Chinese universities by accessing the world's most advanced education systems, thereby accelerating the process of building human capital and, ultimately, economic development. For individual Chinese institutions, the appeal is in being able to offer programs in partnership that they could not provide alone because of their lack of resources, expertise and prestige, meaning that they fail to attract students on their own account. By partnering, they can capitalise on the demand for foreign qualifications or the shortage of places available at universities or both. They also hope that, in the longer term, such collaboration can help build their capacity to deliver their own programs without foreign partners.

Despite recent massive expansion of higher education, local institutions still cannot meet the demands for higher education. The Chinese government has gradually taken a favourable view of in-country activity by foreign institutions, especially after China's entry into the World Trade Organization and its agreement signed with the General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS).There have been specific legislations governing transnational education in China since the 1990s, including the Interim Provisions for Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools in 1995 and the Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools in 2003. These regulations contain the following stipulations:

* foreign institutions must partner with Chinese institutions

* partnerships must not seek profit as their objective

* no fewer than half the members of the governing body of the institution must be Chinese citizens and the post of president or the equivalent must be a Chinese citizen residing in China

* the basic language of instruction should be Chinese

* tuition fees may not be raised without approval (Garrett, 2004).

They also restrict the levels and forms of the joint academic programs, excluding China's compulsory education and the education and training under special provisions by the state.

Compared with the provisions in 1995, the 2003 regulations have some important features to mention, including the following:

* extending governmental encouragement from vocational to higher education

* strongly promoting Chinese universities to cooperate with renowned overseas higher education institutions in launching new academic programs to improve the quality of teaching and learning and to import excellent overseas educational resources to local institutions

* relaxing the restrictions on profit making.

Major features of transnational higher education in China

As with the international situation (Adam, 2001), hard statistical data on transnational education in China is lacking. China publishes its regulations and some (not always timely) information including a list of 'approved higher education joint programs in China leading to the award of overseas degrees or degrees of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region' on an official web site specifically on joint Chinese-foreign higher education programs. According to the information provided by the web site and information from recent studies by Chinese scholars (Lin & Liu, 2007; Shao, 2008), it is clear that the scale of foreign higher education activity in China has developed rapidly in recent years; the extent of foreign commitment is growing; and the types of providers involved are becoming increasingly diverse.

Scale of foreign activity

Since the promulgation of the 1995 regulations, there is evidence over time of increasing ambitions and greater commitment on the part of joint ventures. Both the University of Nottingham in the UK and Oklahoma City University from the USA were expressly invited by the national authorities to set up operations in China, marking the first official push in this direction. In 1995, there were only two programs that could offer an overseas degree. By 2002, the joint programs had spread to China's 28 provinces (China Education Daily, 2004).The number of joint programs increased to 745 by June 2004, with 169 programs qualified to award overseas (including Hong Kong) degrees (Ministry of Education, 2004).

According to the official web site information (as updated on 23 March 2006), by 30 June 2004, there had been 668 approved partnerships. (This refers to formal collaboration between different institutions to offer education programs in a chosen field. Once established, it is still considered as one partnership here even with batches of students enrolled thereafter.) A total of 51 893 students had been enrolled; and there had been new partnerships annually since 1995, as shown in Table 1.

While the State has always been strong in Chinese education, transnational higher education is seriously challenging China's administration. China's sheer size, devolved authority and ambivalent practice of the rule of law have led to a situation of both officially approved and non-approved foreign provision, and various types of approval. There are clear ambiguities over approved and non-approved status, with approval operating at various 'official' levels (Garrett, 2004).The range of known partnerships suggests a flexible relationship between government regulation and local practice. There are many non-approved joint programs in China that lead to the award of an overseas degree. In May 2003, for example, the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) listed 200 current offshore programs in China undertaken by Australian universities (AVCC, 2003), 157 (79 per cent) of which involved either Australian bachelor's degree or master's degree programs, indicating that the real extent of foreign degree activity is in excess of that reported on the official ministry list. Given the apparent scale of non-approved activity, the variety of sources of non-ministry approval (for example, municipal, provincial and local governments) and the possibility that some programs lack any form of government approval at all, the total number of ventures involving degree programs from overseas institutions is certain to exceed the number reported on the official ministry list.

Details of partnerships

Countries of origin of overseas partnership institutions The degree programs approved by the Chinese government are run in collaboration with 164 overseas universities or colleges. These overseas partners are predominantly from countries or regions with developed economies and advanced technology. With the biggest shares of educational service export in the world, Australia and the USA are the dominant forces. As demonstrated by Figure 1, Australia has the highest number of partnership institutions (29.3 per cent), followed by the USA (26.8 per cent), Hong Kong (13.4 per cent), Canada (8.5 per cent), France (6.7 per cent) and the UK (5.5 per cent).

This is in line with the findings of other studies. According to Australian Education International (2006), Australia's share of the Chinese market has grown exponentially. Over the past 10 years, the number of Chinese nationals studying at onshore and offshore Australian higher and vocational education institutions has increased from 3828 to 63 543, an increase of close to 1700 per cent. The AVCC (2003) reports that 27 Australian universities (representing 71 per cent of its 38 members) have current offshore programs in China mainland in 2003, suggesting China as a major site of offshore activity for a large majority of Australia's universities. Offshore programs in China represent 13 per cent of all reported current offshore activity by AVCC members. More than half (53 per cent) of Australian joint programs in China are offered by three universities: Charles Sturt, Southern Queensland and Victoria. The number of China's joint programs with Australian universities had surpassed those with US institutions by 2004 (Huang, 2007).

While Australian universities have been known for their aggressive marketing globally, especially within the Asia-Pacific region, it is interesting to note that Hong Kong, a city with only eight university-level institutions, has been actively participating in the China market. As with the Australian situation, closer scrutiny reveals that only four Hong Kong institutions are listed: the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Of the total shared by Hong Kong institutions, their percentages are respectively 13.6 per cent, 9.1 per cent, 9.1 per cent and 68.2 per cent, showing great institutional differentiation, dominated by Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Levels of education and disciplinary distribution Many joint programs are only authorised to offer certificates and diplomas. Actual numbers are hard to obtain. According to Yang (2003), only 52.3 per cent of Chinese-foreign joint programs led to an overseas degree. My analysis here is based on the official list, which only includes the programs formally approved to grant overseas degrees. As shown in Figure 2, an overwhelming majority (68.3 per cent) of the programs are at the master's level, 27.5 per cent at the bachelor's level, and 2.4 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively at the postgraduate diploma and doctoral level.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Since the Ministry of Education has the power to approve joint programs, it has direct impact on the disciplinary distribution of the programs and tends to favour certain subject areas depending on what it perceives as the needs of the country at that time (Sun & Boncella, 2007). In general, English language programs were popular in the 1970s, science and technology was in high demand in the 1980s and 1990s, and management has become the most desirable option in the last 10 years (Zhang, 2003). As illustrated in Figure 3, by subject, 61.0 per cent of provision is in the broad area of business and management, followed by IT (13.6 per cent), engineering (7.9 per cent), education (7.3 per cent), law (2.2 per cent), sports management (1.7 per cent), real estate (1.7 per cent), English language (1.1 per cent), and 0.6 per cent each for psychology, architecture and a few others. This echoes Tan's (2006) finding that among the 136 undergraduate joint programs, 67 (49.3 per cent) were in business and management, with 4075 (54 per cent) of the national total of 7549 students.

Geographical distribution Most of the Chinese-overseas joint education programs are run by institutions concentrated in the eastern coastal areas, the most economically prosperous region in China. Of the 47 higher education institutions with joint undergraduate programs with overseas partners in 2004, 32 (68.1 per cent) were in the coastal east, only 2 (4.3 per cent) in the west. Similarly, 35 (74.5 per cent) of the 47 institutions with joint programs in tertiary vocational or technical education or both were in the east, only 4 (8.5 per cent) were in the west (Tan, 2006). As demonstrated in Figure 4, my own calculation shows the following regional distribution:

* Beijing (28.9 per cent)

* Shanghai (19.3 per cent)

* Tianjin (7.8 per cent)

* Zhejiang (7.2 per cent)

* Jiangsu (6.2 per cent)

* Jiangxi (4.8 per cent)

* Liaoning and Guangdong (each 4.2 per cent)

* Heilongjiang (3 per cent)

* Hubei and Yunnan (each 2.4 per cent)

* Shaanxi, Jilin and Sichuan (each 1.8 per cent)

* Hebei and Fujian (each 1.2 per cent)

* Henan, Shanxi and Guizhou (each 0.6 per cent).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In 2004, there were no officially listed joint programs in some other provinces, such as Anhui, Gansu, Guangxi, Hainan, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Qinghai, Tibet and Xinjiang, all of which are relatively underdeveloped.

Teaching, teachers and assessment According to Xu (2005), Chinese students enrolled in joint programs are normally satisfied with the teaching approaches used by their teachers from overseas, despite the fact that they often find it difficult to communicate effectively with their teachers due to their lack of English proficiency. They also perceive their teachers as generally competent. The Chinese regulations require foreign teachers and administrators of the joint programs have at least bachelor degree and certification respectively. Teachers are also required to have at least two years' teaching experience before joining the programs. Such criteria are fairly low and are usually met easily by overseas partners. Thus, Chinese students are generally happy with the quality of their teaching staff in their programs, measured especially by qualifications. While the ways students are assessed in the joint programs are very different from the ways they are used to, it has been reported that they have a highly positive attitude towards the assessment methods used by the programs but the students have expressed some concerns that any assessment could be out of the control of the Chinese partner. Here, some differences have been identified between undergraduate and postgraduate students.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Tuition fees Tuition fees are one of the most important factors when students choose between the programs offered by different institutions. Chinese regulations do not contain much detail on tuition fees. The partner institutions decide how much to charge based on the related price policy issued by the government, and cannot add further items or elevate criteria without the prior permission of the government. According to the most recent notice issued by the ministry last year, any new programs with tuition fees that are perceived by the government as having evidently demanded an exorbitant price would not be approved.

Although the cost of enrolling in Chinese-overseas joint programs is substantially lower than that of studying abroad, most of the students enrolled in the programs still think their tuition fees are quite high. The tuition fees charged by the joint programs leading to a foreign or Hong Kong university degree are usually four to eight times more expensive than those of the programs offered by local universities alone (Yang, 2003). Most domestic students in China are still unable to pay for such 'expensive' programs.

Nevertheless, as the joint programs are a service offered by the overseas institutions as trade, it is inevitable that the overseas institutions aim at making a profit. Therefore a significant issue for overseas partner institutions is to consider what Chinese students are able to afford when setting their fees. The difficult part is to decide a reasonable level of tuition fees, as they depend on a variety of factors from the subject area of the joint program to the local living standards. For reference, most students enrolled in some joint programs in Zhejiang province, one of China's most developed regions, consider that a reasonable tuition level should currently pitch between 25 000 and 30 000 RMB (approximately A$3750 to A$4500, based on the exchange rate on 21 July 2008).

Issues of concern

Quality assurance

Transnational higher education is especially vulnerable to the perils that consumerism creates in higher education. It has been suggested that increases in the numbers of fee-paying students may lead to pressure on institutions and academics to engage in 'soft marking' or 'grade inflation' in order to keep their ever-more influential customers satisfied (Tierney, 2001). Evidence continues to show that transnational provision is in many cases driven by market opportunity and that compromises in quality are widespread (Lieven & Martin, 2006).With the recent global rise of transnational education programs, quality assurance has become a major issue for those program-offering institutions. Australian universities, for instance, have started to re-examine their quality assurance systems in order to maintain similar academic standards between the home and overseas academic programs (Meek, 2006). At this stage, with little international agreement on standards, stronger national regulation, rather than the liberalisation demanded by Alderman (2002) and others, is needed. An unregulated market allows overseas 'for-profit' operations to offer poor-quality higher education.

The quality assurance issue has also been in China. On 6 April 2007, the Ministry of Education issued a further notice to regulate joint higher education programs, expressing strong concerns about the quality control of joint education programs. It decided not to approve any further programs, in principle, until the end of 2008. Indeed, it even forced 64 joint programs in Shanghai to close down (Qian & Jiao, 2007).

According to Chinese regulations, the government takes legal responsibility for approving or chartering the establishment of transnational education programs in line with the existing legal frameworks and guidelines. But the problem lies in the lack of consistent intervention after approval. The responsibility for quality assurance, in effect, falls almost entirely into the hands of the involved individual teaching staff and their program coordinators (Huang, 2006). Chinese students enrolled in the joint programs are, therefore, concerned about the quality of their programs, especially when individual teachers and their departments are the only ones to take up quality assurance responsibilities. It would be constructive if the Chinese government could explore the possibility of developing new regulatory frameworks to govern the operation of transnational higher education programs.

Legal status

Chinese regulations stipulate clearly that transnational higher education is only a supplementary part of China's higher education sector. Foreign higher education activity in China has not been regarded as an integrated part of the Chinese higher education system. In this legal sense, it is fundamentally different from that provided solely by Chinese national, provincial and even private higher education institutions. Due to the fact that the joint programs are usually run by overseas universities in collaboration with Chinese public (national and provincial) universities, it often leads to a misperception that the programs are publicly owned. The operation of these joint programs is, in fact, strikingly different from that of the education programs at Chinese public universities, especially from a legal perspective. While these joint programs are set up by public universities as encouraged by the Ministry of Education, they are run privately. How to define them legally remains a challenge to Chinese policy-makers.

The Chinese government has not permitted overseas institutions to set up their branch campuses on the mainland to recruit local students and offer teaching programs. Here, an often-cited example is the University of Nottingham, Ningbo. The University of Nottingham has so far failed to achieve its goal to set up a branch campus in China despite its endeavours over years. It has only been allowed to found a university in collaboration with Zhejiang Wanli University. Although the majority of programs taught at the newly established University of Nottingham, Ningbo, have been imported from the University of Nottingham, it is formally regarded not as a branch campus of the University of Nottingham, but as a completely independent university owned by Zhejiang Wanli University (Huang, 2007).

One explanation of China's ambiguity regarding the legal status of transnational higher education is the fact that such joint education is relatively new to China. There is also another, more fundamental, reason: China's concern about its possible loss of educational sovereignty (Wang & Xue, 2004), something that has never stopped perplexing Chinese policy-makers, theorists and partner institutions. Such a concern, however, is not China-specific. A report commissioned by European university heads warned that as a result of the development of transnational education, national autonomy and sovereignty in the domain of higher education have never before been challenged on such a scale (Adam, 2001).

Cultural appropriateness

There has been an increasing awareness of the appropriate level of adaptation of content and pedagogy of foreign programs and the impact of foreign providers on the culture of students and the nation. According to GATE (1999), materials and learning resources used should normally be adjusted to be culturally appropriate to the range of students to whom the courses are being offered.

In reality, this is not always the case. Some providers even advocate the 'global template,' a generic product that has no trace of local character, in the current transnational higher education courses (Luke, 2005). On one hand, this continues the long-standing notion of 'sanctioned ignorance' that enables an individual discipline or nation to proceed without reference to others, and without fully acknowledging the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. On the other, there is a miscalculation of global dominance, failing to acknowledge that the global-local nexus is a twofold process of give and take, an exchange by which global trends are reshaped to local ends, and a dynamic interaction between global trends and local responses.

This issue of cultural appropriateness has significant implications for transnational provision of higher education in China. Considering that the students enrolled in joint programs come to buy Western education and degrees and are usually keen to learn from their Western experience, most of them consider their course arrangements reasonably appropriate. At the same time, in order to make sure they can benefit from their Western knowledge and degrees, they demand a well-balanced combination of both Western and Chinese experience. Indeed, they are required to have knowledge of both the global and the local. Unique perspectives and values based on rich local experience and awareness of the society and culture would allow them to seize the initiative in identifying the real needs of their local societies and in setting up their own agendas and targets. But it is the local perspective that is over-shadowed by the dominant, hegemonic global perspective. This is happening as transnational higher education provision in China booms. The cultural appropriateness of curricula has begun to catch more and more people's attention. People are becoming more critical of the proportional of foreign (often Western) course content. While most of the students still accept current arrangements, the numbers of those with a negative view are increasing. Joint program developers need to take care that both the content and structure of courses appropriately reflect the attri-butes and demands of their local students (Thompson, 2002). Studies have shown that students regard the adaptability of the curriculum to their local context as a key aspect of their course (Dunn & Wallace, 2004).

There are a number of pedagogical issues in achieving high-quality transnational higher education courses in China. The danger with the 'global template' is that it dissociates education from China's society, culture and politics. Such decontextualised 'globalised' curricula reflect a particular view of what is claimed to be 'universal' that is informed by the geographical and social location of the curriculum developer, which is typically the Western (English-speaking) world. The implicit social values of these exporting countries inform the curriculum, and the Chinese social and cultural context in which students live is largely ignored by such courses (Yang & Yao, 2007), raising the question of what counts as 'scholarship' (Appadurai, 2001).This reinforces the perception that real or proper knowledge is only produced by particular countries in a particular way, and warns us that the Western educational system and structures continue to define education for the rest of the world (Goodman, 1984). By extension, they define what knowledge is and who may claim competence in it.

Public good or private commodity

To many critics, the rapid growth of income-generating transnational programs looks like an unseemly gold rush threatening to undermine the public service orientation that should be paramount to higher education institutions. The approach of Western universities is often described as aggressive or even predatory in developing countries, leading South Africa's Kader Asmal (1999) to ask:' Are we entering a Darwinian nightmare, when higher education is red in tooth and claw and only the fittest survive?' Exporting universities often see the establishment of overseas operations as a profitable means of responding to unmet student demand in other countries, arguing that transnational education is a vital means of expanding educational opportunity and student choice in places with excess demand. While transnational education serves to build educational capacity selectively in areas in which local providers are constrained or unwilling to respond to commercial demand, it is seen to pose potential threats to traditional conceptions of education as a public good because of its commercial and foreign nature.

The clearest motivation for the involved institutions on both sides of the partnership is the promise of expanding enrolments and revenue through attracting students who are unlikely to enrol in a distance education program or to complete an entire program abroad. The danger that excessive focus on the financial bottom line can compromise commitment to the community-service responsibility of the publicly funded body is real. Here, the approach covering strategic, academic and business dimensions suggested by McBurnie and Pollock (2000) is useful for decision-makers in evaluating transnational opportunities. A judicious combination of the rationales allows a university to evaluate revenue-raising opportunities critically while giving appropriate priority to the overriding academic values that guide the future of the institution.

Concluding comments

As a response to supply shortages that have arisen due to the local system's inability to grow as fast as demand has grown, and as an approach to development assistance that focuses on improving the capacity of the local education system to provide for itself, the Chinese government expects transnational joint programs to help to improve the quality of China's human resources, upgrade China's educational system, meet the national educational demand, prevent 'brain drain', and attract foreign capital into education (Zhang, 2003). For Chinese universities, the stated expectations are to learn practical and effective ways to improve their academic quality, upgrade standards and build up the new programs that are badly needed for China's development yet which they cannot offer themselves.

While such expectations have not fully materialised, transnational higher education certainly has much room for further development in China, as indicated by the fact that no more than 100 of the 1671 higher education institutions had joint programs with overseas partners in 2004 at undergraduate level and below; and that only about 10 000 (0.5 per cent) of the annual intake of students (4 473 400) were enrolled in the joint programs offered by Chinese and overseas partners.

The road ahead will most likely be bumpy. Transnational higher education rises in China against a backdrop of a significantly transformed Chinese higher education sector, with proliferating providers, diversified financial sources, and a growing yet pseudo market. Intensified diversification and commercialisation of higher education have challenged China's conventional higher education governance (Mok, 2006). Rather than building up new regulatory frameworks to govern the increasingly complex and diversified higher education sector, the Chinese government unwisely still places its hope on its state-oriented regime.

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Rui Yang

University of Hong Kong

Rui Yang is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Email: [email protected]

Table 1 New partnerships established, 1995-June 2004

Year           1995   1996   1997   1998   1999

Number of
Partnerships      2      3      4      7      9

Year           2000   2001   2002   2003   2004

Number of
Partnerships     11     22     37     45     24