| Chapter 1: | The Study |
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Beneath these pressures and tensions, the meaning of Chinese studies is constantly challenged and changed in a university.
The focus of this book is to identify what marks the tension in the way the study of China is constructed in a university and the educational implications arising from such processes. The two specific questions addressed are the following:
- 1. How do the macro contexts of economics and politics contribute to the process of the construction of Chinese studies in universities?
- 2. In what ways do social phenomena at the departmental level play a part in such a process?
Considering the limited body of research material available on knowledge construction in Chinese studies, the approaches adopted in this study are explorative and comparative rather than experimental, predictive, or deterministic. This research is divided into two phases. First, it comprises ethnographical studies in two elite universities in two countries—the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the University of Melbourne in Australia. Second, it offers a comparative analysis of the two ethnographical studies. The theoretical approaches adopted and the selection of the universities researched are explained in the succeeding chapters.
The objective of this research is to gain a grounded understanding of the complex mechanisms whereby economic, political, and social cons-traints filter through to university departments and to gain an understanding of the implications for academics’ intellectual work of knowledge construction. It is hoped that this study will (a) contribute to documenting the intellectual thinking of China scholars in different institutions with different historical and geographical contexts; (b) highlight some sociological aspects in the process of constructing a realm of knowledge, such as Chinese studies; and (c) draw the attention of policy makers in higher education and university teachers in Chinese studies to the implications and significance of sociological factors in epistemological rationalities and in the educational process.