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Yali College, a four-year institution operating under the aegis of Yale University, offered a US-style undergraduate education in China's Hunan province from 1914 to 1927. It developed a robust curriculum and an impressive physical plant but collapsed after a little more than a decade. This paper, drawing on new archival research, focuses on the circumstances leading to that collapse. It argues that a deep divide emerged over Yali's form and function, pitting modernisers at the institution's helm against its tradition-minded faculty and trustees, eventually crippling the college. The case of Yali helps us understand the perils of ideological misalignment in education, especially when it occurs in challenging sociopolitical contexts like 1920s China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although engineering education has played important roles in China’s growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and engineering education, this paper attempts to address this scholarly gap by relating contemporary Chinese engineering education policy-making to its broader historical, cultural and ideological contexts. Based on analysis of policy documents and reports released by the Chinese government and engineering schools, and drawing on prior scholarship of Chinese (engineering) education policy, this paper employs the concept of ‘past/forward’ as an analytic lens to interpret and understand four major areas of engineering education policy change in contemporary China: institutional reform, disciplines and majors, training objectives, and curriculum reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teachers in China are regarded as vulnerable to sociopolitical changes. This paper, however, focuses on the resilience and innovativeness of state-selected expert teachers - the recipients of the Special Rank Teacher (SRT) award. This award was the product of a transitional period in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and was an act of rehabilitation for the teaching profession. Using a biographical approach, this paper analyses how the intentions of the award were reflected in the choice of recipients. It contributes to a deeper understanding of teachers in China and the notion of teaching excellence that the state-recognised teachers exemplify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares public–private partnerships (PPPs) in education in post-war Singapore and Hong Kong. After the Second World War the Singapore government shied away from PPPs, while the state in Hong Kong collaborated extensively with the non-state sector in education. Singapore was a small city-state flanked by two Muslim nations, and its post-war regime faced challenges from the Malayan Communist Party. These pressures curbed the state’s involvement with missionary and Chinese bodies in education. Hong Kong, however, was a mono-racial society without any anti-Chinese neighbours, and its authorities were seldom challenged by a militant antagonist. Thus, its government was freer to involve non-state agents in education. This study reveals that PPPs are viable only when suitable non-state partners exist and when the state does not believe that such undertakings would expose the school system to an antagonist. It also urges scholars in future to explore the socio-political preconditions for PPPs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The feminisation of teaching is an important topic in education and gender studies. Discussions have been enriched by comparative and international studies as well as a gendering perspective in which a complicated view of the role of the state has emerged. In colonial Hong Kong, although the government was limited in its support of teacher training, its strategic control was not ineffective. Through regulating the teaching force, the colonial regime was instrumental in training women to help civilise the young and in creating a dead end job that of a 'primary school teacher'. It also constantly (re)constructed the nature and role of 'Chinese teacher' and 'Chinese women'. By revealing some seldom-explored strategies and disrupting the fixed meanings of 'Chinese teacher', 'Chinese women', and 'primary school teacher', this paper unravels the intervention and (re)invention of the colonial regime in the teaching occupation and probes their implications for a patriarchal society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates socialist China's pedagogic treatment of individuality between 1949 and 1958, with a focus on the debates concerning 'all-round development' and 'teaching in accordance with aptitude', two principles that clashed regarding students' individuality. It reconstructs how educational bureaucrat and theorist Zhang Lingguang spearheaded the debates in People's Education, China's leading educational journal. Building on the existing idealistic, critical and cultural perspectives on the debates, this article offers an analysis of power dynamics on three levels. Interpersonally, bureaucrats and ideologues were in conflict with ordinary teachers from local schools. Institutionally, People's Education mediated between the Ministry of Education and teachers nationwide, while managing its accountability. (Inter)nationally, the debates were conditioned by the changing Sino–Soviet relationship, and by the Hundred Flowers Campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain’s cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]