National Access Policies for Higher Education in China: Creating Equal Opportunities in Education

‘Knowledge changes your destiny, and learning leads to your future success.’ This is a proverb that everyone knows and practices in China. With a long history of Confucian culture, China is a country that values education. It is China’s national policy to prioritize the development of education, and in the era of mass higher education (HE), it becomes the wish of every young man and woman to receive HE. Since the early twenty-first century, China has had the biggest HE system in the world, with more than 34.6 million of students in 2788 colleges and universities in 2013 (MoE, 2014). As a centralized country, China implements a unified examination and enrolment policy in all of its 34 provincial-level administrative units except Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, which have their own policies because of historical reasons. But at different levels of HE, the examination and enrolment policies are also different. In keeping with the other case study countries in this book, this chapter mainly discusses the examination and enrolment policies of undergraduate and short-cycle programmes, focusing on national policies to promote the participation in HE of the ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘under-represented’ groups.