Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

What Makes Universities in China and Russia
Engage in Partnerships across the Border?
Andrey Uroda
When education crosses borders, it is neither a simple event, nor is it a
series of occasional or insignificant measures. The crossing of borders
is the result of careful reasoning. Initializing cross-border educational
settings is difficult. Explaining why and how it becomes important
to transcend borders makes for an even more challenging task. The
extent to which educators are driven by practices and patterns might
be tied to their nation’s agendas, and thus seeking explanations
behind the moves are questions that may be raised among leaders
within these cross-border institutional settings. Any attempt to study
internationalization, as such, takes into consideration the functioning
of a number of multifaceted factors.
It is no longer an acknowledged universal truth that nation states
are the only players in the world game (Fujikane, 2003); consequently,
success in having an initiative performing fruitfully is, in the present
time, also in the hands of the actors themselves. Thus, they are no
longer dependent only on policies imposed by the governments from
above.
The two case studies of partnership presented in this paper are
second-tier, but ambitious higher educational institutions in Harbin
in China and Vladivostok in Russia. These institutions successfully
met the challenges of establishing cross-border dual (Bachelor) degree
programs for Chinese students completing their entire course of study
based in the two countries.
It is not my purpose here to define the underlying reasons behind
having the institutions and their leaders in China and Russia. These
are presumably determined by local conditions rather than ministerial
decisions. Nor do I undertake the task of measuring the importance
of different factors. A general observation gauged from a number
of interviews with Russian (N=7) and Chinese (N=7) university
and program administrators in the spring of 2006 is that it is the
market which drives universities to seek innovations and diverse
categories of student bodies while creating and adapting relevant
programs. This observation from the informants has been supported
by some literature, primarily of Australian and American origin. The
suggestion is that the localizing or border-crossing drive involves a
variety of stakeholders and changes our common perceptions of what
international higher education is all about.
I would argue that this drive is comparative in its nature.
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