Education and the market place in Hong Kong and Mainland China

This paper attempts to examine how market forces have affected educational development in Hong Kong and Mainland China. In both places, there has been a trend to the decentralisation and marketisation of education in recent y ears, particularly in the realm of higher education. Based upon recent rese arch conducted in Hong Kong and China, the author argues that higher educat ion in these two places has been significantly affected by emerging market forces. The core of the paper is confined to the discussion of two major is sues: user charges and the introduction of ``competition'' and cost recover y in education. The main focus of this paper is on what strategies educatio nal institutions in Hong Kong and China have employed in response to the st rong tide of marketisation. Particular attention will be given to discussin g how markets and competition have affected the governance and delivery of educational services in Hong Kong and China. This comparative study has dem onstrated that even though the recent developments in higher education in t hese two places have been experiencing a similar global trend, the global t ide of universal trend in which private charges, market competition, non-st ate provision, corporate governance, system-wide performance management sho uld not be treated as a simplistic notion of undifferentiated universal tre nd. Instead, different places may take different configurations in cases of marketization which remain national-specific as well as global.