Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a critical analysis of polices issued by China's Ministry Of Education in governing Sino-Foreign partnerships. Through analyzing the discursive strategies of MOE and comparing different cases, I show how polices travel to different levels of Chinese higher education sectors.

Paper long abstract:

Upon joining the WTO in 2001, China stated its commitment to GATS and opened its educational market to the world. Meanwhile, the government imposed the fundamental restriction that foreign institutions could only enter China through forming partnerships with Chinese institutions and establishing joint-venture institutions or joint programmes. Though China has enacted a corpus of policies to stipulate the basic structure and developmental direction for these partnerships, the distinctive ways of interpreting and implementing these polices by different educational institutions as well as other actors such as foreign governments or industries have generated vastly varied organisational forms, social relations and subjects in the Sino-Foreign educational partnerships.

This paper provides a critical analysis of polices issued by China's Ministry Of Education in governing these partnerships, which are addressed in the policy documents as CFCRS. Through analyzing the discursive strategies of MOE and comparing the two cases of CFCRS institutions, I show how polices travel to different levels of Chinese higher education sectors and install a hegemonic discourse of global knowledge hierarchy featuring 'the lagging behind' Chinese education and 'the advanced' foreign education.

My inquiry draws on the work of Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their development of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories into a framework of explanatory 'logics.' I point out how the Social Logics of competition, atomization and instrumentailization, the Political Logics of equivalence/differences and the Fantasmatic Logics of 'a rising China' naturalize the knowledge hierarchy and preinstall the conflicts within the CFCRS