Chinese control of international educational relations: The case of the re-establishment of anthropology

This study is about anthropology in Chinese universities and how the discipline's history illustrates China's control of its educational relationships with other countries. The study describes the development and indigenization of anthropology in China before 1949, its banishment from the universities in the early 1950's, and its re-establishment in two institutions after the Cultural Revolution.;In the 1980's, two major developments have emerged in anthropology and its academic setting. First, the discipline and the universities have become increasingly connected to a world-wide educational community through faculty members' personal international relationships, increases in study abroad, importing of books and ideas from the West, growth of English language study, influences of international culture upon students and aid given by foreign and international organizations.;Second, the Chinese have maintained control of universities and the anthropology discipline through the training of future faculty in apprenticeships with senior professors, the renewing of teachers' status, the preserving of orthodoxy through political and military programs, the constraining of theory with ideology, the nurturing of an indigenous anthropology and the building of closely-knit student groups.;Despite the high degree of Chinese control, faculty face a dilemma of continuing to mentor young teachers in the departments where they will teach in the future, versus helping them to enter graduate programs abroad. In addition, the dominance of Lewis Henry Morgan's stages of cultural evolution in current Chinese anthropological theory reflects a politically acceptable appropriation from the Western discipline.;The study uses ethnographic data from four months of field work in the anthropology departments of two Chinese universities and historical accounts of the development of Chinese social science.;The case of anthropology demonstrates successful Chinese management of their educational relations with foreign countries. Furthermore, the case suggests that theoretical frameworks other than dependency and world systems must now be developed to help understand the Chinese situation.