Speaker: Prof. Ka Ho MOK
Time: 08:00-10:00, March 1, 2011
Venue: Office 228, Tian Jia Bing Building

Title: ‘Turning the crisis into opportunity: educational development and social harmony in China’.
Abstract:
    Realizing the difficulty to sustain its economic growth simply by engaging the whole country in exploiting its ‘cheap labour’ to attract overseas capital for investment, the Chinese government has made serious attempts to transform the county from ‘economic power’ into ‘power of human capital’. Like other Asian countries, the Chinese government sees higher education not only as part of nation-building but also an extension of their national ‘soft power’. It is against this context that the Chinese government has adopted various measures like the ‘211’ and ‘985’ projects to inject additional funding to transform the university sector. This paper critically examines the newly published Outline for National Educational Development by 2020, with particular reference to discuss how the Chinese government has tried to turn the crisis into opportunity to further transform its higher education sector to cope with the growing pressures for internationalization of university education. This paper also examines the policy implications of the proposed reforms on social and educational development in China mainland.