Local Response to a Global Agenda: Changing State-Education Relations in Mainland China

Some globalists have stressed the limitations of a state-centered approach in analyzing socioeconomic developments, thereby pointing out that the external constraints on states have significantly reduced the state’s capacity to respond to the changing and far more complicated socio-political-economic environments. For those radical globalists, the increasing interdependence and connectedness of nation-states have made the state less of an autonomous decision-making body, and local policies are increasingly shaped by global trends (O’Brien 1992; Ohmae 1995). Nonetheless, recent comparative studies on education policy show that even though there seem to be similar patterns and trends in education development in East Asian societies,