The Study of China in Universities: A Comparative Case Study of A ...

Attracted by very strong growth in the Chinese economy over the last 2 decades, the U.K. and Australian governments have urged their universities to increase engagement with China in order to raise their national market share and profile for economic and political advantage (Higher Education Funding Council of England [HEFCE], 1999b). Thus, British and Australian scholarship of China has been increasingly influenced by the political and economic climate of the time.

Traditionally, people who profess to be experts in Chinese affairs are known as sinologists, and the study of China is termed sinology. Sinology is essentially European scholarship that encompasses everything Chinese. The term Chinese studies first originated from area studies undertaken in the United States following the end of the Second World War (Mair, 1998). In the 1950s, the study of Asian civilizations was pursued very much in the traditional—namely, philological—mold of the previous century.

In the 1960s, a shift to regional and area studies emphasized a pedagogical move towards the social sciences. Since then, the study of China in many universities in English-speaking countries, such as the United States, Australia, and to some extent the United Kingdom, is no longer achieved through the teaching of classical texts in Chinese, as traditional sinologists did in the previous century. The very notion of the philological and generalist approaches became questioned. The outcome of this shift is that knowledge about China is now divided into Western discipline classifications, such as political sciences, history, and economics being taught in the English language in various universities.

As the importance of China on the world stage greatly increased, particularly from the 1980s onward, the demand for specialists soared, and specialization in the study of China was developed in various disciplines in universities. Since the 1990s, the debate in many Western countries as to the role of a university, together with constraints in the public funding of higher education, has much affected Chinese studies in terms of its being a department in the scope of the curriculum and as a realm of knowledge. Tensions result from the conflicting pressures of utilitarian measures versus the love of pure scholarship.