Why Chinese Universities Embrace Internationalization: An Exploration with Two Case Studies

Internationalization has become a new landmark of Chinese higher education, measured by indicators such as personnel mobility, number of offshore/joint programs, and international publications. Chinese universities have moved from isolation to the forefront of internationalization in a short timeline and amid the dramatic expansion of Chinese higher education to a mass system since the late 1990s. This has set the context of the internationalization discourse. At the same time, Chinese upper- and middle-class families increasingly choose not to send their offspring to Chinese universities, but rather to study abroad. These developments add up to a puzzle as to how internationalization has helped lift the standards of Chinese higher education. Drawing on the glonacal agency heuristic, resource dependency theory, and the Ethical Internationalism in Higher Education (EIHE) perspective, this paper utilizes the case study of two Chinese universities to address such two research questions: (1) How have Chinese universities managed to rise so dramatically in terms of internationalization? and (2) Why do they embrace internationalization so enthusiastically and how does this benefit them?