Internationalizing the Social Sciences in China (eBook)

Meng Xie is a lecturer and Distinguished Young Scholar in the School of Education at Renmin University of China (RUC) in Beijing. Her primary research focuses on higher education, international and comparative higher education, internationalization and international academic relations, and educational policy and management. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Higher Education, Frontiers of Education in China, and Tsinghua Journal of Education. She has taught courses for undergraduate, master and doctoral students, including History of Higher Education and Globalization and Higher Education Reforms. Prior to her appointment at the RUC, she obtained her PhD in Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Education from the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong and a master's degree in Higher Education from the Institute of Education of Tsinghua University. She was also a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University. Her current research centers on the intellectual history and academic influence of the Chinese social sciences, Chinese intellectuals, and spaces of global knowledge in the social sciences.

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The current social reality and changing global forces and spaces are inspiring the rethinking, refining, and re-empowering of the world social sciences to broach the frontiers of human knowledge, enhance mutual understanding across cultures and civilizations, and shape a better world. Taking Tsinghua University's sociology as a case, this book concentrates on how internationalization shapes disciplinary development in a global context of asymmetrical academic relations. This inquiry is set amidst China's dramatic economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, as well as the institutional reforms in this Chinese flagship university. This book seeks to probe how Chinese and Western knowledge, institutions, and cultures are integrated in the ongoing process of internationalization and concentrates on the disciplinary evolution of Tsinghua's sociology-intellectually, institutionally, and culturally-drawing on top-down higher education policy and bottom-up perceptions and experiences of Tsinghua's social scientists. This book highlights that higher education internationalization is an evolving process whose advanced phase would require Chinese social scientists to bring China to the world. It is time for Tsinghua University to reassess the long-term impact of internationalization on its academic disciplines and provide sufficient support for the development of the social sciences.This book will attract academics, practitioners, and postgraduate students interested in higher education internationalization, international academic relations, global constellation and distribution of academic power, academic knowledge production, and the development and intellectual influences of the Chinese social sciences.