135research. A first national higher education society was established around then by
Professor Pan.
During 1980s, almost 200 of institutes of higher education research were estab-
lished in Chinese colleges and universities. Rather than defining their own research
agenda, their main roles were in consulting and supporting local governments and
university leadership on issues of higher education and institutional development. It
was not until the first cross-institutional conference of institutes of higher education
research coordinated by Professor Pan and Professor Wang in October of 1989 that
an explicitly scholarly agenda to shape higher education as a research field in China
began to emerge (Pan 1995 ).
Given the rising number of higher education institutes, not every institute could
establish programs to enroll students. Higher education research center at Xiamen
University was authorized to run the first master program specialized in higher edu-
cation in 1984 and then the first doctoral program in 1986. Xiamen University was
honored as the first national key disciplinary site (xuekedian) in higher education.
This title not only implied academic and symbolic capitals but also brought in sub-
stantial financial supports from the state through quotas of research students and
generous research funding. The recognized status and reputation of this research
center at Xiamen University have, in turn, reinforced the standing of HER in China.
Following their counterpart at Xiamen, the Institute of Higher Education
Research at Peking University was also approved by the state to recruit master and
doctoral students, respectively, in 1986 and 1990. Two institutes adopted diverged
visions of developing the HER either as a unique discipline standing on its own
theories or as a field of absorbing theories and methods from other major disciplin-
ary fields, such as economics, psychology, and sociology (Chen 2010 ). Different as
they have been, the two leading institutes of higher education research in China are
more like brothers than rivals to enrich the diversity of the HER.
Meanwhile, HER journals were proliferating as tangible means to disseminate
the outputs of knowledge production in the field. Around 400 such journals existed
by the end of the 1980s (Li 2005 : 202). Journal of Higher Education (gaodeng
jiaoyu yanjiu), founded in 1980 by Huazhong College of Technology (now
Huazhong University of Science and Technology), is ranked the second most pres-
tigious educational journal in China today.
In the Chinese context, the state is an essential player in formally institutional-
izing the HER, but the growing scholarship as well as the enlarging academic com-
munity also contributes to the development of the HER along with the substantive
system changes in the field of higher education.
After 1999, the Chinese higher education system has been enormously expanded.
During the historical expansion of the system, HER in China has benefited from rich
resources from the practical field of real problems and the pressing policy needs.
Researchers are conscious of reviewing the field regularly and making the research
field more visible than ever before. Any explicit review was rare before the 2000s.
The first notable attempt to record such information was made in 1999 by Professor
Chen Xuefei in publishing an edited anthology of selected journal articles on higher
education between 1949 and 1999. In the 2000s the number of review articles which
7 Higher Education Research in China: An Independent Academic Field Under the State