Jian Li

This study investigates the value essence of “Double reduction” (Shuang jian) policy in China from a perspective of policy narrative. It examines three values essences of “Double reduction” (Shuang jian) policy, including the core value of running schools: student-centered education; the leading value of running schools: quality-based education and the dominant value of running schools: home-school cooperative education. The interactive analysis of “Double reduction” (Shuang jian) policy in China highlights that the main purpose of the "double reduction" policy is to solve major problems related to people’s livelihood in the field of education and provide people with higher quality and universal educational resources. In addition, suggestion, conclusion, and remark are offered in the last.

This study explores “Strengthen Moral Education for Cultivating People” (“Li De Shu Ren”) in China from the perspectives of concepts and policies. “Strengthen Moral Education” (“Li De”) is identified as the “developing great virtue” (“Ming Da De”), “obeying social morality” (“Shou Gong De”), and “keeping personal morals” (“Yan Si De”). “Cultivate People” (“Shu Ren”) includes the moral education, intellectual education, sports education, aesthetic education, and labor education. Policy implementation and advancement is divided into three stages: Policy launch period (2006-2012), policy improvement period (2013-2017), the period of full implementation of policies (2017 to present). Policy suggestions on “Strengthen Moral Education and Cultivate People” (“Li De Shu Ren”) are offered, including building a multi-agent coordinated all-staff education system, building an organically integrated whole-process education system, building an all-round education system guided by values, and building the evaluation system of cultivating people by virtue.

With the rapid development of livestreaming marketing in China, consumers spend an increasing amount of time watching and purchasing on the platform, which shows a trend of livestreaming addiction. In the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the addiction exacerbated by a surge of boredom caused by home quarantine. Based on the observation of this phenomenon, this research focused on whether state boredom could facilitate consumers’ livestreaming addiction and explored the associated mechanisms of this relationship. Based on three studies, this research found that state boredom had a positive effect on consumers’ livestreaming addiction, and this relationship worked through the mediating effect of consumers’ sensation seeking. We further verified a moderated mediation effect of consumers’ life meaning perception, where the indirect effect of state boredom on consumers’ livestreaming addiction via consumers’ sensation seeking existed for high and low levels of life meaning perception, but in opposite directions. The conclusions provided theoretical and practical implications of livestreaming marketing and healthy leisure consumption.

The number of new “Special-post teachers” has decreased considerably, especially at China’s rural schools in recent years. This study applies the semi-structured interview data of new “Special-post teachers” in China’s rural schools to explore their perceptions on the rural new teachers’ problems and challenges at nine developing rural provinces in China. It finds that the new rural teachers were confronted with severe challenges and difficulties for their professional adaptability in rural areas, such as the interpersonal relationship, heavy workload and dissatisfied salary, and unqualified teaching capacities. Those interviewed new “Special-post teachers” also learned lots from those challenges in reality, such as the diversified personality characteristics, professional beliefs and career motivation. It also suggested that, Chinese government should offer sufficient and diversified educational policies to stimulate rural teacher development, especially for new “Special-post Teachers” at rural areas. Chinese central government plays a significant role to guarantee the sustainable funding support for the development of new “Special-post teachers”. In addition, the principals in rural schools should pay close attention to new Special-post Teachers’ personability characteristics, hobbies and needs to create a supportive teaching environment for them to move toward successful rural teacher development.

Modernization of Chinese Education 2035 clearly pointed out that the realization of basic public education equalization is the basic requirement of education modernization, compulsory education is the core of basic public education service system. How to improve the level of compulsory education equalization, the key lies in the realization of standardization of compulsory education schooling. Compulsory education schooling standardization is a basic project, is the responsibility of national education modernization management system. It is necessary for the development of compulsory education to define the nature of public social services for compulsory education and to emphasize the foundation and balance of schools for compulsory education. Thus, this study aims to exploring how to standardize compulsory schooling in China from the scopes of policies, practices, challenges and suggestions. In particular, the policy analysis of compulsory schooling standardization, the practice analysis of compulsory schooling standardization, challenges in the standardization of compulsory schooling, and suggestions on compulsory schooling standardization have been explored, relatively in this study.

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns.

This study explores new pedagogical trends in China’s teacher education from a holistic policy analysis perspective. The emerging idea of ‘new normal/teacher education’ is explored in this study. Applying the comprehensive policy text analysis, we examined the quality of teacher education as the core; explored the comprehensive quality and pursuit of excellence; examined the collaborative sharing training model; and focused on the evaluation of students’ training quality. We argued that the ‘new normal/teacher education’ should be guided by the industry needs reflected in the reform of teacher qualification certification system, implement the overall and advanced curriculum of teacher education, reform the teaching content and teaching methods, and enhance the effectiveness of practical teaching such as education probation and educational practice for normal students according to the professional standards and examination syllabus of teachers. In addition, the conclusion and discussion have also been provided in the end.

Pursuing world-class universities, China has emerged in recent decades as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The goal of this study was to identify current education policy dispositions toward foreign faculty at the national and institutional levels in China. Findings indicate that within China’s higher education policy discourse, foreign faculty are identified as an advantage, and a source of conflict, ultimately having an ambiguous role as they attempt to manage their complicated status in Chinese higher education institutions. Foreign faculty are typically regarded as an international asset, accelerating global competitiveness and international rankings to enhance the acceleration of China’s higher education system. They are also considered controversial in relation to Chinese culture, values, and traditions. However, the most prevalent policy disposition explored in this study was that of vagueness and marginality, indicating underlying ambiguity toward foreign faculty. The study concludes with implications for future scholars and policymakers to consider.

The purpose of this study is to characterize the graduate education development for creating world-class universities from the insight of the doctoral education in China. A systematic review is applied to examine the doctoral education development in contemporary China. The findings argue that there are tremendous challenges in China’s current doctoral cultivation system. The current doctoral talent cultivation encountered various difficulties, specifically for creating the effectiveness of world-class universities. The student–faculty relations were regard as a key theme to investigate the doctoral education development in current China’s higher education system. The findings indicated that the selected studies in regard to the doctoral graduate education focusing on the cultivation of innovation ability, the interdisciplinary graduate student training has become one of the important ways of graduate education reform. In addition, the conclusion and remark were offered in the last.

This study explores the type-based vocational education system from the perspective of China. General education and vocational education are equal types of education in status, but not based on different levels of education in China. Specifically, the connotation of vocational education as type-based education is mainly embodied in ‘three directions’. The outstanding problems of vocational education as a type-based education include ‘four aspects’. Vocational education as a type-based education reform path is considered as ‘four reforms’. We should strengthen management, improve the comprehensive quality of vocational college students and make clear the direction and explore the new path of reform and development of vocational colleges. In addition, we need to optimize investment and make innovations in the system and mechanism of funding for China’s vocational education.

This study aims to explore the new directions towards internationalization of higher education in China during post-COVID 19. The systematic literature review is applied as an evidence-based policy analysis approach. The findings indicate that the challenges and difficulties of internationalization of higher education in the post-COVID 19 were considered as a high-frequency discussion topic. In order to address the crises of internationalization of higher education during the post-COVID 19, the idea of internationalization at home is regarded as a beneficial approach to deal with the process of internationalization of higher education, systematically. This study also highlighted that the internationalization at home within Chinese higher education institutions not only brings opportunities for the development of China’s higher education system, but also poses challenges to the reform of the current higher education system. In addition, the conclusion and implication were provided to analyze the rationales of promoting internationalization of higher education system in contemporary China.

This study explores the online education action for defeating COVID-19 in China from the perspectives of the system, mechanism and mode. In particular, the policy development of online education in China during the epidemic includes the education informatization policy, the online education system, and the online education mechanism in China. The online education and teaching mode during the epidemic involve the synchronous live class-based teaching mode, asynchronous recording and broadcasting teaching mode, online flipped classroom teaching mode, and online tutoring-based teaching mode. Both characteristics and trends of online education in China during the epidemic have been explored in this study. In addition, the problems, discussions and remarks are also offered.

This study aims to critically and systematically investigate the contemporary discourse within scholarship on world-class universities in different higher education context. It applies critical discourse analysis to review articles from some top higher education academic journals and books published between 2000 and 2019. Exploring the notion of world-class university involves international-level identities and models, national-level policies and strategies, and institutional-level responses and practices. Findings highlight the absence of a clear definition of the concept of world-class university, an obvious Western-dominated value-laden paradigm, hegemony of global rankings discourse, priority of policies and strategies and inexplicit suggestions for practical application of research findings. Applying the critical discourse analysis, we examine the mission of higher education research towards global competitiveness and global rankings and the attitudes towards the challenges in pursuing world-class universities and its dissemination through the international academic publications as value neutral. This study focuses on recognizing, articulating, and critiquing biases in research production and dissemination. Different researchers might provide multiple critical scopes to investigate international inclusive scholarship on world-class universities. This study also contributes to the approaches in which discourse both shapes and is shaped by globalization and internationalization trends in the higher education contexts, and future orientations in this study.

Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA. The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets of corpora are examined and analyzed based on the theory of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. The results show that there are significant differences between the three sets of corpora and the three main features of modal verbs in the UCC are: the high frequency use of may, the relatively lower frequency use of legal modal verb shall, and the much higher frequency of must and may not. The seemingly contrary usages within the UCC are discussed and explained with the background of the legislation and the legal thoughts of the major legislator in a sociosemiotic approach. With both the quantitative and qualitative analysis combining the examples, the study hopes to shed light on the related legal translation and further enhance the understanding of the modal verbs in the UCC as well as legal discourse in a more general context.

This study examines the key historical stages of the sustainable rural education policy development, including the stage of Rural Education Restoration and Adjustment Period (1979–1985); the stage of Comprehensive Reform Period of Rural Education (1985–2003); the stage of Rural Education Coordinated Development Period (2003–2018); and the stage of Rural Education Revitalization and Development Period (2018 to present). Along with the analysis, the policy characteristics of sustainable development of rural education policy in China concentrates on adhering to the unified leadership of the Party as the fundamental, adhering to the principle of comprehensive reform, adhering to the goal of serving rural development; adhere to promoting equity in education as the main task; and adhering to the construction of teachers as the key. In addition, policy problems on the sustainable development of rural education in China are also highlighted in this study. The conclusion and remarks are finally offered in the last.

This study aims to unpack policy evaluation and measurement of creating world-class universities in China from an integrated policy analysis. Specifically, an integrated policy analysis of policy evaluation of creating world-class universities concentrated on exploring the world class evaluation index released by the university rankings organization and the scholars’ views on the assessment criteria for world-class disciplines. The characteristics of policy evaluation of creating world-class (First-Class) universities included adhering to diversified comprehensive evaluation; clear educational objectives and positioning; taking students as the foundation and cultivate first-class talents and paying attention to scientific research and produce first-class achievements. In the meanwhile, problems existing in the policy evaluation of creating world-class universities were also explored in this study. The suggestion and implications were offered to deepen theoretical research and enhance the practical effect of third-party evaluation and improve the evaluation system for "Double Tops" construction and balance the two characteristics of "Chinese characteristics" and "world-class" and respect the development rules of universities and disciplines and create a systematic ecology of orderly competition.

This study explores the education governance system to deal with major public crisis in China. Specifically, the literature review on the emergency system of national education, the school’s response to public crisis and public crisis education have been examined to analyze the comprehensive development of China’s education governance system historically. The macro background and situation analysis of the education system’s response to the major public crisis includes the analysis of organizational system, institutional system, operation system, evaluation system, and guarantee system. In addition, this study also examines the major challenges and key issues for the education system to respond to major public crises. In the last, the pathways of the education system to deal with the major public crisis concentrate on establishing a multi-department coordination system for educational emergency response; establishing a permanent institution for educational emergency management; strengthening institutional building and formulate rules for crisis response; establishing a unified and flexible central and local coordinated response system; optimizing the construction of the operation system and improve the mechanism for crisis response; establishing a hierarchical response mechanism for education to respond to public crises, improving the security system and enhance the capability of comprehensive response, and establishing an early warning mechanism for education in response to public crises.

While collaborative curriculum design has gained increasing attention in the field of education, there is scant research as to how EFL teachers implement it in authentic design contexts. The present case study places particular emphasis on teacher activities during collaborative EFL curriculum development in China. The researchers adopt Activity Theory as an analytical tool to understand the relationships between EFL teachers, reform goals, and various aspects of the sociocultural context in which CCD is advocated, highlighting the pivotal role that mediation of knowledge/experience plays in the teacher learning community. Research findings indicate that the TDTs’ collaborative process is a socially constructed and culturally mediated activity that promotes EFL teacher development. Moreover, in-service teachers are prone to take challenges through educational reforms out of teacher motives and external stimuli. Limitations of the CCD model are also discussed to shed light on future research.

This study explores the doctoral cultivation system and mechanism of university think tank in China. A policy narrative analysis of doctoral cultivation mechanism aims to unpack how to cultivate university think tank talents. It is suggested that we need to promote the construction of interdisciplinary disciplines and clarify the attribution of disciplines for personnel training; build an interdisciplinary interaction mechanism and form a collaborative training system and give priority to the construction of policy disciplines as basic disciplines for personnel training. Along with the policy suggestions above, the cultivation pathways of cultivating doctoral students in university think tanks is provided systematically in the last section.

This study investigates how talent cultivation contributes to creating world-class universities in China from the perspectives of characteristics, problems, and choices. A policy discourse perspective is applied to examine the overall landscape of policy formulation and implementation, relatively. It explores the policy discourse analysis of talent cultivation and indicates that the task of talent cultivation is to train student to undertake the great task of national rejuvenation; the goal of talent cultivation is to guide students to grow and become talents; the mission of talent cultivation is to spread advanced culture and core values; the object of talent cultivation is to strengthen undergraduate and graduate education development; the theme of talent cultivation is to enhance innovation and entrepreneurship development. In addition, this study also points out that the assimilation of the objectives of talent training and regional imbalance of talent training are considered as two problems of implementing talent cultivation strategies. This study also suggests that we might reasonably adjust the hierarchical structure of students and control the scale of the school; create the characteristics of first-class talent training and promote the personalized development of talents and reasonably allocate higher education resources to promote the balanced distribution of talents.

This study explores how to optimize and improve the strategical development of urban schools in China from a policy analysis perspective. Geographically, urban school layout emphasizes the regional distribution of schools, which is affected by the geographical environment; Economically, urban school layout involves the adjustment and allocation of students' sources, educational funds, educational facilities and other elements. In terms of policy, urban school layout is the result of mutual consultation among different stakeholders, which is related to the flow of students and teachers, the satisfaction of students' needs and the educational needs of families. The strategical development of urban schools refers to a set of technical and management procedures applied to planning the spatial distribution and characteristics of schools, which can be applied to match the development of schools with the distribution of the school-age population and promote the achievement of educational policy objectives.

Green consumption values have been shown to motivate consumers to engage in green consumption practices. However, surprisingly little research has examined how green consumption values develop in young people. In the current study, we employed ecological socialization theory as a framework to investigate the process by which parents’ green consumption values shape similar values in their young adolescents. In Study 1, data from 722 Chinese families that included an early adolescent showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ green consumption values were positively associated with early adolescents’ green consumption values, and this association was mediated by each parent’s environmentally responsible consumption behavior. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 using two waves of matched parent-adolescent data collected a month apart from another group of 477 Chinese families. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that the mediation process identified in Study 1 was evident only when there was a close parent–child relationship. These findings have implications for cultivating the green consumption values of today’s youth. The results also have heuristic value for future research on the ecological socialization and inter-generational transmission of pro-environmental values.

This study investigates how to cultivate high-level innovative relents by the integration of science and education in China from a strategic policy perspective. Specifically, why should scientifically research and education be integrated to cultivate innovative talents has been explored in this study. Theoretical analysis of the integration of scientific research and education to cultivate innovative talents has been offered, systematically. New challenges of the integration of scientific research and education to cultivate innovative talents include the historical issues of the dual-track development of scientific research and education system; institutional issues of the separation of research and education systems; resource problem of lacking complement between scientific research and educational resources and positioning problem of insufficient coordination between scientific research and educational input. In addition, suggestions on the strategic pathway of integrating scientific research and education to cultivate innovative talents have been examined in the last part.

This study investigates how to create world-class universities in China from a policy mapping perspective. Specifically, policy connotations of creating world-class universities in China have been explored in this study. Policy mapping of creating world-class universities in China is mainly divided into two stages: Stage 1 focuses on the introduction and continuous improvement of the guiding overall plan; Stage 2 concentrates on conducting specific implementation plans, speeding up construction, and implementing them in colleges and universities. In addition, policy strategies on further improving the “Double first class” construction policy are also examined in this study.

This study explores how China’s education responses to COVID-19 from a perspective of policy analysis. Specifically, it involves building an educational policy system for COVID-19 to examine educational governance framework, school management and teaching, policies for teachers during the epidemic. The education policy during the epidemic has achieved positive results. Those results aim to ensure the physical and mental health of teachers and students, ensure the supply of epidemic prevention materials and educational resources, ensure the quality of students' learning, and enhance the application ability of teachers' teaching technology. The process of policy changes and effects of policy implementation have been examined to analyze how China’s education responses to COVID-19. The characteristics and experience of China's education policy in response to the epidemic concentrate on forming a governance system under the centralized and unified leadership of the Communist Party of China, building a pattern in which families and schools cooperate closely to promote the smooth development of education and teaching, transforming from an emergency substitute during the crisis into an important motivation to promote the transformation of education paradigm, and paying great attention to remote and poor areas and disadvantaged student groups.