The abrupt dismissal of Chinese education minister Zhou Ji on Saturday is an attempt to allay growing public frustration with the country’s education system, analysts say. But what the shakeup means for higher-education policy is still unclear.
In a routine meeting, the executive committee of China’s legislature removed Mr. Zhou, who at 63 was just two years short of retirement, and replaced him with Yuan Guiren, a vice minister whose background positions him as an outsider among Beijing’s policy elite. Mr. Zhou was appointed deputy party secretary at Beijing’s Chinese Academy of Engineering, a less important but still significant post.
Mr. Zhou’s removal comes amid widespread dissatisfaction with China’s higher-education system, which has expanded hugely since the 1990s. Many of the problems that have developed with the expansion predated his term in office.
“He is taking blame for a lot of the challenges facing a system in rapid transition,” said Dali Yang, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. “Changing the leader helps placate public sentiment.”
In the past two decades, university enrollment has skyrocketed, from 3 percent of 18- to 22-year-olds in 1990 to 23 percent in 2008. Hundreds of new universities have cropped up to accommodate these students.
But as universities multiplied, the central government reworked their administration, handing over responsibility for lesser institutions to provincial authorities. Quality suffered, giving way to high student-professor ratios and an alarming gap in quality between elite and mass institutions.
Other problems include rampant plagiarism among students and professors, ballooning institutional debt, and entrenched corruption—including the sale of exam scores and professors who pressure their students to hire them as private tutors.
International news reports have speculated that Mr. Zhou may have been linked to a corruption scandal in Wuhan, where he spent several years as president of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and later served as mayor.
In September two senior administrators at Wuhan University were arrested for accepting millions of yuan in bribes for construction contracts. But while the scandal may have helped prompt Mr. Zhou’s removal, education scholars and political observers interviewed by The Chronicle say there is no indication that Mr. Zhou is implicated.
Mr. Zhou’s new post does not suggest serious punishment, said Stanley Rosen, director of the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. “It’s a sign that he’s a scapegoat, not that he’s corrupt.”
The shift, he added, “reflects more the general problems that have plagued education for a long time rather than any particular corruption on Zhou Ji’s part.”
Others say they have been expecting Saturday’s announcement since well before the Wuhan scandal broke. Mr. Zhou’s departure has been a possibility since as early as last year, the South China Morning Post reported Monday. That was when Chen Zhili, Zhou Ji’s immediate supervisor as State Councilor, was dismissed and given a new, largely honorary post.
In March, when China’s legislature met to vote in a new cabinet for five-year terms, Zhou Ji received only 84 percent of the votes—the lowest confidence rating of any minister.
Later, Premier Wen Jiabao publicly commented on China’s escalating education woes.
An Unusual Pick
Last Friday the state-run People’s Daily ran an article with the headline “Education Expansion Resulting in Intensified Resource Constraints and Increasing Complaints About Quality"—an unusually bleak assessment from a government mouthpiece.
The next day, the state news agency Xinhua announced Mr. Zhou’s removal.
While scholars disagree on what the appointment of Mr. Yuan will mean for higher education, his background is notable. The new minister began his career at 19 as a teacher in a rural corner of poor Anhui province. He later studied philosophy at Beijing Normal University, a respected education institution, and from 1999 to 2001 served as the university’s president.
That career path makes him an oddity among the Beijing elite. Many top officials hold degrees from prestigious Peking University and Tsinghua University, often in engineering.
Critics say the new minister has less international experience than Mr. Zhou, who earned a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo. Others say his training in philosophy and links to education scholars could be an asset.
His appointment could signal a new emphasis on the humanities and social sciences, as well as more resources for China’s lesser universities, said Qiang Zha, an expert on Chinese higher education at York University, in Toronto.
“He will bring a different perspective to the job,” he said. “He may look more closely at the balanced growth and development of universities.”
Mr. Yuan’s background could also be a liability, however. The education minister remains subservient to other officials, and membership in the elite is important for securing approval for financing, among other things.
“Humanistic people aren’t taken seriously,” said Mr. Rosen. “He knows the education field very well, but he doesn’t have clout outside the education bureaucracy.”
What is clear is that Mr. Yuan has inherited a decentralized, bloated higher-education system. Fixing reforms initiated under his predecessors will be far from easy.
In the short term, however, the change seems to have assuaged public concerns.
Shortly after the switch in ministers was announced Saturday night, online forums filled with celebration. On its Web site, People’s Daily opened a thread entitled “Say a Few Words to the New Education Minister.”
Within a few hours, hundreds of people had posted messages imploring Mr. Yuan to eliminate corruption, raise instructors’ pay, and improve oversight of education.
“I hope that, with the cooperation of others in the academic world, you can go a long way toward solving these problems,” one wrote.