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In China, social work was reestablished in 1988. Despite the number of social work programmes increased very fast throughout the 1990s, there was a huge need for social work-trained educators. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Peking University launched the MSW (China) Programme in 2000 to create a critical mass of social work educators who would assume future leadership in social work development in mainland China. Participatory action research was employed as a methodology to explore how social work education could transform students into catalysts for social work education and social development. Purposive sampling was adopted, and seven cohorts totaling 238 graduates who graduated from the programme were the participants in this research. Data collection and analysis were carried out throughout the action research process. We found the triple capacity building model to be a good pedagogy to foster transformation among participants, and to steer the knowledge co-creation, practice innovation, policy reform, and social change through social work education. In this paper, we will provide an overview of the background, vision, and mission, as well as the teaching pedagogy of the programme and a case study to demonstrate how social work education has an impact on policy and practice innovation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work education was first developed in China in the early 1920s in the most prestigious universities, and the social work curricula of these schools were largely modeled on those of the West, especially those of North America. The result is a unique pattern of social work education which, though still in its formative stage, is reflective of and congruent with the social and cultural milieu of contemporary Chinese society. Social work in China, in the form of philanthropy, dates back to much earlier times. It has included all kinds of social relief and social services provided by governments and private and religious organizations and had a strong flavor paternalism. However, shortly after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), all sociology and social work-related courses were eliminated from the universities during the restructuring of institutions of higher learning' in 1952. When social work was reintroduced to the universities in the late 1980s, China had neither the professional expertise nor the experience to develop this newly introduced discipline and had to search for its own direction through trial and error. In the 1990s, social work education in China was confronted with a host of issues and problems, and social work educators in China had to constantly struggle to find their positioning in the midst of conflicting options.