| Since the early 1980s, China's system for placing graduates from its universities in employment positions has gradually changed from one based on central planning to one which is intended to reflect market forces. An examination of these reforms sheds light on how the Chinese Communist Party has guided China's political and socioeconomic transition in the post-Mao era. I argue that the Party's involvement has led to mixed and unintended results. To ensure that Chinese universities cultivate reliable Party successors, the Party has established a series of institutions and practices, discussed in the dissertation, which pose significant constraints on the achievement of university reform objectives intended to improve educational quality and human resource development.;This study finds that the higher education case illustrates the broader proposition that the Party's attempts to maintain its power and legitimacy in a rapidly changing China through state transformation in its modes of governance has led to some successes, indicating that the regime maintains a certain level of resilience. But, the Party's flexibility with regard to reforms in governance is limited by its insistence that the established instruments of Party control be maintained. This is the ultimate political logic of China's political and socioeconomic transition.;During the 1980 to 1997 period, market-oriented reforms in placement, financing, and recruitment achieved a number of successes due to appropriate self-adjustments in the state's modes of governance. By 1998, however, the challenges of higher educational reform became more complex, and required more fundamental institutional reforms which were inconsistent with the maintenance of the instruments of Party control. In the absence of political reform to create genuine university autonomy, the further appeal to market-oriented reforms led to a series of perverse outcomes, including serious quantitative and qualitative mismatches in the supply and demand of graduates and employment opportunities. |
