Sowing Dragon’s Teeth and Harvesting Fleas? – A Historical Inquiry into China’s Education-Aid Programs since the 1970s

This paper reviews the historical evolution of China’s education-aid programs. These specific programs are seemingly consistent with China’s education reform legacy. With a cross-disciplinary survey regarding how foreign-aid policy commitments got delivered, the paper proposes more inclusive approaches for interpreting local contexts relevant to China’s education-aid policies. The following discussion first presents local evidence to provide plausible explanations from the national background of China’s social-economic reforms since the 1970s. Then it gives a case study of Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, to examine how the local higher-education institutions have managed those education-aid practices since the late 1990s. Re-visiting a variety of mainstream views on China’s evolving national identity as a member of the Global South, the article ends by making some analysis of significance to the evolution of China’s education-aid policies.