Lead author Robert Rhoads and his Chinese colleagues—from Tsinghua, Peking, and Minzu (Central University for Nationalities), three of the four universities, along with Renmin (People's), covered in the book—have given us a very useful volume from the point of view of Chinese faculty members on some of the major practices and issues that mark the academic profession in contemporary China. Examining the impact of key policy initiatives from the Ministry of Education to transform a small number of China's universities into world-class institutions, which includes substantial additional funding for those so anointed, their basic research question is to investigate how the working lives of professors at these elite institutions are changing. The volume is greatly enhanced because of the extensive interviews conducted with faculty members at each institution, giving the reader a better understanding of where consensus exists and where there is continuing contention. The conclusion summarizes the four case studies, offering institutional achievements in eight areas—infrastructure for research and teaching, research capacity, scholarly productivity, university-industry connections, internationalization, academic quality, faculty promotion processes, and faculty recruitment practices—along with seven challenges their interviewees noted that have hindered China's quest to achieve its global ambitions in education—institutional autonomy, administrative transparency, diversified funding, faculty empowerment, faculty evaluation and assessment, ethnic affairs and diversity (only in the case of Minzu University), and questions of colonialism. The volume provides valuable information not easily available for those who do not read Chinese education journals and will be of interest beyond the field of education, although those more concerned with politics and larger state-society issues will notice the limitations in the approach taken by the authors.

While the authors do very well in highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes that mark the current situation, these contradictions are not fully spelled out. Arguably, the primary contradiction is the relationship between the government and the universities, which includes the role of politics in academic governance. This comes through most clearly in the chapter on Tsinghua University, where it is acknowledged that without extensive government involvement the university is unlikely to have attained its present-day success, while also noting that the university often has to address a short-term, government-driven agenda and that “senior administrators are appointed by the government mainly on the basis of political credentials, rather than on the basis of academic or administrative expertise” (p. 41).

Despite the acknowledged limitations on faculty governance—which is clear at the other universities as well—there is no discussion of the role of the Communist Party Committees in university governance and the relationship between the president and the Party secretary. It is also clear—and certainly understandable given the context in which the interviews were conducted and the purposes of the volume—that the authors did not want to push their interviewees into addressing sensitive issues in any detail. As the conclusion notes, among the most important challenges are the “pressing need to strengthen university autonomy and enhance academic freedom for faculty members” (p. 159), although we are told in several places that not all faculty members were “willing to speak out about the issue” of academic freedom (p. 21) and even when they did, in comparing the scholarly gap between China and the West, “for the most part they did not expand much on their point of view, preferring to move on to other topics” (p. 103). When the authors do discuss political constraints—for example, citing a new policy at Peking University to “‘screen’ students with ‘radical thoughts’ or ‘independent lifestyles’”—they are at pains to assure readers that the policy “was not proposed by Beida's faculty but by the administration” (p. 88). Significantly, the authors cite an article in the Guardian, and not their interviewees, revealing both the limits of faculty governance and their hesitancy to raise uncomfortable questions.

In the conclusion, they make the important point that Chinese universities have had to subscribe to and adopt many Western norms and values as a necessary condition for becoming a top research university. Although they address this in terms of the “paradoxical challenge” of following such a Western model while retaining cultural distinctiveness, and cite the concern of some senior scholars who fear “colonization by the West” (p. 177), the issue is much larger and reflects the fear of Xi Jinping and the Party leadership that these Western norms and values are an existential threat to Party control, as detailed in the internal Document No. 9. Indeed, early in 2015 Minister of Education Yuan Guiren—in remarks widely reported in the Chinese media which noted the danger of (Western) “ideological indoctrination” in universities—called for a boycott of incorrect Western value systems in Chinese textbooks and classrooms. Thus, while the reader will learn a great deal of valuable information about faculty life in elite Chinese universities, the goal of creating “world-class universities” while maintaining tight political control from above is likely to prove elusive.