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In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid−2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorises how politics, economy and migrant population policies influence educational policy, utilising Bourdieusian theoretical resources to analyse the Chinese context. It develops the work of Lingard and Rawolle on cross-field effects and produces an updated three-step analytical framework. Taking the policy issue of the schooling of internal migrant children as an example, it analyses how a range of fields – political, economic and public policy – ‘export’ their logics of practice into the educational policy field (as a sub-field of the public policy field) and consolidate the changes. The cross-field effects shape the state school enrolment policy and the relative positions of agents and the relative value of their capital in the educational policy field. This paper demonstrates the analytical capacity of Bourdieusian theoretical resources for policy analysis in the Chinese context, by illustrating how the inequalities experienced by migrant families have been intensified in education by cross-field effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With its shift to a market economy gathering speed from the 1990s, the Chinese Government embarked on an agenda that brought neoliberal forces into almost all sectors including education. The policies underpinned China’s spectacular economic growth, but in education have had consequences that arguably are problematic. Drawing on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, this paper examines ‘micro-neoliberalism’ in China’s education system, i.e. privatization and marketization at the individual, family, and institutional levels, with focus on blurring boundaries between public schooling and private supplementary tutoring. Some dimensions of these processes resulted from deliberate macro-level policies to decentralize control of schooling, raise performance, and empower private education. Other dimensions arose from the market behavior of individuals, families, and institutions that countered government efforts to steer parental choice of schools and to reduce disparities between schools. Education policies are enacted not only in schools but also in the shadow sector which is commonly overlooked. This paper focuses on Shanghai but has implications for other parts of China; and since shadow education is expanding as a global phenomenon, it also has relevance to many other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A great deal of research has addressed the tension between economic globalization and local cultural identity, and the tension between convergence in global policy objectives and divergence in local practices, but research has not explored the impact of the complex interactions between these tensions on an individual university, especially in relation to university autonomy. This paper attempts to bridge this gap. Based on a case study of Tsinghua University in China, this paper explores the university's role in three interrelated processes: the incorporation of international experience into higher education, in order to respond to economic globalization; the reinforcement of political education, as a means of preserving the state-prescribed cultural identity; and the quest for autonomy, to facilitate the university's move towards world-class status. Tensions raised by the interaction of these processes will also be discussed. This paper concludes by applying the concept of ‘glocalization’—i.e., ‘thinking and acting both globally and locally’—as a means of understanding the complex interrelations of global, national, and local factors that inform the translation of global imperatives into local realities in the context of Tsinghua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and implementers in some developing countries with a vast territory, China and Russia, for example, has hindered deeper exploration in policy studies. Adopting cross-field effects as the theoretical base and applying Bourdieu's conceptual triad as a whole, rather than considering habitus, practice, or field separately, this study examines Chinese transnational higher education (TNHE) policy enactment by subnational authorities, aiming to: first, contextualize Bourdieu's theoretical and empirical approaches in various political/economic systems while consider the policy practice at meso-level; second, demonstrate the essentiality of conversation rate and standard of capitals in field analysis; and third, based on these analyses, explore the formation of institutional habitus as a way of explaining the perennial inequality in the Chinese higher education (HE) system. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection that Bourdieu's ever-developing definition of habitus and the criticism of his unavoidable relapse to objectivism result from the indiscriminate use of individual and institutional habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses about problems of education policy in Hong Kong. In year 1991, the Education and Manpower Branch and the Education department jointly issued a document entitled "The School Management Initiative," which is a framework for future reforms in education. These reforms brought about confusion and a sense of unsettledness among school principals and teachers, as the intensification of surveillance over the education process led to increased dehumanization and alienation. One of the major problem with educational system of Hong Kong was medium of teaching. This problem still persist. Neglect of the reality in classrooms and the experience and views of practitioners, is unfortunately, also evident in the development of continuous teacher education which Ho Ming Ng discusses in his paper.

In the spring of 2005, students and alumni of the Chinese University of Hong Kong staged an adamant protest against University directives which they perceived would result in a significant increase in the number of courses taught in English. They denounced the administration of selling out on the founding mission of the University, for which, as stated in its Ordinance, the principal medium of teaching would be Chinese. The University, on the other hand, defended its policy in the name of 'internationalization' and the need to stay ahead in the midst of severe competition at home and abroad. This paper examines this language controversy against the wider context of English hegemony and the rise of academic capitalism, two forces which are inextricably linked for the non-Western societies in a post-colonial era. I will try to show that the controversy was ultimately a struggle over the meaning of university education, between what I would call the instrumentalists and the humanists in this age of globalization. I end the paper with a pessimistic note, saying that it is the former who have gained an upper hand, and that the scope and parameters of the language debate are heavily restricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education in Hong Kong has developed rapidly since the 70s in parallel with the economic boom. To support such development, the government has invested heavily in initial teacher education and will soon impose professional training and graduate qualifications as prerequisites for entering the profession. Continuous teacher education (CTE), generally regarded as equally important as initial teacher education if not more so, is not given comparable emphasis. This paper aims to study CTE in Hong Kong, including its policy, practice and provision at the system level. Some special features of the system are identified and scrutinized, including ad hoc, policy led, and competence based. The centrally provided CTE is also closely examined in terms of its relevance to the profession, impact on schools, and cost-effectiveness. The paper ends with a close look at its latest developments, obstacles encountered and prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid-2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy.

In September 1997, shortly after China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Education Department announced a policy which was widely seen as a restoration of 'mother-tongue education', but which, in reality, was an elitist language selection policy. This policy, which provided for the selection of the best primary school graduates for monolingual education in English, was designed to be a cost-effective way of training in English skills for those who had the economic and cultural capital to benefit from it. Meanwhile, the majority of students were barred from sufficient exposure to English, the language of power and wealth. In this paper, I shall show that this policy draws on a strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of English for the economic survival of Hong Kong, which was engineered by business interests on the eve of the changeover in 1997, and which helped perpetuate a form of linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, academics whose research was used to legitimize the policy, failed to problematize dominant language ideologies that have been used to justify pedagogically unsound practices and an inequitable language streaming policy. Through documenting the voices of individual educators, I am able to delineate counter-discourses which, albeit weak and isolated, nevertheless manifested much broader educational concerns than the narrow utilitarianism and the unquestioned privileging of the learning of English skills that underlay the current policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major innovations in the recent wave of education reform in Hong Kong is the target-oriented curriculum. An interesting feature of this new curriculum initiative was its amoebic characteristics - changing shape and focus in its course of development. It was reshaped from an assessment system for accountability purposes to a centrally developed curriculum initiative for improving teaching and learning, and finally to a school-based curriculum development. In this paper, this course of development and the reasons behind it will be described and analysed. The study suggests that the two-tier educational policy and implementation system in Hong Kong is a major cause leading to such a phenomenon. If this system were not improved, the possibility of achieving real changes at the school and classroom level would be low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying current research on China's world-class university (WCU) policy approaches are analytical foci that privilege the agency of social actors and the problem-solving approach to policy analysis. Foucauldian poststructuralists draw our attention to policy document, which is seen as a discourse that organizes and administers society. Inspired by Foucault, Carol Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to Be?' approach (WPR) views policy document as a technology of governmentality. As proposed solutions to a problem, policy text produces the very problem that it seeks to address. Carol Bacchi draws our analytical attention to the rationalities, technologies of governing and subjectification effects created by particular problem representations in the WCU policy. Using WPR, this paper shows that WCU is represented as merely a technical, managerial and organizational problem. Such representations naturally reify WCU in material terms, such as research output, and in a temporal form of state planning. Genealogically, the root of WCU can be traced to the neoliberal movement of knowledge economy. However, Shanghai Ranking overturned this center-periphery landscape in disseminating the concept of WCU. China's one-party state means that WCU is pursued at the expense of sacrificing social sciences and subjecting academics and students to become 'red experts.'

A great deal of research has addressed the tension between economic globalization and local cultural identity, and the tension between convergence in global policy objectives and divergence in local practices, but research has not explored the impact of the complex interactions between these tensions on an individual university, especially in relation to university autonomy. This paper attempts to bridge this gap. Based on a case study of Tsinghua University in China, this paper explores the university's role in three interrelated processes: the incorporation of international experience into higher education, in order to respond to economic globalization; the reinforcement of political education, as a means of preserving the state-prescribed cultural identity; and the quest for autonomy, to facilitate the university's move towards world-class status. Tensions raised by the interaction of these processes will also be discussed. This paper concludes by applying the concept of "glocalization"--i.e., "thinking and acting both globally and locally"--as a means of understanding the complex interrelations of global, national, and local factors that inform the translation of global imperatives into local realities in the context of Tsinghua. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper focuses on two themes - the marginalization of curriculum subjects and the gap between curriculum policy aims and the implemented curriculum. Illustrating these themes, the study focuses on the marginalization of physical education and the policy-practice gap in the Hong Kong school curriculum. A framework recognizing three domains - normative, institutional and resources - is proposed as a useful heuristic device to gain further insight into problems connected with the two themes and as a way of generating appropriate policies to address them. In accounting for the differential weightings given curriculum subjects, it is necessary to go beyond school-level (institutional) decisions taken by principals and teachers and to consider long-cherished Chinese societal values, reflective of the normative domain. What is considered 'valid knowledge' is a product of deeply ingrained Chinese socio-cultural values that place high esteem on academic subjects leading to careers in the professions, public service and highly remunerated work in the service-based economy. Schools are sandwiched between pressures from the central authority and from societal and parental values and expectations, leading to a policy-practice gap where core subjects, such as physical education, struggle for survival and resources. The three domains of the framework are used to suggest a number of strategies for addressing the problems of marginalization and policy-practice gap, one of which involves the adoption of a more integrated approach to the curriculum and a commitment to increase resource allocation, both of which could eventuate in changing societal norms and values. Finally, policy and political implications suggest that government policy makers endeavour to close the policy-practice gap by developing a closer understanding of the problems schools experience in implementing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and implementers in some developing countries with a vast territory, China and Russia, for example, has hindered deeper exploration in policy studies. Adopting cross-field effects as the theoretical base and applying Bourdieu's conceptual triad as a whole, rather than considering habitus, practice, or field separately, this study examines Chinese transnational higher education (TNHE) policy enactment by subnational authorities, aiming to: first, contextualize Bourdieu's theoretical and empirical approaches in various political/economic systems while consider the policy practice at meso-level; second, demonstrate the essentiality of conversation rate and standard of capitals in field analysis; and third, based on these analyses, explore the formation of institutional habitus as a way of explaining the perennial inequality in the Chinese higher education (HE) system. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection that Bourdieu's ever-developing definition of habitus and the criticism of his unavoidable relapse to objectivism result from the indiscriminate use of individual and institutional habitus.

Policy network approach has become a broadly accepted and frequently adopted practice in modern state governance, especially in the public sector. The study utilises a broadly defined policy network conceptual frame and categories of reference to trace the evolution of education policy-making in China. The study usesThe Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020)as an illustrative case study. This study argues that China’s education policy-making has changed, and the three most prominent changes are the transition from a Party-dominant practice to one primarily driven by the central government, the enhanced role of higher education institutions and scholars as ‘professional interest group’ in the Chinese context and the increasing participation of non-governmental actors in the policy-making process. Essentially exploratory in nature, this study hopes to contribute to the understanding of China’s education policy-making and broader education governance while contributing to the mapping of an important sector of the global education network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China as the world factory in the last few decades has been accompanied by a rapid expansion in vocational education. A growing number of youth from rural backgrounds now have the chance to receive post-compulsory education in vocational training schools. Using human capital theory as an analytical focus, this study examines their strong desire to acquire educational credentials and explores the stress and frustration they experience after finding out that graduates in vocational schools are sent to factories to work as cheap labourers. This article argues that reform of the educational system in post-reform China has channelled a large group of rural youth to vocational education without granting them enough chance of upward mobility. When China relies heavily on a labour-intensive manufacturing economy to secure its place in neoliberal globalization, most of the jobs available are regarded as ‘undesirable’, dead-end and low income. Returns of human capital investment among rural youth are not guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to the perceived ‘feminisation’ of primary school teaching, educational authorities in many countries have implemented policies designed to encourage more men to take up teaching positions in primary schools. While challenges to the efficacy of such policies have emerged in the literature, limited attention has been given to the voice of male primary school teachers themselves. Using a qualitative multiple case study approach, this study addresses this imbalance by examining how five male primary school teachers construct professional identities within Hong Kong primary schools. In-depth interviews give voice to these male primary school teachers, revealing the dominant discourses that make available certain identity positions to all primary school teachers in Hong Kong. The study explores how these five teachers exercise individual agency as they struggle to be recognised as competent members of a community of primary school teachers. The case studies also describe the limits to such personal agency, suggesting the need for policy initiatives that support the identity work of all primary school teachers by going beyond calls for the recruitment of greater numbers of male primary teachers. Some of the ways in which educational policy and practice could provide such support are considered and implications for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The positional competition reflected in the current parental choice fever in China is highlighted by the introduction of market mechanisms: buying houses near preferred schools, paying choice fees or co-founding fees, giving donations and spending money on spare time training classes, etc. All of these work effectively together with the traditional tools of power and guanxi in carrying out one's parental choice. The involvement of huge amounts of choice fee money has resulted in changes in government policies that work to the middle classes' advantage by giving the green light to the intake of choice students in senior middle schools and allowing the former key primary schools and junior middle schools to change into 'converted schools' for the sake of charging high choice fees in a legal way. The development of the series of government policies has resulted in a shift of the parental choice process from being a meritocratic competition to a largely private competition between families based in large part on wealth, power and guanxi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hong Kong government, in common with many others around the world, has experienced major difficulties in implementing educational reforms. The nature of the constraints on implementation, however, have differed significantly between the pre- and post-1997 periods. During the transition to Chinese sovereignty, the colonial government sought to avoid friction with teachers and pressure groups which might have resulted from determined efforts to implement its reforms. Policy, consequently, was usually symbolic and often remained at the level of rhetoric. The post-1997 government has shown more intent to bring about change but has been hampered both by an inherited culture of inertia and cynicism towards reform and by the dysfunctions of a disarticulated political system which have led to problems of co-ordination and a loss of capacity. The article analyses the relationship between educational reform and the changing political system and concludes that reform remains an elusive objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the changing educational landscape in Hong Kong prior to and following its transition to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It does this through an analysis of the rise and fall of a specific curriculum reform, the Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), which straddled the political reunification. The article draws on a range of published research and evaluation projects and the analysis focusses on the four key elements of public policy, namely the origins, the nature, the policy actions used and its impact on practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]