Situating Higher Education in China From Universal History to the Research Paradigm

It is a reality that China has become the second largest economy in the world and with one of the highest rates of continued growth, which mostly benefits from both the reform and open-door policy initiated in 1978 and the continued growth of the global economy in the past three decades. However, it is also well known that over hundred years earlier, China was backward compared with other modern countries, some of which had colonial interests in China. From the 1840s, based on most Chinese historians’ viewpoints, China experienced a slow but complex process to shape and reshape itself into a modern nation-state along the lines of other such nations. Consequently, as a modern nation-state China is equipped with modern cities, factories, transportation systems, communication, electronic productions, and so on. Over the same period, a modern educational system was established.