Recent transformations in China's economic, social, and education policies for promoting innovation and creativity

The purpose of this study is to review major Chinese policies related to creativity education. We first identify and describe the role of innovation and creativity in economic and social development policies over the past 20 years, then analyze how the call for enhanced Chinese innovation and creativity was actualized in corresponding education policies. The article concludes with an analysis of issues surrounding Chinese education policy toward creativity and several directions for future research in this area. Many visitors to mainland China have observed that it is a land of contradictions, and this certainly holds true for the Chinese view of their own creativity. On one hand, people around the world can recite thousands of years of Chinese inventiveness, ranging from gunpowder to noodles, from the civil service to intellectual examinations, among many other innovations. On the other hand, sentiments such as "Chinese students lack creativity" and "Chinese people need to be more creative" are common topics in Chinese media and academic journals, reflecting a conventional wisdom that China is no longer a creative country. Over the past two decades, researchers have conducted a number of studies on these issues and have provided some reasonable explanations for the apparent lack of perceived creativity among Chinese students and adults (e.g., Chan & Chan, 1999; Niu & Sternberg, 2003; Wu, 2004). Niu and Sternberg (2003) believed that Chinese social values, school pedagogic practices, and educational testing systems were responsible for the comparative lack of creativity among Chinese students. They claimed that overemphasizing conformity, analytic thinking, and test scores significantly decrease Chinese students' creative performance. Chan and Chan (1999), in an investigation of Chinese teachers' perceptions of creative students, found that the teachers often regarded characteristics of creative students as socially undesirable. Prior research also revealed that while Chinese teachers value the significance of creativity, they know less about how to teach creativity (Chien & Hui, 2010). In recent years, researchers have begun to explore Chinese creativity education from a policy perspective. For instance, based on the analysis of China's educational documents issued in 1998, Hui and Lau (2010) found that, in mainland China, innovation was usually regarded as synonymous with creativity, but that creativity education was not sufficiently emphasized in the larger community. Nonetheless, it seems the prior research on China's "creativity problem" has not captured the whole picture of Chinese creativity education. On the one hand, China's creativity education is tightly associated with national developmental strategies. Under China's top-down approach to policymaking, national strategies can dramatically affect national and local educational policies, which in turn determine the practices of teaching creativity. Therefore, it will be very difficult to grasp the essentials of China's creativity education unless considered in the context of national strategies. On the other hand, since the beginning of the new century, particularly in the past 5 years, many significant changes have occurred in China's national strategies for promoting innovation and creativity. This has brought about new transformations in China's educational policies on creativity education, indicating the potential for great change in the corresponding educational practices for developing Chinese students' creativity. As such, the purpose of this study is to examine the recent transformations of China's educational policies for fostering innovation and creativity. The article is divided into two main parts. The first part concerns the changes in the national strategies for innovation and creativity so as to provide a context for analyzing the transformations in educational policies. The second part focuses on the specific changes in creativity education policies, with a particular focus on recent policy developments in this area. The study concludes with a discussion of potential problems with the current education policies.