Public Universities

Corso di Dottorato di Ricerca in Lingue e civiltà dell’Asia e dell’Africa Mediterranea ciclo 28 Tesi di Ricerca A Study on China’s Contemporary Personnel System Reform: Public Universities SSD: L/OR-21 Coordinatore del Dottorato ch. prof. Federico Squarcini Supervisore ch. prof.ssa Valeria Zanier Dottorando Sha Ha Matricola 956040 1 2 A Study on China’s Contemporary Personnel System Reform: Public Universities Content Introduction Chapter 1 - Methodology of the Research and Relevance of the Context 1.1 Methodology: the “Inside-out” and the “Outside-in” Approaches 1.2 The context of the Chinese Public Administration Governance and Management 1.2.1 The Chinese Higher Education System 1.3 The Western Context 1.3.1 Guidelines of the European Higher Education System Chapter 2 - China’s Reforms of Public Administration and of Higher Education Institutions 2.1 The Pathway to Public Administration Reforms 2.1.1 Most Recent Public Administration Reforms 2.1.2 The Public Administration Reforms in the Guangdong Province 2.2 The Chinese Higher Education System 2.2.1 Historic Overview 2.2.2 Developing Excellence: Project 211, Project 985 and the C9 League 2.3 The Personnel Reform of Higher Education Institutions 2.3.1 The Peking, Zhejiang and Shanghai Jiao Tong Universities 2.3.2 The Chinese “Human Resources Management” 2.4 Academic Entrepreneurship in China 2.5 The culture of innovation in Chinese public universities 3 Chapter 3 - Higher Education Institutions in the Guangdong Province 3.1 The Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) 3.1.1 University Structure and Governance 3.1.2 Personnel Reform at SYSU 3.2 Research and Internationalization at SYSU 3.3 The Guangzhou University (GZHU) 3.3.1 University Structure and Governance at GZU 3.3.2 Personnel Reform at GZHU 3.3.3 Research and Internationalization at GZU 3.4 The pursuit of excellence in SYSU and in GZHU Chapter 4 - The Italian Public Universities 4.1 The New Public Administration Paradigm in Italy 4.2 The Reform of Italian Public Universities 4.2.1 Historic Overview 4.3 The Gelmini University Reform 4.3.1 Governance and Management 4.3.2 New Accounting Practices 4.3.3 Personnel Reform 4.4 Entrepreneurship in Western Universities 4.4.1 Academic Entrepreneurship in Italy 4.5 Research and Development in Italian Universities Chapter 5 - The Ca’ Foscari and Padova Universities 5.1 Higher Education Institutions in the Italian North-East 5.2 Ca’ Foscari University (CFU) 5.2.1 University Structure and Governance at CFU 4 5.2.2 Research Activities and International Cooperations at CFU 5.2.3 Academic Entrepreneurial Activities at CFU 5.3 University of Padova (UP) 5.3.1 University Structure and Governance at UP 5.3.2 Research and International Cooperation at UP 5.3.3 Academic Entrepreneurial Activities at UP 5.4 The pursuit of excellence at Ca’ Foscari and Padova Universities Conclusions Bibliography Appendix A1. Decree of State Council of the People's Republic of China No. 652, "Personnel Management Regulations of Public Institutions” by Premier Li Keqiang - 2014 A2. Research Institutes and Internationalization at Sun Yat-Sen University A3. Press conferences by Mr. Li Zhong, spokesman of the Human Resources and Social Security Ministry, concerning the Personnel System Reform of Public Institutions (2015-2016) A4. Excerpts from the Yearbook of Guangzhou University for the Years 2001-2015 5 Introduction The research on the management of the structure of staff of China’s public institutions, and particularly of its higher education system, is not an extensively addressed issue in Italy, due to the uniqueness and novelty of the subject. Even a mere comparison between the Italian administrative laws and the Chinese ones entails a great effort and some approximation, being the first a mature system and the second one a new-born, although in constant and rapid evolution: an evolution linked to the economic development of the Country and also to the interests of the business world. The renewal of Public Administration has become one of the most urgent issues of present day China. The study of the reforms of the Chinese personnel of public institutions cannot ignore the analysis of the economic development that characterizes the context. It is well known that China is entering a critical phase in its transition to a market economy. There is a variety of types of market economies, so that the concept referred to continental Europe is not the same as the American or the Japanese one, because they possess distinctive institutional and legal elements, reflecting their diversity from political, social, cultural and historical points of view. China has decided to adopt a market economy with “Chinese characteristics”, i.e.a market economy adapted to the particular context and history of the Country. Article 1 of the Chinese Constitution states that ‘the socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China’. So China’s economic structure is grounded in the canons of the Marxist-Leninist socialism, according to the reading of Mao Zedong. The reforms inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), convened in December 1978, led to the so-called ‘four modernizations’, i.e. a process of renewal of rural/urban areas and the adoption of a policy of reform of the economic system1. The CPC formulated a strategy of actively developing the economic cooperation with other countries, adopting a process of “opening- up” (the so-called ‘open-door’ policy)2 that from then on became a fundamental principle of China’s socialist system. 1 Yu, T. 1994. Intellectuals’ role in China’s Four Modernizations. In Vajpeyi, D.K. 1994. Modernizing China. BRILL. 2 Zanier V. (2010) Dal grande esperimento alla società armoniosa – Trent’ anni di riforme economiche per costruire una nuova Cina. Franco Angeli Edizioni 6 As for the organizational principles of the government’s structure, under Art. 3 of the Constitution all state bodies are organized according to the principle of “democratic centralism”. This involves the elective nature of all members of the management, the strict application of party discipline, the majority principle for collective decisions and, finally, the binding nature of the decisions of the higher bodies. A corollary is the ‘double hierarchical principle’, whereby each state organ depends on horizontally from its constituents and vertically from a higher level organ. This system should be read in light of the keystone of the whole system, i.e. the leadership of CPC. As for the economic characteristics, the program of development issued by Deng Xiaoping was based on the introduction of market elements, implemented with a consistent centralized planning. After the 14th Congress of the CPC, in 1992, which officially confirmed the establishment of the market economy, no less than 11 reforms of the Public Administration System have been launched by the Chinese government until today, gradually opening the Chinese borders, at the same time maintaining a decisive presence in economy and politics: the last reform has been launched on April 25, 2014 by Premier Li Keqiang. As for the Higher Education System, during the same 14th Congress the CPC announced that “developing education” was its first priority and, on the turn of the century, it concentrated a relevant amount of economic resources of the central and local governments on about 100 “key universities”: the organizational guideline was that of “meeting a balance between the efficiency principle and the fairness principle”. Out of them, a group of 39 elite universities was chosen (constituting the so-called C9 League), whose mission can be summarized by the acronym R&D (Research and Development): to those “national universities” a consistent public funding and a large amount of managerial autonomy have been granted. A question arises: “Were the Chinese government’s reforms successful in laying the foundations of an efficient higher education system and the premises for a competitive knowledge production activity?” The aim of the present research work is to investigate this question, exposing facts rather than expressing conclusive judgments: the Chinese reform process has not yet been concluded. 7 To successfully perform this investigation, it was necessary to take into account the Chinese history and its present reality, in order to assess the extent to which the reform’s characteristics were “context-specific”: to that purpose an “inside out” approach has been adopted, which considers the reforms as based on the identification of important features that are specific to the Chinese present-day society, as it will be better explained in Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation. We also analyzed the structure of Italian higher education institutions, in light of the most recent reform introduced by the central government (the so-called Gelmini Reform), what could be seen as an outside-in approach. We adopted two case studies, the University of Padova and the Ca’ Foscari University, both located in the North East of the Country, an area which was the protagonist of a great economic development, starting with the 60-iest of last century. While adopting this “mixed approach” we did not intend to perform a “one-to-one” comparison between the Chinese and the Italian Higher Education Systems: that would have been an impossible task, given the huge differences between the two countries in terms of size, economic resources, and political systems. Our purpose was that of establishing a reference frame for the Chinese reforms, beneficial to the western reader, considering that China’s first modern higher education institutions, as the Peking and the Shanghai Jiao Tong Universities, had been established according to Western models during the last quarter of the 19th century.

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