Power landscapes within Chinese universities: a three-dimensional discourse analysis of university statutes

Legitimising shared governance in China's higher education sector through university statutes

“…Regarding the second question of how shared governance has in practice been implemented in decision‐making processes at Chinese universities, our findings reveal tokenism in practices of shared governance, with administrative unprofessionalism being a catalyst. The findings suggest that while China is moving towards a more multi‐stakeholder‐embracing direction of governance, shared governance efforts remain curtailed by the sector's hierarchical power landscape (Zhuang & Liu, 2020). One manifestation of such curtailed governance in our findings included the unequal power of votes in decision‐making meetings.…”

“…The analysis in this study draws on a total of thirteen Chinese university statutes. Statutes are institutional permanent laws and official articulations (Fielden, 2008; Zhuang & Liu, 2020). The vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, text structure, the force of utterances, and the coherence of texts in the statutes denote different types of stipulated rights, obligations, duties and relationships among various stakeholders (Fairclough, 1992).…”

“…Unlike what we usually understand as a simple academic‐administrative dichotomy in the West (Favero & Bray, 2005), the discussion about stakeholders' relationships cannot be isolated from political power in China. For instance, explicit forms of political power constitute a constant force within Chinese higher education institutions to steer the direction of university development with ideological purposes (Zhuang & Liu, 2020). Also, university administration plays a key role by allocating resources within higher education institutions.…”

“…A wealth of literature have discussed the prominence of shared governance in facilitating the effectiveness and quality of Chinese higher education (Zhou & Liu, 2018; Zhuang & Liu, 2020). Various types of government planning documents and legal lexical resources have also termed shared governance as an idea critical to higher education reform (Han & Xu, 2019).…”

Policy decoupling in strategic response to the double world-class project: evidence from elite universities in China

“…The universities are recontextualizing prior policies for selective disciplines and further strengthening the differentiation. The organizational changes in universities are guided by the government instead of academic power, and academics' participation in university governance is insufficient (Zhuang and Liu 2020).This may result in the loss of a sustainable environment for WCUs and WCDs development as well as potentially affecting the overall educational quality.…”