Chinese Students’ Dilemmas of Neoliberal Storm in Ivory Tower: A Top-down Reasoning and Bottom-up Solutions’ Proposal

With rapidly developing globalization and modernization, Chinese university students' values and competencies have been discursively shaped in the prevailing neoliberal Ivory Tower. Also, influenced by Confucian values, Chinese university students regard higher education as the most significant chance of promoting their social class. Firstly, with the economic history approach, this study illustrates the cultural-acceptance process of neoliberalism in China. Secondly, with the top-down reasoning, this study critically analyses Chinese university students' dilemmas like heavy competitive pressure, weak socio-emotional skills, limited critical analysis and inadequate creativity in examination-oriented and teacher-centered higher education resulting from social stratification pressure of low socio-economic status families for social stratification, the World Class University movement, and broader political, economic contexts. Furthermore, in terms of “gloncal agency heuristic” (Marginson & Rhoades, 2002), and a multi-level stakeholder analysis about the micro, meso, and macro-level educational challenges in the Chinese higher education system, this paper develops a bottom-up solutions' proposal about student-centered and self-learning constructivism strategy. Moreover, the proposed social-emotional skills and transversal competencies for Chinese university students involve critical thinking, self-efficacy, interpersonal, intrapersonal, cognitive, intercultural communicative competence, empathy, cosmopolitanism as global citizens, and a common identity. In conclusion, the proposed bottom-up solutions are as follows: (1) SDGs-based liberal arts curriculum for the public value construction; (2) student-centered pedagogy for Chinese students' autonomy formation; (3) civic-life engagement for “whole person” cultivation. This constructive proposal aims at facilitating students to overcome competitive status anxiety independently with inner motivation, global employability, and finally realize social mobility through transformative higher education.