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 rapid spread of new coronaviruses throughout China and the world in 2019–2020 has had a great impact on China’s economic and social development. As the backbone of Chinese society, Chinese universities have made significant contributions to emergency risk management. Such contributions have been made primarily in the following areas: alumni resource collection, medical rescue and emergency management, mental health maintenance, control of staff mobility, and innovation in online education models. Through the support of these methods, Chinese universities have played a positive role in the prevention and control of the epidemic situation. However, they also face the problems of alumni’s economic development difficulties, the risk of deadly infection to medical rescue teams and health workers, infection of teachers and students, and the unsatisfactory application of information technology in resolving the crisis. In response to these risks and emergency problems, we propose some corresponding solutions for public dissemination, including issues related to medical security, emergency research, professional assistance, positive communication, and hierarchical information-based teaching.

Of all the levels of education, doctoral education is the most internationalised. By selecting one key indicator (the proportion of international students among a country’s doctorate recipients), the article presents an analysis of PhD students’ international mobility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, many barriers to the international mobility of PhD students were removed, leading to an even larger flow of students. From 2000 to 2012, the international mobility of PhD students reached a new peak, with a significant increase in the percentage going to Japan, France, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Nowadays, China has become the largest source of international doctoral students. In that process, a number of excellent students go abroad to study for foreign doctoral degrees. On one hand, the loss of excellent students is harmful to China’s PhD training system, but on the other hand, it is a great opportunity for China to change brain drain into brain gain by making full use of the knowledge diaspora scattered around the world.

Background: Doctoral students have much higher risk of anxiety or depression than general population. Doctoral students worldwide are facing varying degrees of mental health risks. Method: Based on the survey data of 6,812 doctoral students worldwide in Nature in 2019, Probit and Logit models are used to explore the correlation between the fit of doctoral education and training process and the mental health of doctoral students. Results: (1) The training environment fit of doctoral students has a significant positive impact on their mental health. (2) The academic profession fit of doctoral students has a significant positive impact on their mental health. (3) The organizational culture fit of doctoral students has a significant positive impact on their mental health. (4) The financial support fit of doctoral students has a significant positive impact on their mental health. Conclusion: The higher the degree of doctoral students’ training environment fit, academic profession fit, organizational culture fit, and financial support fit, the lower the possibility of anxiety or depression among doctoral students. The current research results can help reveal extensive factors that affect the mental health of doctoral students, facilitate the planning and development of effective intervention measures by universities, improve the fit of the doctoral education and training process, improve the mental health of doctoral students, and boost academic excellence.

The paper employs a glonacal agency heuristic to explore how certain research-intensive Chinese universities exercise agency in response to global and national impacts in creating the world-class university. Two global forces (international scholarly discussions on the world-class university and global university rankings) and one national force (China’s Double First-Class Project) are considered. Through an in-depth document analysis of 41 Chinese research-intensive universities’ strategic plans, it is revealed that the universities have designed mainly three strategies to reply to the impacts. The first is to actively embrace global impacts, while looking for national supports for the embracement; the second is to partly draw on global forces while taking into account national considerations; and the third is to primarily draw on national forces while being minimally influenced by global forces. The three strategies point to possible ways for non-Western universities to balance global and national influences in their development, and reflect potential contributions of universities, as local organisational agencies, to global higher education.

Increasing research and development (R&D) investment has been a common strategy to advance the sustainable development of economy and competitiveness across the world. Instead of external determinants, exploring the influence of internal factors such as the characteristics of board members is an important topic, yet under-researched. This article aims to reveal whether a firm’s R&D investment is related to the directors’ postgraduate education experience. Further, we want to explore whether this relationship shows heterogeneity in different industrial environments. We analyzed information from a sample of 1374 listed companies in China using descriptive statistics, ordinary least square (OLS) regression and instrumental variable (IV) estimation, and came to the following conclusions: First, the percentage of directors with doctorates significantly increases the chance of investing R&D activities. Second, in the second industry, the higher the proportion of postgraduate education degree holder as directors in a firm, the more expenditure the firm invests in R&D activities. Yet, there is no such association in the third industry. Finally, if a capital-driven strategy is adopted, directors with a master’s degree tend to reduce R&D investment in IT companies. Findings from this research not only enrich innovation management theory, upper echelon theory, and human capital theory, but also provide insights for corporate governance and national sustainable innovation.