Comparative study on the internal governance models of Chinese and European universities

Nowadays, China increasingly sees education as a critical component of becoming a world emerging power. Since 2015, China has implemented its new education strategy, named the “World first-class universities and world first-class disciplines” project. In this context, the university’s internal governance has become a critical factor for the Chinese standards to construct world first-class universities. The Chinese government has published a series of related documents to enhance university autonomy and improve external conditions with university governance’s mechanism reform. The paper firstly discusses the research statutes and proposes the analytical framework based on the stakeholder theory and quadrilateral model. Secondly, it presents the history and progress of the university’s internal governance in China and Europe and summarizes their experiences and characteristics. Thirdly, it discusses the similarities and differences between Europe and China in the universities’ internal governance, which focuses on the internal governance framework and the power distribution. In this way, the university budget and finance, teacher’s appointment and promotion, enrollment power, curriculum design, research, and even the housing and equipment assignment are all analyzed. Finally, it summarizes China and Europe’s internal governance models with the key factors and prominent features in the different models. It also discusses the common issues that the universities are facing in internal governance.