About this book

The current social reality and changing global forces and spaces are inspiring the rethinking, refining, and re-empowering of the world social sciences to broach the frontiers of human knowledge, enhance mutual understanding across cultures and civilizations, and shape a better world. Taking Tsinghua University’s sociology as a case, this book concentrates on how internationalization shapes disciplinary development in a global context of asymmetrical academic relations. This inquiry is set amidst China’s dramatic economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, as well as the institutional reforms in this Chinese flagship university. This book seeks to probe how Chinese and Western knowledge, institutions, and cultures are integrated in the ongoing process of internationalization and concentrates on the disciplinary evolution of Tsinghua’s sociology―intellectually, institutionally, and culturally―drawing on top-down higher education policy and bottom-up perceptions and experiences of Tsinghua’s social scientists. This book highlights that higher education internationalization is an evolving process whose advanced phase would require Chinese social scientists to bring China to the world. It is time for Tsinghua University to reassess the long-term impact of internationalization on its academic disciplines and provide sufficient support for the development of the social sciences.This book will attract academics, practitioners, and postgraduate students interested in higher education internationalization, international academic relations, global constellation and distribution of academic power, academic knowledge production, and the development and intellectual influences of the Chinese social sciences.

About this book series

This book series focuses on higher education crosscurrents between Asia and the West, including traditional comprehensive universities, normal universities for teachers, higher vocational institutions, community colleges, distance and on-line universities and all the differing approaches to higher education emerging under processes of massification and diversification. It gives attention to the ways in which the Asian context shapes the internationalization of higher education and the response to globalization differently from that of the West, as well as new phenomena that are arising in the interface between these two broad regions, such as higher education hubs and regional networks of collaboration. Lastly, it will highlight the growing reciprocity between these two regions, whose higher education systems have grown from such deeply different historical roots.

Higher Education has deep roots in the cultures and civilizations of diverse regions of the world, but perhaps the most influential models shaping contemporary globalization come from Europe and China. Universities established in Europe in the Middle Ages have developed into what is now described as the “global research university,” a model profoundly shaped by 19th century Germany and 20th century America, and spread around the world both through colonization and the emulation of its scientific achievements and contribution to nation building. A millennium earlier China spawned another influential model, characterized by close integration within a meritocratic bureaucracy that entrusted governance to those who could demonstrate their knowledge through written examinations. The Chinese model was greatly admired in Europe from the time it was introduced in the 16th century, and one can see its contours in what Burton Clark described as the “continental model” in contradistinction to the “Anglo-American model” epitomized in the global research university.

What has become clear in the maelstrom of globalization, which has stimulated the growth of a global knowledge economy and created circumstances where nations consider higher education as crucial to remaining competitive, is that the integration of core features from both models would be optimal: from Asia, a tradition of strong state support for and involvement in higher education, which is crucial for good governance and social advancement; and from Europe and North America, the ideas of university autonomy and academic freedom, which are essential to promoting scientific creativity and innovation.