WALKING ON THREE LEGS: CENTRALIZATION, DECENTRALIZATION, AND RECENTRALIZATION IN CHINESE EDUCATION
China has clearly set itself on a path to become not only a regional but also a world leader. But in order to do so, its leaders are convinced that China’s power is linked to producing and retaining the best and brightest students and to reforming its edu
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INTRODUCTION
China has clearly set itself on a path to become not only a regional but also a world leader. But in order to do so, its leaders are convinced that China’s power is linked to producing and retaining the best and brightest students and to reforming its educational system (Lu, 2000). A major feature of the current educational reform movement to achieve these goals is the focus on decentralization. China’s educational leadership has been struggling with the issue of centralization and decentralization almost since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Terms such as “walking on two legs” (combining both centralized and decentralized approaches to education) and minban schools (community-run schools), once again in vogue, date back several decades (Hawkins, 1973). In the latter years of the commune system, communes, and production brigades were being urged by provincial authorities to run rural primary and junior middle schools independently, raising funds through their own efforts, and hiring teachers in a competitive manner (Xin, 1984). These early efforts to shift authority from central to local levels did not represent, however, a national decentralization policy of the scope we are witnessing today. Nevertheless, there is a history of experimentation with different levels and degrees of decentralization, always against the background of a highly centralized political economy, and often followed by a recentralization as authorities retrench fearing loss of control (the paradoxes of state-led decentralization are convincingly argued in Tatto (1999)). As Hanson (1993) and Bray (1999) correctly note, in general, there are no clear examples of completely decentralized educational systems, but rather one finds mixtures of centralization and decentralization. These processes are fluid and in motion and change over time. It is also important to remember that there are differing definitions of what constitutes decentralization. In this volume, Hanson offers a useful general definition that is appropriate for the China case: “Decentralization is defined as the transfer of decision-making authority, responsibility, and tasks from higher to lower organizational levels or between organizations” (p. XX). He and Bray (1999) also note three basic kinds of decentralization: (1) Deconcentration (transfer of tasks and work but not authority); (2) Delegation (transfer of decisionmaking authority from higher to lower levels, but authority can be withdrawn by the center); (3) Devolution (transfer of authority to an autonomous unit which can act independently without permission from the center). Privatization is another form 27 Christopher Bjork (ed.), Educational Decentralization, 27–41. C 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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EDUCATIONAL DECENTRALIZATION
which, however, is not always decentralized. As we shall see, in the case of China, several of these exist at the same time. In the remainder of this chapter we will examine the various stages of the educational reform movement begun in 1985, fo
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