Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in transnational education mobility. The two trends of international integration and marketisation of higher education have made for a situation in which increasing numbers of aspiring young people worldwide seize the opportunity to study abroad as part of their higher education. No other nation sends more students abroad than China. In 2014, 459,800 students left the country to study abroad (Ministry of Education 2015); and 22 per cent of all international students enrolled in tertiary education in OECD countries in 2012 came from China (OECD 2014: 350). To explore the many dimensions of this huge wave of educational migration we hosted a conference at Aarhus University with the title Chinese Students Abroad: Reflections, Strategies and Impacts of a Global Generation in March 2014. The initial versions of the first three articles in this issue by Heidi Ross and Yajing Chen, Kirsten Jæger and Malene Gram, and Qing Gu were presented at this conference.2 The fourth article, by Naomi Yamada, examines the education of ethnic minorities inside China and thereby throws light on another, but related, effect of the marketisation of Chinese education.
Abstract The Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) initiated by Liang Shuming stands out as an ambitious and visionary alternative to more bureaucratic government-sponsored modernization drives, as well as to the Communist revolutionary mode) for social change. The RRM and its work in Zouping county, Shandong province, between 1931 and 1937 was just one expression of the growing attention paid to the villages by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries from the later half of the l920s. What makes Liang’s experiments particularly relevant for the discussion of the relationship between state and society in the modern transformation of China, however, is his firm belief in the potentials of rural society, and his articulate aversion to state intervention and coercive measures. Liang conceived of the drama of modernization and rural reconstruction as a triangular relationship between village communities. intellectuals, and the state. His aim was to reconstruct rural society through the establishment of village schools (cunxue) which should play the double role of administrative organs and community centres. The state should only accept and assist this process, not dominate it, while the intellectuals should contribute with new ideas and knowledge. The implementation of these ideas in Zouping was no unqualified success, however, and even before the Japanese invaded the area in 1937 Liang was forced to admit that village China resisted this remodelling more than he had imagined.
The Communist Party of China is fighting hard to redefine its basis of legitimacy and give village and township cadres and ordinary Party members a sense of purpose and direction. It is trying to redefine itself as an elite party whose cadres are better educated, more cultured and civilised, and have better organisational abilities than the rest of the rural population; but these views are being seriously challenged by the peasants. This paper is based on a study of Xuanwei County, Yunnan Province.
Zouping in Transition. The Process of Reform in Rural North China. Edited by Andrew G. Walder. Harvard Contemporary China Series, 11. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. xv, 277 pp. 19.95 (paper). - Volume 58 Issue 2
The Paradox of Power in a People's Republic of China Middle School. By Martin Schoenhals. [Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. viii + 255 pp. Hard cover £48.00, ISBN 1–56324–188–9; paperback £18.00, ISBN 1–56324–189–7.] - Volume 142
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