As a foreigner working as both a teacher and administrator in the People's Republic of China over the past six years, I have witnessed several changes in Chinese higher education as the country has entered a “new era” (xinshidai 新时代). The announcement of this “new era” during the 19th People's Congress in the autumn of 2017 signified not only a new set of national priorities and talking points but also periodized changes occurring in Chinese universities since at least 2012 that have reframed the globalization of higher education in China.Footnote 1 These changes did not require significant structural alterations to China's educational system. Instead, shifting points of emphasis and a mobilization of tools already in place allowed for a lock-step change, countering some of the ways globalization was changing higher education in China that exposed contradictions in China's global ambitions and domestic agenda. This paper explores the ways in which these changes have been managed through the production of space.
Space provides the basis for human interaction and is best understood as a set of social practices. Michel Foucault, in his essay “Of other spaces,” writes that “we do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”Footnote 2 This is to say that the places we inhabit and traverse shape and are shaped by a complex set of social relations. For example, the space occupied by higher education represents a multiplicity of social purposes; in addition to spaces of education, institutions of higher education are spaces for professional work, cultural heritage preservation, rites of passage, play, spousal selection, political party organization, social networking, commerce, national aspirations, community organization and global integration, to name but a few.Footnote 3 These competing activities require the strategic management of the production of space. The production of space in this essay refers to the influential work by the French social philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Lefebvre saw the development of urban space as the intersection of spatial practice (the ways in which people interact with space, performing everyday life duties such as building, shopping, working and studying), representational spaces (the images, text, symbols and representational figures that blanket physical places and which are sometimes used as markers to territorialize locations), and the representation of space (maps, charts and arrangements that dictate the use and meaning of space).Footnote 4 This essay also refers to the distinction drawn by Michel De Certou between the way that space is organized and how it is practised, and Michel Foucault's ideas about institutions of discipline where space can be designed “to provide a hold on [people's] conduct, to alter them.”Footnote 5
One way to understand China's production of higher education space is through education law. For example, Article 1 of the 1995 Chinese Education Law provides a speech act through which education is given a space and priority within the state:
With a view to developing educational undertakings, improving the quality of the whole nationality, accelerating the construction of the socialist material and spiritual civilization and in accordance with the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, the present Law is hereby formulated.Footnote 6Footnote 7
While education law does not necessarily have a causal relationship with the production of higher education space, Article 1 indicates the role of educational institutions in the task of realizing the utopian horizon of socialist revolution. Education is framed as a catalyst of both “material” and “spiritual” development. The first article refers to the Chinese Constitution as well as communist revolutionary discourse to position the space of the university within a temporality that is governed by a historiography of progress. Tied in this way to national destiny, the Chinese university is grounded in the Humboldtian model of higher education as a repository of culture and a manifestation of a national spirit, despite Humboldt's appeal to the university's role in cultivating “world citizens.” The vestiges of revolutionary romanticism – with roots in the German romanticism that accompanied nation building and the establishment of the 19th-century German state – informed much of Chinese nationalist rhetoric from the Mao era which is embedded in education law. The inclusion of the term “civilization” (wenming 文明), instead of “nation,” emphasizes the aspirational nature of educational law as it spatializes the temporality of a utopian project, creating not just a future but a past-ness to that future, rhetorically embodied by the speech act that the first article represents.
Although the rhetoric of socialist historiography permeates Chinese institutions of higher education, the 1995 Education Law marks a shift from an earlier goal of universal, basic literacy that was promoted in the 1950s and 1960s to a more nuanced policy in line with the reintegration of China into the global economy as it entered the “opening and reform” period heralded by Deng Xiaoping 邓小平.Footnote 8 For example, the law reflects some of the decentralization that occurred in China in the 1990s. According to Article 30, institutions of higher education in China are granted autonomy to manage their own affairs, including the permission to form “democratic” faculty and staff self-governing bodies.Footnote 9 Such an emphasis allowed Chinese higher education to develop programmes and administer the reforms necessary to move away from the Soviet model adopted in the 1950s and to create a space for internationalization and globalization within the national system. Article 12 of the revised Higher Education Law explicitly claims: “[t]he State encourages and supports international exchange and cooperation in higher education.”Footnote 10 The strategic engagement of China's institutions of higher education with the world, as nurtured by the Ministry of Education (MOE) after opening and reform, has allowed Chinese higher education to serve as one of the major contact zones between China and other nations, bringing together scholars and students. The assertion of such values has allowed China to become competitive globally. Chinese universities now rank among the world's leaders in research, particularly in the sciences, and they have become an increasingly popular destination for international students.
The expansion of higher education to match the values suggested by education law has resulted in a vast expansion of territory in the name of higher education. For example, according to MOE statistics, in 2016 the floor space committed to Chinese higher education in mainland China covered over 840 square kilometres, as China has continued to create “university cities” and expand available seats in existing institutions.Footnote 11 As with many aspects of the People's Republic of China, the scale of the system creates unique challenges. Chinese higher education includes more than 2,500 state-run institutions providing undergraduate and vocational degrees.Footnote 12 In 2015, there were over 25 million undergraduates and almost 2 million graduate students, making the number of enrolled students in China greater than Australia's entire population.Footnote 13 These numbers pale in comparison to the overall mission of the MOE, which is charged with the management of 514,000 schools, 15 million teachers and 260 million students – if China's enrolled students were to form a country, the population would be just shy of Indonesia's as the world's fourth most populous country.Footnote 14 Based on scale alone, nations around the world can learn much from China's MOE in terms of managing a system that provides quality education at a relatively low cost while at the same time constantly seeking to reform and improve. Up until the “new era,” in practice, Chinese higher education sought to make institutions of higher education globally competitive by incorporating several globalized standards of what Walter Mignolo calls “the corporate university.”Footnote 15
Local governments are charged with territorializing land as educational spaces, thus, localizing Chinese higher education. Overall spending on education in 2015 included a 16.8 billion yuan central government investment and 55 billion yuan in provincial and local government investments, indicating the degree to which education is tied to the local.Footnote 16 The law highlights the poly-locality of higher education space, signifying the way that any locality is not the home of “locals” but rather a site where different actors with competing interests and values contest spatial meaning.Footnote 17 In practice, the federal MOE directly oversees universities with strategic interests including key universities, like Peking and Tsinghua, with provincial-level MOEs administering tertiary education and local MOEs in charge of primary, secondary and vocational education. Education is another way in which national and local priorities are aligned and managed. Through education law, institutions of higher education are territorialized, localizing zones of economic development while coding these zones with the temporality of national destiny, civilizational aspirations and a Leninist tool for totalizing governance.
In order to manage a complex set of spatial relations on campus, higher education administration performs the task of creating what Michel De Certou calls “strategic space.”Footnote 18 Strategic space is space designed by central planners to facilitate certain behaviours while discouraging others, as well as governing the rituals and representations that embed such behaviours with spatial meaning. The delineation of space on campus provides the many people who live, work, study and visit direction for competently using space, despite the fact that in order to fit so many spaces into one place, universities are designed like labyrinths. The maze-like quality of campuses produces an identity of insiders who are initiated into a society of shared values, qualities and identities. Universities, globally speaking, tend to be carefully planned and landscaped to produce proscribed social practices.
A set of spatial practices ensures the reproduction of the institution's culture in addition to serving as a branding tool, which marks the institution within a global discourse of higher education that conforms to what Marc Augé labels a “non-place.”Footnote 19 Universities are places of transient populations that in terms of architecture, spatial practice and economic activity do not match their localities – places that are “implicated with geographic identity, history, and relations to other localities” – as much as they match other universities.Footnote 20 Like other global spaces, such as airports and shopping malls, these “non-places” are more similar to each other, even though they may be thousands of miles away, than they are to other structures in their locality. In this way, the globalization of higher education has given institutions of higher education a heightened sense of otherness, in China and around the world.Footnote 21 Yet, this otherness of space symbolically reaffirms the spatialization of temporality: global “non-places” – the shopping mall, airport and university campus – exemplify a historiography of progress.
While working at a provincial university in east Guangdong province, where I held both administrative and teaching posts between 2012 and the spring of 2018, I rode my bicycle from the faculty dormitories to class every day and had to navigate the road barriers along the “golden triangle” (jinsanjia 金三角) – a confluence of three roads between a main cafeteria, the new administration building, a lotus pond, the library and athletic fields, which merges into the main artery along the centre of campus, leading to college offices, classroom buildings and dormitories. Part of this road is a pedestrian street. Short bumpers made from welded pipes, painted red and white, standing four inches off the ground, designate the space for foot traffic – strategic space. Faced with these barriers, riders simply lift their bicycles over them and continue peddling down the long pedestrian street. Motorcycles skirt the edge of the bumper by the university canteen and continue on their way up and around the new administration building, creating a rutted path across a side lawn to the perpendicular road that later bends around the top of the campus. The spatial practice of commuters demonstrates that strategic space within an institution does not preclude what De Certou calls “tactics” of those who inhabit the space.Footnote 22 “Tactics” in De Certou's eyes are how people create the meaning of a space as they traverse a locale. It is like going to a shopping mall to enjoy the air conditioning and not the products for sale. The barrier, which was welded in place to ensure the space's strategic meaning, created more problems than it solved because it forced people who use the space to engage in tactics that they otherwise would not attempt. Moreover, it made a large portion of the campus inaccessible to wheelchairs, scooters and motorcycles ripped up the landscaping, and, at night, it created a dangerous, hard-to-see barrier for pedestrians and cyclists alike.
The “golden triangle” provides a good example of how China manages the localization of global flows in Chinese institutions of higher education. There are parts of campus that signify a unique Chinese identity of Chinese school culture, such as the representation of Confucian tradition, geomancy (feng shui 风水), or enhance the idea of Chinese past-ness in self-orientalizing pastiches. These features do not preserve necessarily artefacts of the past but rather create an ahistorical “no-when” and their presence marks the traces of an erased past that haunts Chinese urban and educational space.Footnote 23 For example, most universities have some variation of a lotus pond or main gate, features that are unique to China. The lotus pond suggests the geomancy of dichotomy: lake and mountain, water and rock, hard and soft of feng shui, according to Daoist philosophy. These distinctive spaces are a form of representational space, which corresponds to Frederic Jamison's cognitive mapping – or how we imagine the space around us to look and function, with all the possible associative meanings of a place.
At the university where I worked, practitioners had been changing their tactics when negotiating the space of the campus lotus pond since the onset of the “new era.” In the evenings it was a dimly lit space that attracted students for dating and sharing affection because it offered a reprieve from the hypervisibility of the other parts of campus. Over the course of my time there, more cameras were inserted and fewer couples huddled together. The cameras reinforced the disciplining of strategic space as a means of dictating spatial practice. In this way, the installation of cameras on campus reflected changes in “new era” Chinese society where visibility, especially through cameras connected to the public security apparatus, allows for the strategic penetration of public spaces, forming a panopticon with the end of modifying behaviour, reducing liminal spaces towards the goal of limiting tactics that might contest the meaning of space. It is a policing of space that forces people into margins or represses cultural production. This aspect of urban planning is expressed by Zhang Hongmei 张红梅, the minister of propaganda for the small city of Doumen 斗门, when discussing a four-part metaphor of the city as a body:
If you compare a city to a person, its “managed body” is the external image. Its “nourished heart” is the cultivation of the quality of civilization, especially the ideological and moral cultivation in young people. “Cultivation” is setting the norm of good behaviour for the whole of society. The ultimate goal is to achieve “moral education” in order to improve the level of civilization and the well-being of the residents.Footnote 24
I include this discussion on the way that space is policed because of the overlap between the production of urban and campus spaces and because the passage uses Confucian terminology in slogans from the recent “civilized city” campaign (qishen 齐身, yangxin 养心, xiuwei 修为, yude 育德), which are similar to the ones on the banners that now line the walking street with its arabesque-like successions of metaphors. There is a curious but informative slippage used by Zhang Hongmei in that space is being disciplined, and the disciplining of space leads to an improvement in the level of “civilization” of the people. The collapsing of one into the other complicates cause and effect: a hallmark of propaganda. The translation of wenming as “civilization” is complicated, because while there is a different set of associations with the term, there remains the assertion that ideology can be controlled through the production of space.Footnote 25
Representational Space
According to Henri Lefebvre, one of the three kinds of spaces that can be produced is representational space.Footnote 26 Space becomes representational through practice, knowledge and usage of space. The pedestrian street that was once lined with promotional banners that announced events, lectures, club activities, and so on, suddenly became lined with red-bannered propaganda slogans after the “new era” was announced. These banners have been accompanied by an increase in propaganda on large LED screens flashing China's “socialist core values” on the approach to the teaching buildings. In addition, the campus is now festooned with large, slick posters promoting Youth League activities as well as slogans boosting “national defence” and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Embedding these signifiers of national priorities into the place of everyday life spatializes the campus as the territory of political mobilization. Meanwhile, posters promoting educational activities that shape students’ lived experience on campus have either disappeared or moved to indoor locations like teaching building foyers or stairwells leading to the canteen. There are other minor but instructive ways in which campus representational space has changed. There used to be Christmas decorations and banners that for some reason would be on display all year round in spaces that were either for businesses or student clubs. Since the “new era,” these displays have all been taken down and now it is forbidden to display Christmas signage on campus. Between the creation of a panopticon approach to campus security and strictly controlling representational space, the management of space on campus is designed to reduce the possible range of tactics by people who use the space and to produce the representational spaces that signify the meaning of the space with the hopes of guiding spatial practice in an effort to spatialize the temporality of the “new era.”
Representation of Space
In addition to representational space, the representation of space provides another means through which space is produced and coded.Footnote 27 Representations of space include maps, genealogies, flowcharts, images, paintings and websites which name spaces and the appropriate social practices for these spaces. As Lefebvre claims, without the representation of space, people could not competently engage with spatial practice – the rituals, exchanges, work, travels and other interactions with the physical place of the campus that require mapping. One way in which spatial practice in higher education is realized is through campus administration.
Representations of Chinese university administration are difficult to create because of the way that interpenetrated management, for lack of a better term, ensures supra-institutional administrative and ideological control. In a UNESCO study of higher education governance in China, Mei Li and Rui Yang took East China Normal University as a fairly representative Chinese institution of higher education. They created an organization chart to understand the administrative structure that would correspond to a global standard, legible to the United Nations’ reporting efforts on higher education.Footnote 28 This chart, which appears in their work on administration, is important because it shows a pre-“new era” high watermark of the liberalization of higher education in China. On one level, this reflects how globalization affects space and the perceptions of space through outside standards, and the privileging of a set of values often based upon elite, first-world norms – the chart attempts to reproduce expectations and standards of administration that can be compared and assessed with other university systems. Another problem with representing a university's hierarchy in China relates to the kind of administrative project that the hierarchy chart is supposed to represent. Li and Yang's map of university administration is flawed because in China the institution is not supposed to be administered independently but must follow China's larger educational, economic, military, propaganda and political bureaucracies. That being said, even without the chart assembled by Li and Yang, university administration is spatialized through representations of space – administrative structures can be mapped out spatially through the distribution of offices held by administrators.
According to Li and Yang's chart, at the top of the hierarchy is a university president and a Party secretary. Below these university leaders are the teaching affairs office and an executive council of vice-presidents. In practice, the teaching affairs office ensures the implementation of policies issued by the municipal, provincial and national levels of the MOE, which have more power than any single institution's leaders. The same is true for the ideological apparatus. This means that the national level of control over the university – the ideological apparatus, and the MOE – interpenetrate the command-and-control style of management that Li and Yang's chart is meant to represent. There is a box on the hierarchy chart between the vice-presidents and the vice-Party secretaries, “Political and administrative joint meetings,” which does not flow downward but unifies the secondary level of administrative and ideological oversight, signifying the additional administrative apparatuses of a public Chinese university that departs from most other nations’ higher education administrative structures. This integration also occurs on a tertiary level where the “University Council” oversees both the ideological and the administrative sides of university. According to the chart, this third level of ideological oversight is integrated with the fourth level of administrative management, putting the ideological component both inside and outside the management of programme affairs. In terms of the production of space, this means that Chinese institutions of higher education create imbricated strata around parts of the system with the most independence.Footnote 29 This is done in order to guide procedures, policies and practices. One layer of administration is, at the same time, above and below another unit, spatializing the flow of power and monopolizing administrative oversight by the two supra-institutional offices, teaching affairs and the ideological apparatus, which interpenetrate all levels of routine university management.
Representations of space highlight the multiplicity of spatiality and help us to understand its production. They clarify the difference between the map and the territory, so to speak. For example, the administration chart for East China Normal University is misleading in the way that the administrative space is occupied. In practice, as mentioned above, the members of the Party committee have offices within each department and are instrumental to the day-to-day functioning of departments and the workflow of each faculty and work unit. Academic departments do not independently report to the university council, as the chart suggests. Instead, members of the University Council are embedded in each department or work unit. This is what allows for multidirectional flows of the ideological apparatus, creating what Deleuze and Guattari call “holey space.”Footnote 30 Holey space indicates the porous quality of faculty-level strata. The administrative flow ensures that the faculty can be monitored and led outside of the formal, academic leadership structure of each teaching and research unit. Similarly, the teaching affairs office, which ensures compliance to the Ministry of Education's policies, has staff embedded in the faculty level, in addition to having supra-institutional authority. It, too, has imbricated strata and holey space, giving what would be analogous to the power of a registrar's office in a US institution of higher education over department-level decision making. Spatially speaking, imbricated strata and holey space produce a double articulated administrative apparatus whereby the teaching affairs office and the ideological apparatus are able to penetrate and flow through higher education administrative space. In this way, national-level authority is localized in Chinese institutions of higher education, atomizing academic and research units.
Chinese institutions of higher education create administrative strata on different levels of authority and the boundary of each layer is porous. For example, Li and Yang's organization chart indicates that the space of university administrative control in China is striated space – that is, space which is bounded and defined by its boundaries. The space of university ideological control is smooth, which allows for flows across bounded territories.Footnote 31 This separation becomes a guardrail that is designed into the system. The business of academic departments is guided by and interpenetrated with the ideological apparatus. Interpenetrated leadership structure is what gives the space of Chinese institutions of higher education their uniqueness as well as their homogeneity. This makes Chinese institutions of higher education more stable and provides shared standards to evaluate relative performance across the education system. Interpenetrated management structures the future horizon of work so that the accomplishments of these institutions will be governed by strategic spaces and not necessarily department-based initiatives. As such, department-level innovations would be illegible within the structure of the system and constitute a threatening tactical space. The post-Taylorist management style of global higher education – the corporate university – generally de-proletarianizes and seeks to erase divisions, especially on the lower levels, between management and labour in order to maximize flows of communication and create greater efficiencies. The holey spaces that allow for interpenetration to occur restrict such possibilities in a Chinese context, because the occupants of holey space belong to the strata of the ideological apparatus, within a command-and-control structure. This facilitates downward flows designed to limit feedback, rather than horizontal or upward flows: there are people in a faculty that are not of that faculty. Another implication is that since university management follows the Chinese government's representations of space, from state-owned enterprises to state ministries, it renders the workings of the university as banal, putting the space of scholars and intellectuals – and their potential intellectual authority – under the control of quotidian offices and minor bureaucrats. It is a strategy that has a long history in China. For example, on 31 July 2018, after rare public grumbling about China's handling of the US–China trade war and an even rarer publication from an academic criticizing the government,Footnote 32 the Ministry of Propaganda issued a call to “Promote the spirit of patriotic struggle, contribute positively to the new era activities” (hongyang aiguo fendou jingshen, jiangong liye xinshidai huodong 弘扬爱国奋斗精神、建功立业新时代活动).Footnote 33 These kinds of directives spatialize temporality through administrative control. The move harkens back to the Soviet-styled era of Chinese higher education when the goal of literacy building was to create the intellectual ability of masses to read and write political banners as revolutionary activities – that is to say, higher education was instrumental to the state not for “common good” research that could be commodified and used to contribute to the economic development of the state but rather to strengthen the political apparatus. It is striking, too, when compared to the nuanced approach to institution building during much of the era of opening and reform, which allowed China's institutions of higher education to become more aligned with international norms and practices, that the emphasis of China's higher education agenda would be to fold its practices into promoting a mass line.
The representation of space does not determine spatial practice; it merely means that the habitus of Chinese higher education is shaped through the production of space, which defines roles for the people that inhabit them. The habitus of Chinese higher education over the past few years can be understood through a tension that exists between the ways that globalization and neoliberal capitalism have been tied to the rise of China's economy (along with its institutions of higher education) and China's “new era” management of its domestic and global scene.
Spatial Practice
An additional factor that produces space, according to Lefebvre, is spatial practice.Footnote 34 Spatial practice occurs through social relations and engaging in everyday life activities, like work, that result in the co-creation of the production of space. As essential work of higher education, scholarship is one of the central forms of spatial practice in the university that embeds meaning. Chinese higher education administrators, like their counterparts outside of China, are constantly looking to increase their institutions’ rankings in order to enhance their national reputation as well as potentially raise the profile of Chinese institutions of higher education globally. Scholarship is one way to achieve this. As Simon Marginson notes, “for governments, higher education and research are primary instruments of national competitiveness in the global setting. It is the desire for global effectiveness that drives the emerging systems and universities.”Footnote 35 More than just symbolism, the global knowledge economy in the post-Cold War neoliberal order transformed the value of institutions of higher education in terms of national resources. Melody Viczko and Clara I. Tascón explain this as a value “shift” which occurred “in higher education from a traditional notion of knowledge as a public good to capital that can be marketed and traded.”Footnote 36 Since the announcement of the “new era,” with their potential competitive and symbolic advantages, institutions of higher education have become even more important for providing legitimacy to China's “great power” claims not only in producing civilizational aspirations but also policy directives. To this end, China has invested educational resources to bring domestic institutions of higher education in line with soft power strategies, adding to the uniqueness of Chinese higher education as a global space. For example, on 26 August 2018, China awarded scholarships to 1,450 Ethiopians, including 220 masters and PhD students, to study in China's institutions of higher education.Footnote 37 Ethiopia is one of the major centres of the BRI in Africa, which, although it does not accommodate resource extraction, does import more than US$4.5 billion of Chinese goods.Footnote 38 The case of Ethiopia is representative of the way that higher education as a global space is being produced by national policy as it is currently articulated through the “new era” and BRI.
In 2017, shortly after Chinese universities were given the same task as the media to serve the ideological apparatus and top leadership in China, two articles appeared in an online global studies journal called Global-E. They revealed a “new era” trend in Chinese universities’ spatial practice in terms of academic research.Footnote 39 Global-E has a close relationship to the Global Studies Consortium, hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara. It publishes short position papers relating to global studies, including articles reflecting on the field of global studies itself. The two articles provide insight into how top-level policy filters down to scholarship, shaping Chinese institutions of higher education as a space for work and research.
The first article published in the journal was written by scholars Yang Na and Wen Hao.Footnote 40 They introduced their brand of global studies in Nankai University's International Global Institute as follows:
IGI [International Global Institute] thereby promotes research on global governance from a national perspective, which means that all research and teaching are premised on the idea that the global governance strategies of major states seek to strike a balance between nation-state and supra-national levels of governance in response to the processes of globalization and the complexity of global issues.Footnote 41
Yang and Wen's description of their global studies programme echoes China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ approach to globalization. The study of “major states” matches the foreign policy orientation that the top leadership wants to create international consensus on – that major powers should have unique relations and authority in world affairs. The programme description treats this as a point of departure rather than as an area for inquiry.
Yang and Wen's article continues by situating global studies scholarship in terms of the current leadership's orthodoxy – whereby the nation-state serves as the core constituent of global formations – to the extent that they are offering it as the “China model” of economic globalization. They write:
In responding to these puzzles, Chinese GS [global studies] scholars argue that effective global governance should reiterate and reflect national governance. That is, the governance of the globe should stress the dominant nature of states while preventing a regressive statism that narrowly maximizes national interests, as seen in trade protectionism, racial xenophobia, and social isolationism. The relationship between nation-states and global actors is not a “zero-sum” game, but rather a “yin-yang” system.Footnote 42
The passage identifies “national governance” as a key component of global governance, even though most global studies scholars would argue that not only is the “global” significantly different from the “state” but also that pursuing this approach would grant global spoils to the great powers which have geographic, historic or demographic advantages. At the same time, the passage admonishes protectionist nationalism as “regressive statism,” a reiteration of a barb thrown at Brexit and Trump at the 2017 Davos meeting by China's top-level administration, where the “China model” of globalization was set in relief against what was criticized in the Chinese media as the dysfunction of democracies in the West. Finally, the passage closes with a reductionist false dichotomy of “zero-sum game” versus “yin and yang” to characterize the relationship between nation states and globalization.Footnote 43 The statement leverages a clichéd image from Daoism – a traditional Chinese model for the balance of forces in the natural world – to underscore their global studies programme as one that promotes a Chinese model of globalization. The self-orientalization of ascribing ancient Chinese philosophy to contemporary policy echoes official rhetoric seen, for example, in Confucius Centers, not simply because they are Chinese in origin but because they are branding tools of readily recognized terms which have been used outside of China and absorbed in popular and intellectual culture for a very long time as a shorthand for “Chinese.” For a global studies programme to employ such rhetorical manoeuvres is to acknowledge that the research space of the university is informed by the policies of the top levels of Chinese leadership and not the autonomy of the programme.
Following after Yang and Wen's article, Shanghai University's Center for Global Studies published an article in Global-E that describes its programme and makes a case for the Chinese model of globalization. This article, “Global studies in Shanghai: theory and practice of global governance” by Tang Qingye, is more specific and demonstrates how policy is currently shaping the space of education on a programme level.Footnote 44 It introduces the BRI as having been created by Chinese leadership “to construct a global community with a shared future,” mirroring the article about the Nankai International Global Institute. Both institutes’ research involves the promotion of national global governance strategies. Certainly, nations have strategies for how they hope to influence or take advantage of global governance institutions, but these two articles are saying something different. Both suggest China's “great power” diplomacy and BRI activities are in themselves global governance. The Wen and Yang article claims the goal of the BRI is to “revise the international system,” without indicating what revisions need to be made,Footnote 45 while Tang suggests that global governance “demands reshaping the paradigm of globalization,” without stating who is making these demands.Footnote 46 The authors repeat slogans like “win-win” to emphasis China's national global governance strategy as “mutual” and “common,” “benefits” which are encapsulated in a mission civilisatrice.Footnote 47 The contribution that the authors are talking about is not the actual BRI but rather an intellectual contribution that Chinese scholars are making to the world by “explaining” the BRI. It seems that what is being stressed is that Chinese scholars possess a unique critical vocabulary, with ideas like “yin-yang” which derive from “oriental philosophy,” to represent the Chinese conception of “national global governance.”Footnote 48
Both articles show, obliquely, how China is engaged in an effort to reterritorialize the world map, especially on a cognitive level. To territorialize, whether with a flag or the release of pheromones, is to spatialize with code. Wen and Yang, and Tang, in writing about their global studies programmes simultaneously engage with the “new era” mapping of their departments as serving the top levels of Chinese leadership by echoing national policy points, as well as redrawing the global map along lines of “great powers” and BRI projects. To have two such similar articles, performing almost identical rhetorical manoeuvres, published in English in an international global studies journal connected to the Global Studies Consortium within months of a call for universities to serve the ideological apparatus signifies the degree to which Chinese institutions of higher education, as spaces of scholarly work and research in “new era” China, are specifically focusing their scholarly production on reifying top-level decision making. This intellectual work is not just being carried out within the national sphere but also on the global stage.
In closing her article on the Center for Global Studies in Shanghai University, Tang emphasizes the support for the Chinese model of global governance, or as the article frames it, “national global governance strategies,” to argue that the questions global governance researchers might pose already have answers in the BRI.Footnote 49 Tang writes:
How to make global institutions and mechanisms effective and accountable poses a great challenge to researchers. In this regard, the BRI has been applauded around the world. It gives responses to the questions of how to place the interests of people and the common good at the heart of global governance … [BRI] will bring about new modes for regional and global peace and development, and even potentially shape the new global system.Footnote 50
In a paragraph that is structured through an amalgam of axiomatic statements that repeat the themes that define “new-era” China's global policies, the author shifts from a question of global governance as a problem for global studies research, to the BRI as a panacea that will provide the framework for a new global system. Research and scholarly work are always interventions, whether into disciplinary questions or larger social and political issues. These articles constitute an intervention by Chinese institutions of higher education into “global” conversations that define a relatively recent discipline (at least in terms of the humanities and social sciences), situating Chinese national policy goals as global studies theory and practice.
Both articles present a similar kind of circularity in reasoning. This is not necessarily a lack of awareness of logical fallacies on behalf of the writers, but rather a decipherable marker of what cannot be said or criticized. In this sense, the space of research in Chinese institutions of higher education is like the pedestrian street described earlier in this paper, where strategic space disciplines spatial practice. As with the cyclists who pull their bicycles over barriers and keep riding on the pedestrian walkway, many Chinese scholars continue doing innovative global studies research outside of the discursive framework mentioned above; however, by sticking to the script, the articles indicate where disciplinary priorities are and what the space of work and research is supposed to represent. The two articles also attest to the effectiveness of interpenetrated administration in policing scholarship to perform according to the basic demands of the space of China's higher education.
Conclusion
The goal of this article is to analyse the production of space in Chinese higher education in the “new era.” One of the main findings is that the production of higher education space involves an intense spatialization of temporality of the “new era.” Education law instituted during Deng Xiaoping's opening and reform period reveals the way in which higher education was encouraged to move away from the Soviet model. Education law shows that the values of those responsible for creating strategic space and the guidelines for institutions of higher education have not changed in the “new era.” In “new-era” China, top-level leadership has been actively pursuing ways to mitigate the contradictions between foreign capital, global economic flows and state planning. Furthermore, the “new era” has been marked by a renewed effort to maintain ideological control over higher education, which has been carried out through the disciplining of what De Certou calls strategic space and limiting tactics to ensure proscriptive social practices. To enable these priorities, the production and expansion of urban space that is penetrated by the security apparatus has created what Michel Foucault describes as a panopticon, where visibility transforms social practice and encodes discipline into public action. This attempt to create greater visibility and legibility of people's behaviour in spatial discourse on college campuses is changing the way that campuses physically appear. Institutions of higher education are under intense scrutiny because scholars, as arbiters of acceptable knowledge, have a unique power over claims to authority. In addition, institutions of higher education are national symbols – in some cases national brands – that give off an aura of a nation's social and technological development associated with concepts of wenming or civilization. As in other countries, China's leadership has been working to harness the benefits of this power and authority while limiting the challenges to its authority, particularly when it comes to managing the tactics of the practitioners of higher education spaces whose priorities might be different. Their success comes through an interpenetrated management whereby “holey spaces” and “imbricated strata” allow for ideological control and a rigid policing of university strategic spaces.
Through Lefebvre's tripartite model of the production of space, we can interpret institutions of higher education of “new-era” China as changing to harmonize with spatial production in urban areas where the state panopticon disciplines behaviour. We can see through a strategy of interpenetrated management that individual institutions are guided by supra-institutional power, even at the lowest levels. Finally, spatial practice reveals the degree to which the everyday work of a university, such as scholarship, is made to co-construct strategic space. This interpretive framework provides an understanding of how China is unifying what seems to be two separate and opposing projects: taking a leading role in globalization and firewalling the domestic scene from global influence.
Conflicts of interest
None.
Biographical note
James I. MCDOUGALL received his PhD from the University of Florida and is currently an associate professor of the humanities. He has worked in global education in the Middle East, East Asia and North America. His current research examines the cultures of the transpacific.
