Higher education

In the last few decades, the Chinese government has tried to adopt ideas and practices along the line of neo-liberalism to reform the social service delivery mode and social policy provision. It is against this wider context that major social policy areas like health, education and housing have been going through the processes of marketization and privatization. As a result, people have to bear heavy financial burden for meeting these welfare and social policy needs. After privatizing and marketizing education for a few decades, the Chinese government was recently confronted with criticisms for its failure in tackling the problems related to “new three mountains phenomenon” (namely heavy financial burdens for meeting health, education and housing needs). Based upon a case study of Beijing, together with the analysis of secondary data, this chapter focuses on how higher education is privatized and marketized and also covers the consequences. It examines how the government has tried to revert the tide of privatization. This chapter will critically discuss the policy implications throughout the processes of transformations that have taken place in higher education in mainland China.