Knowledge transfer in China's higher education

Citation

Dickson, T. and Li-Hua, R. (2009), "Knowledge transfer in China's higher education", Journal of Knowledge-based Innovation in China, Vol. 1 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jkic.2009.40401caa.001

Knowledge transfer in China's higher education

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Knowledge-based Innovation in China, Volume 1, Issue 3

About the Guest Editors

Tony DicksonPresident of Raffles University, Singapore and Managing Director of Global Higher Education Consulting. He has held senior positions in a number of universities in the UK and in Singapore. These include positions as Dean of Life and Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University and as Dean and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Northumbria University in the UK. He has been directly involved in leading the internationalisation of HE at a number of universities and has acted as an advisor to a number of universities, governments and ministries, and for-profit education groups.

Richard Li-Hua Director of China Programmes at Salford Business School, where he teaches (and researches) on Strategic Management, Technology Management and Leadership to PhD and MSc and MA programmes. He is an internationally recognised authority on technology transfer and competitiveness. His research on Chinese business and management was featured by Emerald Group Publishing Ltd and was also specially interviewed by people.com.cn on China's technology management and innovation. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. His research interests currently lie in international strategy in HE, knowledge management, technology management and, in particular, the effectiveness and appropriateness of technology transfer in China. As the Director of China Programmes and the Academic Leader of Prime Minister Initiative 2 (PMI2) Project at Salford, he has been playing a key role in designing the school/university's China strategy, which underpins development of the school/university's sustainable academic partnerships with prestigious Chinese universities. He is Editor of Journal of Technology Management in China and the Journal of Technology Management and Strategy in China (Chinese version). He is also the Founder and current President of China Association for Management of Technology (www.camot.org). He advises not only international business, but also the HE sector and government agencies. He has been Senior Economic Advisor to the Henan Provincial Government, People's Republic of China, and International Advisor to ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia and Emerald Group Publishing Ltd, UK since 2003.

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, knowledge is widely recognised as the single most important factor in creating and sustaining superior organisational performance. The effective creation of knowledge depends upon knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing and organisational learning. University knowledge transfer activities are an increasingly important and integral part of the work of higher education (HE) sectors in many countries as they become essential drivers for governments and their economic and modernisation agendas, including enhancing competitiveness and improving quality of life. Knowledge transfer provides a route to innovation and development at all levels.

The term globalisation is used to describe the way in which a number of processes in economic, social, cultural and technological areas have begun to permeate all geographical regions in the world. This position is no different for HE, which is still often a largely unknown and certainly under-exploited resource contributing to the creation of wealth and economic competitiveness in regional and national economies. Many outside HE still do not recognise the capacity of that resource or how to get it, and many of those inside HE do not know how best to connect with the outside world. The internationalisation of HE is one of the most pressing challenges for both developed and developing countries because most HE systems were originally created by national governments for national purposes. The impact of globalisation is now beginning to challenge that traditional view and is forcing many governments to look to the greater internationalisation of their HE sectors.

In the age of globalisation, the significant expansion of academic collaboration initiatives is characterised by two major trends. The first is that higher education institutions (HEIs) are becoming more and more internationalised. It is a growing imperative to integrate an international/intercultural dimension into teaching, research and students services in universities in order to enhance academic excellence, the relevance of their contribution to society, and the status of universities in a world that increasingly measures excellence in international, rather than national, terms. The second trend, which is for the moment a higher priority for HEIs in the developed countries, is the growth of market driven activities, fuelled by increased demand for HE worldwide, declining public funding in many national contexts, the diversification of HE providers, and new methods of delivery, often initiated by private sector HEIs.

These complex pressures around globalisation and its impact on HE systems, the growing trend towards more international collaboration, and the changing role of knowledge transfer by universities is the base for the papers in this special edition.

Knowledge transfer and national competitiveness

In the last ten years in particular, there has been an accelerating race by many countries to shift their economic base to that of a “knowledge economy” where a much higher proportion of wealth creation and economic activity is underpinned by higher level skills and innovation. National policies in countries as diverse as Singapore, Malaysia, the UK, and the European Union have placed this at the forefront of national imperatives. The paper by Tony Dickson, “Knowledge transfer and the globalisation of higher education”, analyses this dynamic and its impact on the role of universities and their relationship to national economic policies. He gives a number of examples of the way that countries have begun to give their universities an explicit role in the transfer of knowledge and innovation into business and regional development. These include, for example, the various “university cities” brought into being in countries like Qatar and the UAE as a deliberate attempt to import foreign university know how into the local economy, as well as the determined efforts by Singapore and Malaysia to become international hubs for international students, thereby providing a source of highly skilled knowledge workers for the economy.

Dickson points to some of the tensions which arise for governments from this higher emphasis on knowledge transfer and the economic development role of universities. These include the continuing debate in forums such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) about whether HE should be seen as a freely traded commodity where WTO members treat foreign HEIs on an equal basis with their national HE system. Reactions range from hostility to foreign HEIs by South Africa, through longstanding (and still inconclusive) debate on the issue in India, through cautious and controlled selective entry in China, to the much more open and liberalised system in the UK. Underlying this uneasy tension is the fact that knowledge workers in a globalised economy are much more mobile geographically, raising the obvious issue that countries that wish their universities to be at the heart of economic development will need to accept that immigration policy will have to encourage a much more international Faculty in universities, and that intellectual property (IP) policy will also have to recognise that national boundaries to innovation and knowledge creation will be very difficult to maintain.

The internationalisation of higher education in China

In parallel with these pressures and trends that have resulted from the impact of globalisation and internationalisation on HE, the Chinese Government has been actively shaping and transforming its own HE system to try to position it as a stronger contributor to national developments and to have a much higher international profile. A number of policy changes have led to a radical set of changes over the last ten years. These include doubling the participation rate in HE so that now over 20 per cent of the Chinese school leaving population go into tertiary education. At the same time, the Chinese HE system has been rapidly developing and reforming its universities – first by enforcing a series of university mergers that created fewer but bigger and more comprehensive universities, and then by projects 211 and 985, aimed at identifying and funding appropriately a small number of universities that will become world class.

At the same time, the Chinese Government has encouraged the processes that have enabled over 180,000 Chinese students to study abroad each year in countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, Germany, and France. It has allowed, under the control of the Ministry of Education, many Chinese universities to develop joint academic programmes with foreign universities. It has also formally approved two UK universities, Nottingham and Liverpool, to develop new campuses in China, with Chinese partners. Finally, the government have also allowed some development of private sector HE, usually under the guidance or governance of well-established public universities.

The paper by John Adams and Hongli Song, “Key developments and future challenges in Chinese-foreign cooperation in higher education”, traces the main changes in HE policy in China over the last 30 years by documenting the complex processes of policy debate and reform and the changes that have been made in regulatory frameworks at different times to encourage necessary changes to take place. These changes have gone hand in hand with the rapid pace of economic development in China and with its increasingly powerful role in world trade. The internationalisation of HE is thus a natural concomitant of the process of internationalisation of the economy. They argue that, as the government has deliberately opened up its HE system to foreign collaboration, the issue of knowledge transfer has risen higher up the agenda. The key issue is who stands to benefit most from these collaborative and international trends?

The involvement of knowledge transfer as a whole in the international collaboration project has been regarded as a leverage to make the project more successful not only in international business sectors but also in HE. Furthermore, knowledge transfer has been widely recognised to be strategically significant for international collaboration. It is acknowledged that knowledge transfer is crucial in the process of international collaboration projects. However, there is, as yet, little solid research and empirical investigation of knowledge transfer in HE internationally. The lack of empirical evidence in this area, in particular, in HE, has limited our understanding of this important phenomenon. It is against this background, that this special issue discusses the strategic development issues, the internationalisation of universities, the opportunities and challenges that universities are facing, and addresses the appropriateness and effectiveness of knowledge transfer.

Academic collaboration between foreign universities and China

The twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented demand for and a great diversification in HE, as well as an increased awareness of its vital importance for socio-cultural and economic development. HE everywhere, including China, is facing with great challenges and difficulties related to financing, equity of conditions of access into and during the course of studies, improved staff development, skills-based training, enhancement and preservation of quality in teaching, research and services, relevance of programmes, employability of graduates, establishment of efficient co-operation agreements, and equitable access to the benefits of international co-operation.

One example of a high level attempt to address some of these challenges and opportunities by sharing a common interest, has been the strategic Sino-UK HE collaboration that has been developing over a number of years since 1996, from an initial three-year collaboration project that was initiated by Vice-Minister Wei Yu. The speech on Attracting More International Students on 18 June 1999 delivered by the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair turned a new page so that HEIs both in China and UK entered into a new stage in academic collaboration through the Prime Minister's Initiative (PMI) that encouraged the development of collaborative projects between the UK and Chinese universities, mainly focused on student recruitment. The latest stage of this is the PMI2 launched in 2007 that focuses on the establishment and consolidation of strategic alliances in HE between the UK and China through the delivery of employability, entrepreneurship and global citizenship.

However, at the operational level, the negotiation and the implementation and management of collaboration projects is never an easy task. The uncertainties and ambiguities prevalent in the Chinese business environment are neither well-understood nor effectively negotiated by the international community. By no means all international involvement with China has been successful. Tales of frustrations and disappointments, even for high profile projects, are legion. Many of the difficulties and disappointments are the direct result of misunderstandings, cultural differences or false assumptions which could have been avoided or alleviated by greater care from the overseas partners.

The remaining papers in this special edition focus on the real issues behind various attempts by foreign universities to create and sustain significant strategic collaborations with Chinese HE partners. The paper by Lyn Courtney and Neil Anderson, “Knowledge transfer between Australia and China”, focuses on data from a series of interviews with Chinese and Australian academics who have been involved in creating HE links between Australian and Chinese universities. The results reveal a range of barriers and issues, including the obvious different cultural assumptions, different attitudes to learning styles, and the complications that arise in trying to agree precise understandings when two languages with fundamentally different structures and underlying meanings are in use! A revealing issue was the perception by most of the Australian academics that knowledge transfer was seen by the Chinese as a one way process – from the Australian institutions to the Chinese. This was exemplified in the Australian sensitivity to “IP issues” – seen by them as a risk of giving away precious knowledge but probably seen by the Chinese as a defense used by the Australians against whole hearted and open collaboration! Perhaps, not surprisingly, the research concludes that all participants saw the solution to effective collaboration being the establishment relationships based on real cultural understanding and trust.

The paper by Xiang Li, John Wilson, and Ed Doran on “Strategic collaboration in higher education: a Sino-UK case study”, concerns itself more with the institutional context and requirements for building successful collaborative projects. It summarises progress to date since 2007 in building a strategic link between Salford University in the UK and Tianjin University of Commerce. The paper explains the context of this collaboration, its link to the PMI initiative, and the range of partnership models being explored, from franchises of programmes by the UK partner to joint degrees between the two universities. It stresses that both institutions need to have, as well as a genuine intent to collaborate, the necessary internal academic processes to evaluate and agree the form of collaboration, its quality assurance framework, its resourcing, and a risk-assessment capability that can evaluate the risks and rewards expected from the partnership. Each institution needs to accept these responsibilities as a necessary feature of the base for successful collaboration. Given the very different regulatory frameworks in the UK and China, the different traditions of learning cultures, and the respective organisational structures, both partners need to be both determined and systematic in their approach!

The final paper in this edition, “The challenges facing Sino-UK transnational education: an institutional experience”, by Lee Zhuang, bases its conclusions on a case study of one UK university and its experience of trying to build three different partnerships with Chinese HEIs. The three different partnerships were with a business training centre in Beijing, a Business School of a Beijing based public university, and an independent (private) school. These diverse institutions illustrated the complexity of working with regulatory frameworks in China and the fundamental importance of “guanxi” in building trust relationships with partners in China. The paper also echoes the issues of language as a communication barrier and differences of perception at various stages of the significance of different events – such as the greater Chinese reliance on memoranda of understanding as a real sign of commitment to collaboration. It also reinforces the importance of mutually agreed procedures for QA and legal approvals as well as the need for an explicit model for resourcing and risk assessment. It provides, alongside the paper by Xiang Li et al., a clear check list of the key issues that must be explored for successful collaboration in Chinese HE.

The future of knowledge transfer and internationalisation in Chinese HE

The papers in this special edition explore a set of linked areas that have so far been under-researched – the changing role internationally of universities in knowledge transfer and its application to national economic policies, the changes in China Government policy aimed at strengthening the international role of its HE system, and the controlled experimentation in China with different forms of international collaboration. They illustrate the difficulties in securing international partnerships across countries and HE systems with very different languages, cultures, and organisational structures. However, they also point to a fascinating set of questions about how the Chinese experimentation will develop further. Will there be a greater relaxation of market entry to allow more foreign universities to set up campuses in China? Will the strongest Chinese universities begin to flex their own muscles into foreign territory? Will the need to attract the best knowledge workers to China be consistent with the governments carefully controlled agenda for foreign participation in China institutions ?

No clear answers to these questions can yet be discerned with confidence but some indicators are already in place. China is investing heavily in stronger international universities through the 211 and 985 projects; it will begin to benefit from the return home of many of the study abroad diaspora and the impact of their knowledge transfer role in the economy; in 2008, more international students came to China to study than Chinese students went overseas; it is accelerating the rate of new international patent registrations every year; and it will soon be the third biggest publisher in the world of refereed academic papers. All of these point to the fact that China is well aware of the importance of the role of HE in knowledge transfer and is laying the base for an increasingly powerful presence in the years to come.

Tony Dickson, Richard Li-HuaGuest Editors