Stay Local, Go Global: A Preliminary Analysis of Chinese-Foreign Higher Education Partnerships in Guangdong, China

As China moves toward a market system after the “reforms and opening-up” policy since the late 1970s, internationalization is receiving widespread attention at many academic institutions in mainland China. Today, there are 70 Sino-Foreign joint institutions (namely, “Chinese-Foreign Higher Education Partnership”) presently operating within the Chinese nation. Despite the fact that the majority of these joint institutions have been developed since the 1990s, surprisingly little work has been published that addresses its physical distribution in China, and the prospects and challenges faced by the faculty and institutions on an operational level. What are the incentives of adopting both Western and Chinese elements in higher education? How do we ensure the higher education models developed in the West can also work well in mainland China? In order to answer the aforementioned questions, the purpose of this paper is therefore threefold: (a) to navigate the current development of internationalization in China; (b) to compare conventional Chinese curriculum with the “hybrid” Chinese-Foreign education model in present Guangdong province, China; and (c) to delineate the prospects and challenges of developing the internalize Chinese-Foreign higher education in contemporary China.