CGHE Webinar 274

Thinking through tianxia: A new/old heuristic for worldwide higher education

Date: Thursday, 3 March 2022 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar

Speaker(s):

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Ancient China was the source of two major ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. First, tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which influenced thinking in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047-771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). Both strands run through Chinese history. Tianxia varies between world-centred and China-centred approaches. Since the Qin, the nation-state has been a stronger influence but tianxia remains the method of conceiving the world level, and it impacts state thinking. In the last twenty years discussion of tianxia has revived, especially through Zhao Tingyang, primarily stimulated by globalisation and the need to understand relations beyond the nation state. As such tianxia has the potential to fill an important gap in higher education theory and practice, because of its spatiality, and its focus on the relational values that maximise universal benefit in a diverse higher education setting. The webinar reviews the different strands of discussion of tianxia, ancient and modern, and develops a tianxia higher education heuristic for interpreting and developing higher education and knowledge. The conclusion summarises eight principles which could be the basis for agreement by diverse organisations and persons in a tianxia world of higher education.

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Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

Lili Yang

Lili Yang is an assistant professor at Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a PhD researcher and then a postdoctoral researcher at CGHE. Her research interests include higher education, cross-cultural comparison of higher education, and higher education policy. Her forthcoming book is titled ‘Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches’ (Bloomsbury).

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk

Dr Xin Xu

Xin Xu (许心) is a Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education at the University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on higher/tertiary education and research.