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Host Alex Usher interviews Dr. Lily Yang (University of Hong Kong) about her book, Higher Education State and Society, comparing Chinese and Anglo-American higher education as distinct cultural worldviews rather than just systems. Yang argues cultural traditions shape how concepts like the person/individual, equity, society, and the public good are understood, and why key ideas do not translate cleanly across contexts. They discuss similarities and deeper differences in student development, contrasting human-capital and tuition-fee rationales with China’s view of higher education as a state-supported apparatus serving broader social goods. Yang explains China’s historically encompassing notion of state and society, differing meanings of liberty versus zhi (free will), and culturally bounded university autonomy and academic freedom.
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What is The World of Higher Education?
The World of Higher Education is dedicated to exploring developments in higher education from a global perspective. Join host, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, as he speaks with new guests each week from different countries discussing developments in their regions.
Produced by Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek.
Alex Usher: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education.
While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is in many ways rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities.
And yet it's two sets of operating principles are very different, and it's not just because it's the Communist Party of China that's calling the shots in one of them. There's some basic concepts about education, society, and the public good — concepts which are central to how academia describes itself and its mission — which simply don't translate very well between the two cultures. As a result, there's an enduring difference in worldviews and sometimes some very different interpretations of what higher education's all about.
These enduring differences in worldviews are the subject of a new and important book by today's guest, Dr. Lili Yang of the University of Hong Kong. The book is called Higher Education State and Society, Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches.
In the book, Dr. Yang deals with five themes. First student development, second, equity in higher education, third academic freedom and university autonomy, fourth, the resources and outcomes of higher education, and fifth, cross border higher education and global outcomes. For each of these themes, Dr. Yang takes a good hard look at how the subject is framed in each of the two big traditions, and more particularly where the traditions overlap and where they simply miss each other completely.
This episode is a bit unlike any other we've ever done. We often try to be in the news, but Lili's work is somewhat more theoretical. It's no less interesting for that though. We range back and forth in the interview across more rarefied territory than usual for this show, but I think you'll like it anyway. Lili's a very well informed guy to the two very different cultures and philosophies that frame the existence of most of the world's great universities. And with that over Lili.
Lili, thanks for being with us. Your book isn't really about comparing two sets of higher education systems. It's more about comparing two worldviews or two cultural traditions in which universities are embedded. Why is it important to study higher education at that level?
Lili Yang: Well, cultural traditions often, I have to say, often receive less attention in higher education studies, but they do not only condition us, but we are actually inevitably situated in our histories and traditions. So cultural traditions influence who we are, what we see and what we ask, which are clearly manifested in what I will talk about in the upcoming questions.
And a typical example is how the individuals, or in the Chinese cultural tradition I would prefer to use the word the persons to highlight the difference here, are situated in and associated with the community which is a very important aspect of how we understand the public, the private, the collective, the common, the communal in our society and in higher education.
And I'm happy to give another example here why we study universities in relation to cultural traditions. And for example, in addition to what we will be talking about later, that the idea of equity, the equality idea in terms of equality of what, for example, equality of opportunity, equality of race, equality of gender only come in much later in Chinese society.
However this has been, there is a long tradition in the Anglo-American, so to speak, a cultural tradition there. And that is, explains why there has been some unease in terms of how we deal with those equality in higher education, though equality is a much less controversial topic in higher education, but there is more controversies in terms of how universities are related with the state, with the government, with the society, so on and so forth, which I think we will be talking more about in a few minutes.
Alex Usher: Higher education intersects with the world on several different planes, if I can use that word. And, and you talk about, you know, the, the individual or the family, right? It's a, it's a little bit more blurred in China than it is in the west. Society, the state, and I guess the market as well, which, you know, again, it's a, the state and the market play out quite differently, I think in different traditions.
I'd like to take these in turn. At the level of the individual, you found a great deal of similarity between chi, between Chinese and Anglo-American traditions in terms of how universities are meant to shape. Student self-development. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Lili Yang: Well, you are absolutely right in terms of how family could be a blurring term in the Chinese society. And in fact, at least in the traditional China, let's say pre-mortem China, that individual was never there in the sense that there isn't such a term or notion of an independent individual so to speak, independent from the family, from the state from society, whatever it means in that period of time.
So, a person is always a part of a larger community, and that is how persons are defined in those time. And I would say that it still have its legacies in the contemporary China. When we see a person, it's not exactly the same when we talk about the individual in the Anglo-American sense.
So when it comes to higher education in terms of student self-development what I would say that you see, the dissimilarities are more related to the immediate practice or or policies in higher education practice. Like, those policies to promote how an individual develop themselves, student develop themselves, like those curricular pedagogy or student support.
However, there are more profound differences in the underlying ideas and worldviews in terms of how a person, how a student is related with his or her family. And it, there were studies, empirical studies highlighting that individuals are not making their independent decisions in the Chinese context.
I mean context not only in mainland China, but also in other Chinese societies. They are their, in their decisions and how they act are largely influenced by their family. So when it comes to student development, it's not necessarily only about self development, it's always a part of the communal or other development and self development.
Alex Usher: So, you know, in, I don't know if it's an Anglo-American tradition, but certainly in the last 30 or 40 years, you know, which is short as the, 'cause you're talking about Confucius, which goes back 2,500 years, right? But, so in the last 40 years self-development has had a very clear economic rationale in the Anglo-American world, right? Coming from Gary Becker and, and traditions around human capital. So if you're developing, therefore you should pay tuition. You know, and that's really changed the way that I think the Anglo-American world has thought about private returns to education. China, you know, um, China brought in tuition fees around the same time the UK did.
So I'm just wondering, like, do the two different conceptions of self-development, has that affected the way that the private, you know, that, that we think about private returns to higher education in the two systems? Or not, like, are, are they, are they running along pretty parallel lines?
Lili Yang: Thank you for bringing that up. I think there is a, in my own view, like there is a huge mistake in terms of the policy pathways in the recent decades in the UK, for example, in terms of tuition fees. I think there, the, the, the huge mistake lies in overlook or deliberate over ignorance of the fact that higher education and student development not only contributes to private terms or peculiar returns of themselves.
They are making huge contributions to the society, to the state, to the world that is the public or the common good that we are, we are here talking about. So, here, I think if we sort of underestimate what higher education is doing to the society, then here comes in the idea of human capitals and new management movement that it should be the students themselves who bear the cost. Or largely bearing the cost of their own education. But that is wrong. In contrast, in the Chinese cultural tradition and still in practice today in Chin, in Chinese higher education, that the longstanding relations between higher education and the state, particularly higher education as seen as an apparatus of the state, makes the government the default founder of higher education and also consistently upholding the idea that higher education and students development should be contributing to the larger good in terms of in, in addition to their own personal development in a more modern sense of economic sense of development and growth. But also for example, contributing to social cohesion, equity, respect, and in that, in a more broad sense of human flourishing instead of the very narrow sense of development.
Alex Usher: So you brought up the relationship between higher education and society, but you also argue that the idea of society, which is kind of a, a public sphere that mediates between the level of the individual and the family, and the level of state, that looks pretty different in the Chinese tradition than it does in the Anglo-American tradition. So how does that difference shape the way universities in the two cultures approach their respective missions?
Lili Yang: Well, there is always a major difficulty here in terms of the language that we use. For example, society when it's translated into Chinese, shèhuì, the word is a more uh, sort of a Western import in the modern history. However, I'm not saying that there isn't sort of a related term of society or related notion of society in Chinese cultural tradition, but that the Chinese notion, the state or the more comprehensive state, um, somehow encompasses the idea of society. So, there wasn't an idea of that, a public sphere independently existing from the state, but it's part of the state. It's a larger state, comprehensive, so and so forth. That's takes all in everything, so to speak, under the heaven.
So in higher education, how, how it's relevant here is that, higher education or universities are not regarded as a part of the independent sphere, the public sphere, as Habermas would argue, independently critiquing what is going on in the government, in the society. However, in the more contemporary time, I don't think there is no society in China because we see society, those civil society grassroots activities going from bottom up, so and so forth.
However, universities are still not expected to lie in an independent sphere, being openly critical of the governments and so forth. But what is good here in my view, is that universities are constructively contributing to, in a lot of policies and debates within the circle. And that is how universities are contributing to the wider society and state.
Alex Usher: We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back.
And we're back. Lili, just before the break, you were talking about the concept of all under Heaven and how the, the state and its proper sphere of action includes a lot more of what in the west we might term as society, right? That it's doing a little bit bigger duty than the, than the state in the West. And that's not just a result of the Communist Party being in charge for the last 75 years, but that's 2,500 years of Confucian thought at work, right? It's a very long tradition. And it's in this frame that you talk in your book about the different understandings of autonomy and freedom, right? So what we call liberty in the West and what you call, zhi, or free will, in China. What's the difference between those two concepts?
Lili Yang: So in terms of the liberty and what, and the zhi or free will in China, I would say that people who are familiar with Chinese history know that there was a huge debate between liberal thinking and communism back in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, we all know the result that Communism won, and that is how China it is today. And many people have looking to various kinds of reasons for that. I once read an article, which I largely agree, is that because the communist ideas resonate with Chinese, ordinary people, that is how they view the world. That is how they view themselves and the family and state, society, so on and so forth. And that's why they embraced this kind of, this line of ideas and that is how China is today.
So in terms of liberty in particular, or zhi um, in the, different from liberty in China, that there has always been a separation between free thinking and a free action in the Chinese cultural tradition. In theory, which I'm not talking about in practice, because the, the government in the imperial times always come in for their own interest that can restrain the, so, so to speak, free thinking, free action. But in theory, Confucian traditions insists in free thinking and free will, and particularly they highlight will here. Because they think that it's not only about how think, it's also about how somebody dedicates him or herself into something and then put action into that line, and then be perseverance. Although there is a layer of moral requirements which come from a person within that, if a person is a benevolent person, then he or she would innately. Think and act benevolently and in a good way. So how people think and how people act are different.
And there comes from a sort of moral autonomy and then not bounded by the kind of no harm or no interference principle as John Stuart Mill would propose.
That's a it is more complicated, but that's how I would say the separation between thinking and action.
Alex Usher: Right. And so how do these different understandings, liberty versus zhi, how does that shape higher education? And particularly how each of the two traditions understands ideas like academic freedom and university autonomy.
Lili Yang: Some people would argue that academic freedom and university autonomy, they should be universal, the principle of a kind of idea that should be applied universally in the same manner. However, I would say that at least for university autonomy, it should be culturally bounded because it's part of how a system operates in terms of higher education governance, in the governance and the systemic wise, how they universities relate with the university with the state. And in the Chinese context I would say that because universities are expected and supposed to be part of this larger, the comprehensive state, then there isn't the, so to speak, universal or universal university autonomy in the Anglo-American sense that be independent, be critical. Instead, as I just uh, mentioned in previous question that universities are supposed to participate in the government decisions policy making, and be a contributor constructively and critically in that process. So that I think is and underlines the major difference between university autonomy uh, in China and the west. However I see people argue that in the history of modern university, worldwide university autonomy should be a pillar, a fundamental pillar of a university and its success. However, we have seen the development and history of Chinese universities and we see that in certain subtle and nuanced and a a good hand of government and governance, it's possible that we do have good development of universities.
With certain difference from what we see as independently auto independent autonomy in the western sense.
Alex Usher: So I'm gonna ask you a question, which is a little bit about epistemology here, and, you know, this is the book of Political Theory and I wanna ask about history, 'cause I studied in history that, that's my background. So it's a totally self-interested question. One major difference between the two traditions is how the universities were introduced in each of them. And, you know, China had a completely different set of educational traditions up to, I forget what year it was, 1905, 1906, when they got rid of the Imperial Academies, and adopted the modern university as a project of technological catch up and national salvation.
We've gotta learn about technology so we can defend ourselves in 1905. And then when Deng Xiaoping came along in the late 1970s was we need higher education to develop economically. So, you know, that's a pretty big difference between the two traditions. And I'm wondering, to what extent do you think political theory and historical experience each explain the contemporary differences between Chinese and Anglo-American institutions?
Lili Yang: Well, I think that it really depends on how we understand what political theory refer to. If we are referring to the Western sense of political theory, for example, then we are talking about the different thing. And to me, I don't think there's these two different approaches are different or will lead to absolutely different explanations or uh, stories. But in my mind, they are different lenses of how we see the past development of Chinese higher education in the maybe a century or a few decades. And I would like to highlight that I agree with you that our history is so important here because as I mentioned, history and traditions are part of who we are, what we see, and what we do.
Here I would like to refer to what a Chinese writer, Lin Yutang, famously wrote that he mentioned that when westerners see an animal, they are inclined to ask whether it can be hunted, whereas a Chinese observer is more likely to ask whether it can be eaten. So behind these different questions, like different horizons of differences, like different assumptions of what is important or valued, and that is influencing how people think and act in higher education. So even though we might say that the policy pathways in the past few decades are sort of new to China because it's modern, it's influenced by communism more recently individualism, so on and so forth.
However, I will say, while people are in those policy development processes, how they think and how they do things are still part of the longer history, a result of the longer history and the cultural tradition. I hope that somehow responds to your question.
Alex Usher: So let me ask you a related question. You know, over the last 50 years, I think both the Anglo-American and Chinese systems, they've undergone rapid expansion. They've gone through significant policy changes. They've both become more research intensive. Two of the three countries we're talking about have introduced tuition fees.
If you'd written this book 50 years ago, so sort of, well, maybe not 50, but let's say in the early late 1970s, do you think you'd have been able to anticipate some of the policy pathways? And relatedly, do you think your current analysis holds any clues about higher education, how higher education in China and in the Anglo-American world might either converge or diverge over the rest of the 21st century?
Lili Yang: Well, that's a difficult question. I don't think I would be able to foresee or anticipate those certain policy pathways because you know that the future is uncertain, but I'm not trying to highlight that part. But there is certain consistency in terms of tradition and what we see in history and also in Confucian. For example, in Analects there was a sort of one chapter that somebody asked Confucius whether he would anticipate what is going on in the coming hundreds of years. And he said there are certain thread that runs through the previous dynasties and the then current dynasty that can help us understand the future.
So I would say that in terms of a running thread here, is the relations in terms of a person and larger, on the larger self, or the communal, the collective, whatever we are referring to here, that there is always an insistence in Chinese society that a person is not only for his or her own good, is there is also the larger self there. That we are expected to be contributing to the larger good, and higher education policy will insist that if we go to um, universities in China, there is always the emphasis on, for example, let's talk about like communal good, collective contributions as an integral part of how a university is educating or nurturing their students.
And also these insistence that the government will continue to invest in universities. Not only for the sake of human capital or a global competitiveness, but also a genuine belief that universities should be contributing to social goods like equity, cohesion, flourishing so and so forth, and the global good as well.
Alex Usher: Last question you teach at Hong Kong University. I mean, arguably this is, you know, all the universities in Hong Kong sit at the intersection of these two traditions. Do you think HKU is a synthesis of the two, or does one tradition remain dominant over the other?
Lili Yang: That's an excellent question. So now it's my fifth year in Hong Kong, and when I arrived here I had the same belief that, and still that Hong Kong is sitting at the intersection of the two traditions and looking at the university, for example, Hong Kong U, you see those university seals and all those documents written in both languages and excellent translation out of state.
However, I have been recently conducting a research into the public good of higher education in Hong Kong, and unfortunately, I realized that there is one tradition dominant, being dominant here, that is Anglo-American tradition. And, which is not surprising if we, if we look at the higher education governance in Hong Kong, we have UGC, a very small government and the university being highly autonomous, even there is buffer between universities and the government, the UTC. However, what is lack here is a more strong supporter of, for example, of the public good. Then universities are left on their own and universities often do much less because today high universities in Hong Kong is so obsessed with rankings and so forth,
Alex Usher: Five in the top 100. You got five. Everyone's talking about it.
Lili Yang: Yeah. You know, and the university leaders are happy about that. However, if we look into what is going on in reality, there are certain faculty members who still have the belief, strong belief in the public good, common good. However, they are not particularly encouraged or supported to conduct what they have been doing for a long time.
And the recent trends, for example, the increasing requirements of research evaluation, performance so and so forth, are not encouraging what is being practiced in daily life of higher education of universities today. So I would say I'm not particularly optimistic in terms of how Hong Kong will continue to be doing a great job here, but, still it's at the intersection and it might help us to see, and I, I would say that the two legs of the traditions will help Hong Kong to grow further if they are both well used and well drawn upon in the university and higher education development.
Alex Usher: Lili, thanks so much for being with us today.
Lili Yang: Thank you for having me.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you our readers and listeners for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode or if you have suggestions for future ones, don't hesitate to get into contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week when we'll be moving just a few doors down the fourth floor of the Meng Wah Complex at HKU to talk to Jisun Jung. She's a professor there and she's gonna be joining us to talk about recent developments in South Korean higher education. Bye for now.