Chinese basic education has undergone profound changes since China
introduced the market-oriented economy in the 1980s. All the social
changes in the past four decades can be traced to the very first reform
and opening-up policy in 1978, which were a historical turning point
marking a new era in China. This Ph.D. dissertation investigates the
transformation of Chinese basic education through educational reforms
focused on quality evaluation and assessment. This dissertation was
prepared during a consortium comparative project, funded by the Academy
of Finland from 2014 to 2017, which investigated how the rise of quality
assurance and evaluation (QAE) as an influential force has reshaped
educational politics in three countries: Brazil, Russia and China (BCR).
This dissertation focuses on one of these countries—China—and analyses
how Chinese educational development has changed in interaction with its
historical, cultural, political and global contexts. During educational
development over the past four decades, the Chinese state has undertaken
several rounds of reforms to improve basic education, first from a
quantitative perspective and then from a qualitative perspective. The
many reforms since the late 2000s have included the establishment of
large-scale assessment.



This dissertation locates educational changes at the interface of
the global–local, the traditional–nonconventional and the
political–apolitical to analyse the characteristics of the politics of
change. The transformation of education evaluation and assessment has
occurred within a changing, contested context fused with contests
between multiculturalism and nationalism, internationalism and
regionalism, elitism and populism, and many other -isms, such as
neoliberalism, postmodernism and universalism. This dissertation takes a
critical but constructive stance towards political studies of education
and socio-cultural studies of China and re-assesses their strengths,
limitations and applicability to analyse the politics of change in
China.



This article-based doctoral dissertation is grounded in three
publications with three main themes: institutional changes, changes in
political discourse, and changes in actors’ positions in policy-making.
The data were collected in China during 2015 and 2016 using
semi-structured interviews and snowball sampling. Qualitative thematic
and discourse analysis were applied to analyse the data.



Article I examines institutional transformation by analysing the
developmental trajectory and institutionalisation process of educational
changes. Drawing on institutional theory, this study finds that Chinese
institutions of supervision have the flexibility to adapt to new
environments through multiple methods, reinforcing their authority and
positions in the political system. For instance, inspection (the old)
incorporates assessment systems (the new) to increase its capacity. This
finding challenges the traditional institutional understanding that new
institutions replace old ones in the process of institutional learning.



Article II analyses the discursive transformation of education
politics focusing on the topic of education equality and equity based on
the state’s official documents from 1980s. The analysis of political
discourse indicates changes in political orientations and the
reconstruction of political power. The study shows that in the Chinese
official discourse, the political agenda decides how to recognise and
define equality and equity. The state’s official discourse further
defines the political reality of whether inequality is considered to be
problematic and how policy is made to address inequality.



Article III focuses on the role of Chinese experts in knowledge
brokering and on changes in their status in Chinese education
policy-making. Through analysing how local experts in China perceive
global knowledge and what reasons support their actions in knowledge
brokering, this study shows that Chinese Academic Experts representing
Chinese top intellectuals display exclusive acceptance on the technical
level and give mostly uncritical recognition to advancements in
international educational assessment. Their acceptance of international
large-scale assessment has led directly to the establishment of Chinese
large-scale assessment. Behind the exclusive acceptance of the global
education agenda of QAE, educational internationalisation has a hidden
but strong nostalgic, nationalist agenda to restore China to its past
status as a strong nation respected by all other countries.



Through these three articles, this dissertation provides new
insights into the study on politics of change, such as transformation of
the object (being changed) and the subject (initiating change); the
nature of time as not linear but relational and collective, as presented
in cultural studies on the politics of change; and the significance of
distinguishing the manifestations of change and the underlying ideas
supporting change. In the Chinese context, particularly Chinese
educational politics, the importance of cultural perspectives should be
better acknowledged as they are interlinked to the core reasons why
change happens or is resisted. Methodologically, this dissertation
demonstrates that relational and transactional approaches can be used to
explain the interrelationships between the causes and consequences of
human actions and interactions.