Higher education and research innovation in China

As a response to globalization, internationalisation of higher education could be accomplished by the forms of a series of national policies and institutional strategies to strengthen the global competitiveness of universities. The history of Japanese higher education spans approximately over 130 years, experiencing both flourishing time and stagnant period. Driven by the increasing pace of internationalisation and great pressure originated from global competition, Japanese government has already taken concrete measures to get its higher education better merged into internationalization. However, higher education in Japan is now at a crossroads maintaining its sustainable and steady development. As Japan’s neighboring country, China came much more slowly of breaking the ice for the internationalisation in dimension of higher education if compared with Japan. As gradually playing an important role internationally, China has invested massively into internationalisation of higher education as well. However the direction of development in Chinese higher education seems to be blur or too early to tell. The current status of higher education in China and Japan are both characterized by profoundly historical roots. Better understanding on the ‘historical internationalisation’ in both countries sheds light on the understanding of higher education in contemporary China and Japan and their developmental progress. Therefore the present dissertation examines the originally authentic sense of internationalisation which could be traced back to the middle to late 19th century. During the middle of nineteenth century China and Japan were both undergoing the threat from invasive West with countries’ independence and traditional culture in danger. In response to expansion of the West, Chinese and Japanese’s reactions varied enormously in polity subversion, economic construction, attitudes towards foreign culture and educational reform. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 in Japan rapidly foster its modernization by successfully ‘using the barbarian to control the barbarian’ to achieve the equal standards with the West eventually which opened a brand-new page for the beginning of Japanese modern history. Unlike Japan, Chinese failure in Self-Strengthening Movement which was supposed to be the preparation of modernization in China, stroke China back to the abyss of bureaucratic governance, leading Chinese modernization and first step accepting western culture and technology almost half a century later than Japan. In this sense, historical roots of internationalisation in China and Japan would be taken into serious consideration in this dissertation because it shaped countries’ status quo and would probably insert a far-reaching influence on the prospective development.

China's higher education system has been reshaped by economic globalisation, national development priorities and growing international competition. Guided by Knight's framework of internationalisation and policy transfer theory, this paper employs a systematic literature review to examine the historical evolution, major policies and global implications of internationalisation and transnational higher education (TNHE) in China. The findings highlight a persistent balance between openness to global practices and the safeguarding of sovereignty, security and economic development. Early reforms relied on importing foreign models, while contemporary strategies emphasise selective adaptation and hybridisation, producing a distinctive model of ‘China‐led internationalisation’. This model integrates global perspectives into domestic frameworks while extending China's academic and cultural influence internationally. The study contributes to international higher education research by showing that policy transfer in China is not passive imitation but an active process of negotiation and innovation, positioning China as both a recipient and a global influencer.

This chapter explores the sustainable development of higher education in China. The sustainable development of higher education is closely related to our country’s social economy and people’s life, so the sustainable development of higher education should be coordinated and adopted with social and economic sustainable development to a maximum extent which acts as the guideline. The sustainable development of higher education should be evaluated by the principles of sustainability, integrity and fairness. Considering China’s national conditions, “fairness” is more instructive for the development of higher education in China at present.

This case focuses on the challenges and trends of Chinese higher education. It analyzes the challenges that the Chinese higher education faces and discusses a couple of issues of internationalization of higher education, and finally, the case points out the future trends that Chinese higher education might encounter.

PhD education plays dominant role in the field of innovation, science, technology and economic development. This is being sponsored by some key scholarship agencies in the world among which Chinese Scholarship Council has emerged one among biggest. This research has been intended to understand the process of selection of PhD awardees and employment adjustment in their home country. An informal interview followed by a 5 point likert scale questionnaire were used to collected data from 200 PhD scholarship awardees in China and indigenous PhDs in Pakistan. This study has identified two main findings, one is the awareness issue about the scholarships availability is a serious issue and the other one is eligibility issue based on the number of schooling years required for PhD admission that may pose serious post PhD adjustment issues. While as a strong coordination gap does exist between Chinese scholarship agencies with other countries. A future research is being suggested to analyze comparative performance between Chinese and non-Chinese Ph.Ds.

Fung Kwan: With the micro-level data of income and other educational indicators, this paper examines the returns to higher education in China. At the full sample level, fixed-effect estimates show no returns to education. After adjusting the endogeneity problem, the returns become around 10 percent. At the individual level, this study finds the returns to education are small for urban, female, and highly educated workers; but significantly positive for those living in the countryside, male, and low-educated workers.The research issue of this paper is important to developing public policy on investment in education in China. Income and wealth inequalities are likely improved with more education investment in the rural area. Nevertheless, more university graduates have recently found difficulty in finding jobs, giving rise to the concern of educated unemployment in the rapidly developing Chinese economy. This phenomenon is fundamentally correlated to the structural rigidity of China's labor and product markets. More research should be devoted to this issue, as it might have profound policy implications to many developing economies during their structural transformation.Together with the debate on the economy approaching its Lewis turning point and the slowdown of GDP growth, China seems to be moving into its growth with a larger contribution from total factor productivity. Inevitably, investment in higher education is both essential to the accumulation of human capital and productivity growth. China appears to be no exception to accepting the role of higher education in its further economic development.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been practiced in China for thousands of years. In the past decade, there have been intensive debates in China about the nature of this ancient practice and its future development. Some critics argue that TCM theories are inaccurate descriptions of the human body that verge on imagination, and so have no place in modern healthcare systems. Other, however, say that TCM has a lot to offer to Western science and medicine and that emerging analytical tools hold great potentials in bridging the gap between the two worlds with contrasting philosophy and approaches. In a forum chaired by National Science Review's Executive Associate Editor Mu-ming Poo, five panelists from diverse backgrounds discussed the differences between TCM and Western science and medicine, recent progress in TCM research, and key challenges in modernizing this ancient practice. Hongxin Cao Director of Science and Technology Bureau, State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine of the People's Republic of China Aiping Lu Dean of the School of Chinese Medicine at Hong Kong Baptist University Yiling Wu President of Hebei Academy of Integrative Chinese and Western Medicine Boli Zhang President of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and President of the Chinese Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine Liping Zhao Professor and former deputy director of the Shanghai Center for System Biology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University Mu-ming Poo (Chair) Neuroscientist and Director of Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Neurosciences in Shanghai

Under the background of deepening the reform of higher education in China, the training of application-oriented undergraduate mass innovation talents has become an important issue in the field of education, especially in the economically developed Pearl River Delta region. Through the empirical research method, this study deeply discusses the interaction between the training of application-oriented undergraduate entrepreneurship and innovation talents and the high-quality development in the Pearl River Delta region. The research finds that the training of application-oriented undergraduate talents has significantly promoted the technological innovation and industrial upgrading in the Pearl River Delta region, and the high-quality development environment in the Pearl River Delta region has in turn provided rich practice platforms and resource conditions to continuously improve the training quality of application-oriented undergraduate talents. This study further explores the roles and collaborative mechanisms of universities, industries and governments in the process of mass entrepreneurship and innovation talent training, and puts forward a new model of interactive and win-win cooperation between talent training and local economic development, which has practical reference value for the economic and social development of the Pearl River Delta region.

College students' innovation and entrepreneurship education is an inevitable trend of China's higher education reform and development. As an important part of China's higher education, local colleges bear the heavy responsibility of cultivating innovation and entrepreneurship talents for local economic and social development. This paper takes Jianghan University as an example to investigate the situation of college students' innovation and entrepreneurship education. The results show that 90% of college students do not have the experience in innovation and entrepreneurship education before they go to college. More than half of college students grow up in Wuhan and will start businesses in local city. Nearly 70% of college students are interested in entrepreneurship and want to get innovation and entrepreneurship education. Innovation and entrepreneurship teachers of theoretical & practical type and practical type are popular among college students. At present, Jianghan University has set up an entrepreneurship college, offered relevant courses, established relevant platforms, and carried out relevant activities. However, due to the lack of education promotion, some students did not participate in innovation and entrepreneurship education, and other students did not understand the progress of innovation and entrepreneurship education. Corresponding countermeasures are proposed by analyzing the situation and causes.

With the continuous improvement of the informatization level of higher education in China, higher education with the core goal of cultivating innovative talents has become a data-intensive research and practice field, and has begun to show the typical characteristics of big data, such as large amount of data, diverse types and low value density. Starting from the data background, this paper analyzes the necessity and advantages of cultivating innovative talents in higher education with the help of big data, and puts forward four training measures including data analysis, innovative research and development, policy integration and practice expansion. The research results are as follows.

Health is an essential element to promote social progress and economic development. It is also a symbol of citizen's peaceful work and life with happy and long life, as well as an emblem of national prosperity and national rejuvenation. Public health develops vigorously in our country. Policy Outlines has been successively issued in China, such as Healthy China 2030 and The Thirteenth Five-year Plan Outline of National Economic and Social Development. Under the Healthy China background, as an important guarantee for public health, nursing higher education in China has experienced a long process of development an reform. It meets the change of the era from education scale, teaching philosophy, establishment of specialized direction and teaching model. Key words: Education, nursing; Reform; University

A minor difference in college entrance examination scores can result in vastly different educational resources in China, so it has been debated whether it is the difference in the student population or the difference in educational resources that causes the difference in medical graduates. We aimed to evaluate the effects of entry grades on students' academic performance under homogeneous educational resources. Students in grade 2016 with 13-point difference in the average admission scores of 2 medicine schools in Sun Yat-sen University were educated in mixed classes and were taught with the same educators during the 5 years of undergraduate period. The grades, graduation, and postgraduate enrollment rates of the students were compared between the two campuses. The average admission scores for Shenzhen Campus (SZC) students are 13 points lower than those of Guangzhou North Campus (GZNC) (613 points vs 626 points). After 5 years of homogeneous education, comparing the GZNC students with the SZC students, there were no significant differences in the average total score (80.2 ± 4.6 vs 80.0 ± 5.6, P = 0.691), the average compulsory course (78.9 ± 3.4 vs 78.4 ± 6.1, P = 0.438), the average core course score (78.8 ± 7.4 vs 78.7 ± 5.0, P=0.860) and the average clerkship score (85.1 ± 7.2 vs 84.6 ± 2.7, P=0.275). However, the completion rate for SZC was higher than for GZNC (93.94% vs 86.27%, P=0.009). There was no statistical difference in postgraduate enrolment between the two institutions (P=0.758). Given the same educational resources, more medical students with lower entrance scores completed their studies and achieved the same percentage of postgraduate acceptance. This finding suggests that a key component of improving the quality of medical higher education in China may be to further rationalize the allocation of high-quality educational resources, rather than to pursuing students with high entrance examination scores.

The Climate-Nature Emergency (CNE) is an existential crisis that makes urgent the need to fundamentally transform the dominant model of social and economic development. Amid the wreckage created by competitive accumulation and hyper consumption, the crucial need is to develop a sustainable moral order, embodying constructive human-nature and human-human relations. Following Durkheim, the main components of a moral order are the state, which is the crucial repository of collective interest, and individuals who take responsibility for self-improvement and the implementation of social values. The CNE foregrounds the capacity of states everywhere to both organise centrally and foster devolved community agency that can effectively address local problems and disasters. Working with government, higher education has a central role to play in advancing and defending science, fostering skills and knowledge in government, and in developing reflexive agents effective in social action in all of the local, communal, national, regional and global scales. The CNE also calls up the need to overhaul the curriculum to render it consistent with ecological survival. Higher education has an advanced capacity to cooperate across national borders and can assist nation-states in the difficult but vital process of building stable global cooperation. In addressing these issues, China and higher education in China have strong endogenous traditions, ancient and recent, on which to draw, including the consensual role of the Sinic state, which when functioning effectively draws on widespread public support; governance through deep devolution within the framework of central policies; Confucian self-cultivation with its capacity to foster consciously reflective lifelong learners; and tianxia an approach to global cooperation founded in moral values and norms of conduct rather than coercion. When combined with the Western respect for personal freedom and initiative, these qualities have much to offer in addressing the CNE, not only in China but across the world.

The article emphasizes the importance of applying innovative models of higher education development, which should include: planning, when the strategy is developed by experts or research scientists based on the analysis of the state of education functioning; experience, when the strategy is developed by trial and error with the involvement of the maximum number of pedagogical workers; the relationship between education and economic development. This model should include internal, external, scientific, creative, economic and ideological needs. The model is considered as formed by the means of sign systems, mental analogues (logical) constructs that schematically reflect the educational practice as a whole or its individual fragments. The article analyses the transformation of the development of the modern model of higher education in China in historical retrospect. The First Stage: 1978-1984. During this period, the reform of the country's economic and political system began. The Second Stage: 1985-1992. In 1984-1985, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China successively adopted decisions on the reform of the economic system and the reform of the scientific and technological system. The Third Stage: 1993-1998. In early 1992, Comrade Deng Xiaoping inspected Southern China, after which his keynote speeches, which became the report at the "14th National Congress of the Communist Party of China", were published. The fourth stage: from 1999 to the present. In June 1999, the Party Central Committee and the State Council held the third national conference on higher education "Reforms and Openings". The article states that a multi-component model of the quality of university education should include a large number of factors: the presence of outstanding scientists and scientists who have a significant number of studies and monographs related to the current problems of modern education; the possibility of students achieving certain (creative, non-standard, logical) goals as a result of studying at the university; quality of the diploma and successful employment. The parameters of the quality of higher education in today's conditions are emphasized: the transition from unjustified teaching methods to innovative ones that provide for the individualization of the educational process; managing the development of higher education on the basis of public-private partnership; teamwork; high level of learning motivation; active cooperation of the one who teaches and the one who learns; high professionalism of the subject; intellectual development of the subject; his capacity for self-learning.

China's apparel higher education has experienced significant transformations to accommodate the development of society and economy. One purpose of this paper is to review the current changes in apparel higher education through reform and reconstruction during the past two decades in a historical perspective. Another purpose is to identify the new challenges and problems met in terms of globalization, mass higher education, and higher technological revolution. Through analysis, the paper concludes that to produce graduates capable of participating and competing in the emerging global society, China apparel higher education should conduct complicated reform and reconstruction, including further international cooperation and exchanges, further computer application in curriculum, strengthening merchandising, marketing and global resourcing education, curricula updating and diversification, and seamless Linkage of knowledge of different major and specialization.