The research-intensive university in a glonacal higher education system: The creation of the world-class university in China

Research-intensive universities worldwide are embedded in the environment constituted of multiple layers and conditions. On the one hand, these universities are deeply involved in the global higher education system, being influenced by global forces. On the other hand, they play a key role in enhancing a country’s competitiveness. They receive national supports and are subject to national influences. It is therefore fair to argue that the future of research-intensive universities seems to be largely determined by global and national forces. However, we also argue that the future also depends on the research-intensive universities themselves in terms of how they respond to various forces. The paper employs a glonacal agency heuristic to explore how certain research-intensive Chinese universities exercise agency in response to global and national impacts in creating the world-class university. Two global forces (international scholarly discussions on the world-class university and global university rankings) and one national force (China’s Double First-Class Project) are considered. Through an in-depth document analysis of 41 Chinese research-intensive universities’ strategic plans, it is revealed that the universities have designed mainly three strategies to reply to the impacts. The first is to actively embrace global impacts, while looking for national supports for the embracement; the second is to partly draw on global forces while taking into account national considerations; and the third is to primarily draw on national forces while being minimally influenced by global forces. The three strategies point to possible ways for non-Western universities to balance global and national influences in their development, and reflect potential contributions of universities, as local organisational agencies, to global higher education.