In the last three decades or so, China has managed to become the second largest economy in the world, especially after engaging in economic reforms since the late 1970s. Despite being a “world factory” and playing a very significant role in manufacturing products and exporting to different parts of the globe, the Chinese government has realized that depending upon this production mode cannot sustain the country’s long term economic growth and development. Hence, the Chinese government has tried to invest more in advancing technology, research and innovation, knowledge transfer, and promoting entrepreneurship education. This article sets out to critically examine the major strategies and policies that the Chinese government has adopted in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation against the wider policies outlined above, with a focused reflection given to the major challenges facing Chinese universities during the process of promoting entrepreneurship and innovation, and entrepreneurship education.

Through experiencing and reviewing multiple-country endeavors in academic profession study and participating in a new project regarding the academic profession in Asia, the author pinpoints and anticipates the shortcomings of study alone or dominantly questionnaire-based and ignoring the broader social context. The author proposes a new perspective or methodology to mitigate these shortcomings. The traditional approach focuses on commonalities rather than differences of the academic profession in a variety of countries. By comparing identical questionnaires, it is easy to conclude that, according to some indicators, the academic profession in developing countries, a category in which most Asian countries belong, is inferior to that in developed countries by a certain magnitude. This research strategy will devalue the research efforts on the academic profession in Asia. The academic profession is a complicated phenomenon, and it requires a sophisticated research methodology. The characteristics of the academic profession in Asia can be induced by empirically studying its relationship with the institutional environments in which the academic profession is embedded. In addition, all developing countries in Asia are undergoing a process of modernization. This dynamic feature is valuable and deserves exploration. The institutional environments in Asia can be demonstrated and illustrated via cultural and historical lenses. The purpose of this paper is to review international projects and literature regarding the academic profession. This review tries to be both critical and constructive, and shed light on newly initiated projects in the Asian academic profession. Two major research questions are raised by the author: What is the scholarly value of the new project? What strategy can researchers employ for this endeavor? Past research is dominated by the structure-function paradigm and cross-sectional questionnaire method. This approach has both strengths and weaknesses. Historical and cultural perspectives are proposed to overcome the existing limitations and explore the potential value of the new academic effort.

This paper highlights how returnees and knowledge diaspora are important sources for China’s human resources development, identifying push and pull factors that also contribute significantly to innovation in the higher education sector. By outlining China’s key projects and schemes for recruiting international professional workers, the paper argues that bringing advanced knowledge and skills back to a country of origin through international education and experiences is neither new, nor limited to China. At the same time, the rise of a large, worldwide Chinese knowledge diaspora is now of global importance in promoting transnational scientific and business networks that underpin both research and development, and the quest for world-class universities. China’s size and weight, its determination to boost development and improve its higher education system, as well as the willingness of both diaspora and returnees to contribute, constitute its advantages. However, there remain limitations to its success, notably a lack of high-quality research, reservations regarding new ideas, low awareness of international collaborations, too much attention given to material rewards and quick results, corruption, and too many administrative controls and government regulations.

From the perspective of neoinstitutionalism, higher vocational education has become an emerging institution in Chinese society. Its development over three decades entails a trend of institutionalization of higher vocational education. In such a process, higher vocational education is gaining legitimacy and experiencing isomorphic changes. Various challenges have indicated an absence of institutional legitimacy at all levels of higher vocational education, namely regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive legitimacy. The latter two are considered key for the ongoing process of institutionalizing higher vocational education. Moreover, the emergence and development of higher vocational education in China has indicated isomorphic changes in Chinese higher education in terms of non-university sectors, practical/skills learning, teachers with dual qualifications and graduate employment.

Over the past decade the scale of higher education in China has expanded substantially. Regional development policies have attempted to make use of scale expansion as a tool to reduce inequality of higher education among regions with different development levels by providing poor regions with preferential treatment and support. This paper analyzes a provincial dataset (1997–2008), aiming to provide comprehensive quantitative evidence for the development of inequality of opportunity in higher education across provinces in China over the period of scale expansion. Results show that, for higher education, regional inequality relative to provincial population size clearly decreased over the research period. Accompanying the reduction in overall inequality across provinces, inequality between poor and rich regions actually increased over the same period. However, the increase was realized in favor of the poor region. The empirical results are consistent with the policy orientation of reforming the higher education system and of promoting regional development in China over the past decade.

Compared to the training of higher education management professionals in the US, the training of their counterparts in China is relatively modest, with few programs offered at the graduate level. Further, few concrete solutions have been proposed for tackling the challenge of preparing managerial professionals for the sound development of higher educational institutions in China. Based on existing theories and practices associated with professionalization and findings from the literature and data collected from universities both in China and the US, this paper examines the training of higher education professionals from a comparative perspective in the two countries. With the intention of identifying the characteristics of “best practices” for the training and education of institutional executives, in an effort to provide possible suggestions for the future development of higher management training in China, the paper will discuss the topic from two perspectives: short-term in-service training programs and formal PhD and EdD programs.