Learning From the United States?: Policy Transfer and the Development of Chinese Higher Education Since 1978

The paper tries to analyze the impact of the American higher education model on China's higher education since the reform and opening-up, enriching the research on policy learning in comparative education by adding a Sino-U.S. case. This study focuses on three cases of policy learning: undergraduate education reform, the transformation of polytechnic universities into comprehensive ones, and the introduction of the tenure-track system, using academic archives, oral interviews, and policy texts. This study identifies several characteristics of policy learning. First, while the influence of the United States remains dominant, other countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and France have also become learning targets. Second, policy learning from the United States reflects the characteristics of selective adoption, suggesting that the foreign model is partially copied and reinterpreted in the Chinese context. Policy transfer is a classic theme of comparative education research. Although the Western model—and the U.S. model in particular—has had a profound impact on China's higher education reform, research on the impact of the U.S. model since 1978 is limited. This study addresses this gap.