Educational reforms and coping strategies under the tidal wave of marketisation: a comparative study of Hong Kong and the mainland

It has been a global trend, since the 1980s, that the process of marketisat ion has been influential in the decision making of social policies around t he world, and that this tidal wave is now crossing over to the Asia-Pacific region as well. Education policy, as one of the important social policies for many developing countries, has been influential in the forefront of nat ional development in terms of manpower training, as well as in other arenas of economic and social developments. In this way, these countries are tryi ng to improve the quality of their educational services so that they can be more competitive in order to cater for the demands in the international ma rkets. One of the outcomes of this global trend is the international qualit y assurance movement in streamlining the educational institutions as well a s in using different coping strategies to promote quality education for all concerned. For the Chinese mainland, it seems that the central government is adopting a policy of decentralisation in getting local governments to us e multiple channels of resources and other methods to provide for their own educational services. Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) o f China, however, has adopted quire a different approach by employing the p rinciple of managerialism in order to enhance its competitiveness in provid ing quality education to meet the increasing marker demands. Hence, the pre sent study is to compare and contrast the educational reforms and coping st rategies that have been adopted by the socialist mainland, on the one hand, and the capitalist Hong Kong SAR, on the other hand, in order to face this new challenge of marketisation.