International Higher Education, Fall 2001

Restructuring through Amalgamation in China

David Y. Chen
David Y. Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Higher Education, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Wuhan, China 430074; e-mail: <davidcyc@263.net>.

The Chinese higher education system was established in 1950s fully based upon the Soviet pattern in the context of a highly centralized and planned economy. However, as the market economy is being implemented, the system characterized by a large quantity of inefficiently run and narrowly specialized professional colleges proved incapable of adapting to the new challenges. To change the system became a matter of strong public interest and concern. Sticking to the guidelines of gongjian (joint administration), tiaozheng (adjustment), hezuo (cooperation), and hebing (merger)—the main target of reform was to change the obsolete pattern under which universities were owned and run by a variety of central ministries, so as to establish a fairly decentralized, two-tiered management system in which administrative powers would be shared by both central and local governments, but with the local governments being required to play a major role.

After painstaking efforts, in 2000 the vice-premier of the Chinese government announced "the optimization of the administration structure of higher education has been basically and successfully fulfilled." During the restructuring, 452 institutions have gone from central to local control, only 71 flagship universities are still under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, and some 50 special professional institutions are temporally under their corresponding ministries. Although the merging of universities and colleges is the most difficult course of action, a total of 612 higher institutions have been merged into 250. (It should be noted that some of these actions have been rather perfunctory.)

Hebing, or merger, as a way for improving economies of scale and creating strong, comprehensive universities, was also most controversial and eye-catching. Even though the restructuring was initiated in 1985, the essential steps were not taken until the 1990s, when mergers were used as a pilot mechanism to change the structure of higher education. There are two kinds of mergers. One is to merge smaller institutions in close proximity that share the same or similar fields of study but are affiliated to different government departments. This step is taken to increase efficiency and effectiveness, broaden discipline coverage, and tackle the problem of segmentation and provincialism. Such mergers were relatively simple procedures and were encouraged by the government and widely welcomed by the public. In May1992, seven relatively small colleges in the area of Yangzhou city, in Jiangsu Province, were merged to create the totally new Yangzhou University, which then became the most comprehensive and one of the largest universities. Its success had spurred on other sporadic mergers.

But, this success has not been achieved with another kind of merger—that is, mergers among larger and stronger universities. The latter were undertaken to build model, first-class universities. In April 1994, two major universities—Sichuan University and Chengdu University of Science and Technology—were combined. Both were spin-offs of Sichuan University and adjacent to one another. However, their merger illustrated the difficulties of such a strategy. Headaches such as renaming the institution, rearranging personnel, redistributing powers, and allocating money almost caused the merger to fail. The ups and downs of this first merger of two leading universities were seen as a warning to proceed cautiously. Therefore, even though, by 1998, 207 institutions had been merged into 84, by 1998 amalgamation among strong ones was rare.

The full-scale restructuring movement started in 1998 with a push from the campaign of government to change the role of government in the market economy. Departments of the State Council were reduced in size; ministries, except for the Ministry of Education, were no longer permitted to hold and run higher education institutions. Instead, institutions were required to detach from their originally affiliated departments and find their own means of survival. Responsibility for these institutions devolved upon the localities, or was transferred to the ministry, mainly through mergers with universities already under direct ministry administration. In this stage, 1,232 institutions were radically changed through decentralization and amalgamation. About 406 universities have been restructured into 171 since 1996. Consequently, the process of merging universities and colleges was accelerated. In just the first half of 2000, 778 institutions, formerly affiliated with 49 departments under the State Council, were restructured.

Mergers were thought to be the shortcut to producing world-class universities. Such institutions, it was believed, should be comprehensive, large enough to handle increasing enrollments, and academically prestigious. Consequently, university giants mushroomed through mergers In particular, it was thought that medical universities were essential to first-class universities and should be incorporated into the new comprehensive universities. Almost all would-be first-rate universities were vying for medical universities to incorporate, with the result that the best medical universities were quickly absorbed into those universities. Many ambitious universities are still seeking ways to incorporate with the remaining medical universities or, less advisedly, to set up medical schools of their own to avoid being perceived as inferior in the competition for resources and status in the hierarchy of higher education.

In fact, the trend toward merging large and prestigious universities has been criticized, even though it has been promoted and supported by government during the whole process. Critics have said, "bigger is not always better," and have pointed out that just having a wide range of study fields does not ensure they will be of world-class quality. However, such voices did not immediately impede the drive toward mergers. Now, however, the consolidation of higher institutions seems to have come to an end, in response, again, to a change in polices of the central government.

Out of the whole process, a number of lessons have been learned. One concerns the role played by government. Chinese higher education reforms have been dominated by the government, but with little attention paid to the university’s role. Consequently, institutions that were forced or were at least reluctant to undergo consolidation might well react with dampened enthusiasm as they confront the work of actually implementing the mergers. In retrospect, mergers between larger and stronger universities tend to encounter difficulties caused by the fusion of campuses with disparate cultures and the pressure of managing large-scale universities. By contrast, the annexation of smaller and weaker institutions by bigger and stronger universities are relatively easy to carry out because the institutions being incorporated had limited power.