Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 outbreak, an emergency policy initiative called “Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning” was launched by the Chinese government to continue teaching activities as schools across the country were closed to contain the virus. However, there is ambiguity and disagreement about what to teach, how to teach, the workload of teachers and students, the teaching environment, and the implications for education equity. Possible difficulties that the policy faces include: the weakness of the online teaching infrastructure, the inexperience of teachers (including unequal learning outcomes caused by teachers’ varied experience), the information gap, the complex environment at home, and so forth. To tackle the problems, we suggest that the government needs to further promote the construction of the educational information superhighway, consider equipping teachers and students with standardized home-based teaching/learning equipment, conduct online teacher training, include the development of massive online education in the national strategic plan, and support academic research into online education, especially education to help students with online learning difficulties.

The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of ‘public good’ and ‘public goods’ and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures (‘traditions’), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the critical function, higher education in civil society, and global tianxia and global common good. A key issue in symmetrical cross-cultural comparison is the position from which it is made; and as well as elucidating similarities and differences the paper develops what Sen calls a ‘trans-positional’ view based on integrating the two positional views. The two traditions are not closely aligned. However, aside for the Anglo-American public/private dualism in economics (which occludes collective outcomes), all ideas in both traditions can contribute to transpositional understanding of the individualised and collective outcomes of higher education.

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This paper examines whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies—the ‘Young Thousand Talents’ policy (Y1000T)—had, in the following years after recruitment, better research performance. We compare these recipients against other Chinese nationals who got PhDs in equally prestigious non-Chinese universities but continued to work abroad (mostly in the USA). Results of difference-in-differences regressions show that returning to China has an effect of positioning returnees both at the bottom and at the very summit of the distribution of quality of publications. Nevertheless, some Y1000T researchers seem to have prioritized the quantity of outputs, arguably to the detriment of quality. This is probably due to certain research evaluation criteria in place until recent times.

Higher education has long established primary importance to the formation of students, manifest in ideas such as Confucianxiushen(self-cultivation) andBildung. However, despite the shared focus on the idea of humans becoming humans,xiushenandBildungare built on divergent philosophical traditions. The divergence has led to varied practice in individual formation. This paper conceptually explores, compares, and searches for potential combination of the ideas ofxiushenandBildungin higher education. As such, it provides new insights into student formation in higher education. Specifically, it is argued that the best situation for individual formation is when individual agency is harmonised with the external environment. This points to two essential considerations for student formation in higher education: students’ agency and the necessary support from society and higher education institutions.

Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Both strands have been influential through Chinese history. In the last twenty years discussion of tianxia has revived, especially through Zhao Tingyang, stimulated by globalisation and the need for practical relations beyond the nation state. This paper proposes one version of tianxia as a heuristic for understanding, rethinking and remaking ethical relations in worldwide higher education. It reviews different understandings of tianxia in China, identifies a world-centred (rather than China-centred) tianxia , and discusses the potentials of tianxia in higher education. Tianxia is appropriate to world higher education because of its spatiality and its ethical commitment to universal benefit in diverse settings on the basis of mutual respect. The article suggests four clusters of relational values that could constitute a tianxia order in higher education, and compares tianxia to existing practices of globalisation.