Overall speaking, from the results of Malmquist-TFP index and its decompo-
sition, we can see that technical progress is the biggest driver of TFP growth, and
TFP growth is highly relied on the improvement of TC, which is true to both
NEAM disciplines and HSS disciplines in 211Us. It’s worth noting that there are
different patterns between NEAM and HSS disciplines to some extent. To NEAM
disciplines, TC index shows a stable and increasing trend all along, but to HSS
disciplines, their TC index experiences much biggerfluctuations apparently. It’s
possible that thesefluctuations unfold the trait of promptness and one-shot deal
contained in the technical changes of HSS disciplines, which would not bring these
disciplines sustainable growth in research innovation, let alone creating an optimal
path for building up world-class university. To achieve the goal of creating
world-class universities, the research mode nested with sustainability and inten-
siveness is a better choice for most 211Us. If not, one-shot investment would not
only bring unintendedfluctuations to their growth, but also bring a serious waste of
scarce research resources.
and Non-985Us....................................... 5.2 Differences and Trends on Research Productivity of 985Us
of 985Us and Non-985Us
Accompanying by China’s ever-increasing economic development, building up
world-class universities in China is the goal of each higher education educator and
administrator. During this process, Chinese government employs gradient devel-
opment strategy by launching“211 Project”and“985 Project”in 1995 and 1998
respectively, which signals China’s ambition to support thefirst group of top
universities to run into the“club”of world-class universities. Compared with“ 211
Project”,“985 Project”is much more like a milestone. At Peking Universities’ 100
anniversaries, former President Zemin Jiang pointed out that,“the universities in
our nation should be the major force of rejuvenating China through science and
education”, and“in order to achieve modernization, our nation must possess some
first-class universities at world-pioneering level”.
To some extent, the implementation of“985 Project”marked the overall opening
of the practices on building up high-level research universities. Under this guid-
ance, central and local governments concentrated their human resources,financial
and physical investments on the 39 985Us. Similar with our descriptive statistics of
211Us’input-output data in Chap. 4 , compared with other 211Us, those 211Us
entering“985 Project”are usually of higher research level, and more prominent
position. They’re granted much more research funds, equipped with more
high-level researchers and high-tech facilities, and at the same time, they gain
higher expectations from both the nation and the society. However, just as men-
tioned above, in the process of building up world-class universities, we should not
only pay attention to the absolute increases of research inputs and outputs, but also
to the improvement of research productivity, they are both closely related to the
5.1 Change of Research Productivity in 211Us 225