In Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches, Lili Yang compares core ideas about the state, society, and higher education in two major world traditions. She explores the broad cultural and philosophical ideas underlying the public good of higher education in the two traditions, reveals their different social imaginaries, and works through five areas where higher education intersects with the individual, society, the state, and the world, intersections understood in contrasting ways in each tradition. The five key themes are: individual student development in higher education, equity in higher education, academic freedom and university autonomy, the resources and outcomes of higher education, and cross-border higher education activities and higher education’s global outcomes. In exploring the similarities, Yang highlights important meeting points between the two world views, with the potential to contribute to the mutual understanding and cooperation across cultures.

The Bloomsbury Higher Education Research series provides the evidence-based academic output of the world’s leading research centre on higher education, the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) in the UK. The core focus of CGHE’s work and of The Bloomsbury Higher Education Research series is higher education, especially the future of higher education in the changing global landscape. The emergence of CGHE reflects the remarkable growth in the role and importance of universities and other higher education institutions, and research and science, across the world. Corresponding to CGHE’s projects, monographs in the series will consist of social science research on global, international, national and local aspects of higher education, drawing on methodologies in education, learning theory, sociology, economics, political science and policy studies. Monographs will be prepared so as to maximise worldwide readership and selected on the basis of their relevance to one or more of higher education policy, management, practice and theory. Topics will range from teaching and learning and technologies, to research and research impact in industry, national system design, the public good role of universities, social stratification and equity, institutional governance and management, and the cross-border mobility of people, institutions, programmes, ideas and knowledge. The Bloomsbury Higher Education Research series is at the cutting edge of world research on higher education.