Education in China : Educational History, Models, and Initiatives

Chinese students are known worldwide for their accomplishment and ambition, and education is profoundly valued in China. But these facts do not tell the whole story. Intellectuals were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and only recently has a college education been accessible to a majority of Chinese high-school graduates. Things are changing rapidly. China s higher-education system is now the largest in the world, and the number of Chinese students in the United States is growing at twenty-five percent annually. Collaboration with Western scholars and universities is increasing. Governmental and philanthropic agencies are working to provide better education to students in the margins, including minority, poor, disabled, and rural students. This Berkshire Essentials volume, Education in China, includes contributions by seventy-four international experts on Chinese education and provides unique coverage of learning at all levels.

The Berkshire Essentials Series
Berkshire China Essentials are accessible, compact volumes designed for use in teaching. Some are distilled from the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China. Others, like this volume on education in China, provide original articles on an emerging field. Each Berkshire China Essentials book is authored by dozens of experts in different countries and carefully edited for clarity and coherence. The result is a set of books that are truly essential in the twenty-first-century global classroom and library.

Qiang Zha is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education, York University. His research interests include Chinese and East Asian higher education, international academic relations, global brain circulation, internationalization of higher education, globalization and education, differentiation and diversity in higher education, theories of organizational change, knowledge transfer and commercialization, and international migration and development. He has written and published widely on these topics in journals such as Compare, Higher Education, Higher Education in Europe, Harvard China Review, and as book chapters. His most recent books include a co-authored book (with Ruth Hayhoe, Jun Li and Jing Lin) Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong and Springer, 2011) and an edited volume Education and Global Cultural Dialogue (with Karen Mundy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In 2004, he was a co-recipient of the inaugural IAU/Palgrave Prize on Higher Education Policy Research. Since 2011, he has joined in an Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada research initiative, Canada-China Human Capital Dialogue, as an Associate Team Member. In 2012-2013, Qiang Zha is a Weilun Scholar at Tsinghua University, and a visiting professor at Peking University.