Universities and Governmentality in Modern China: Planned Education and Its Counter-Logic explores the evolution of higher education in China from the late Qing Dynasty to the present day through a Foucauldian framework. The book examines the dual function of universities as tools of state governance to promote national development and social control, and as spaces where students and educators resist, navigate, and subvert these pressures.
Employing a critical genealogical approach, the book illuminates the dual forces shaping modern Chinese higher education: the top-down strategies of state control and planning, and the bottom-up agency of individuals. Drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality and enriched by original fieldwork, it reveals how modern Chinese HE has fostered new forms of subjectivity while grappling with tensions between neoliberal self-regulation and neo-statist authoritarianism.
In conversation with an extensive body of research on governmentality in China, Hua Guo develops the Foucauldian approach, demonstrating how differing socio-political contexts necessitate a reconfiguration of concepts like discipline, subjectivity, and resistance. In doing so, the book underscores the adaptability of Foucauldian notions while also exposing their limitations when confronted with non-Western experiences.
Universities and Governmentality in Modern Chinawill appeal to readers interested in modern China, education, or governance, providing a nuanced, critical, compelling analysis of one of the most important intersections of power and knowledge in the contemporary world.