Ancient Traditions Reshape the Global Debate on Higher Education’s Public Good

When Lili Yang published Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches with Bloomsbury in 2023, she opened a fault line in comparative education that a new review in the journal Higher Education suggests may redefine how scholars think about universities worldwide. The review, authored by Hongyi Tao of Tsinghua University and the UNESCO-affiliated International Centre for Engineering Education, and Xiaoshi Li of Nanjing Normal University, was published on 18 September 2026 and treats Yang’s book not as a routine contribution but as a foundational intervention. Its central claim is provocative: that the world’s oldest intellectual traditions, far from being museum pieces, can serve as living civilisational resources for resolving one of the most contested questions in modern academia, namely what higher education owes to the public.

At the heart of Yang’s book is a systematic comparison of how Chinese and Anglo-American societies conceive the public good of higher education. Using a method the review describes as trans-positional analysis, Yang moves between the two traditions across five key themes, refusing to treat either as a universal benchmark against which the other must be measured. In the Anglo-American tradition, the public good of universities has been framed largely through liberal individualism, market accountability and the state’s retreat from direct provision. In the Chinese tradition, by contrast, education has long been entwined with the moral cultivation of persons, the responsibilities of family and collectivity, and the state’s role as guarantor of social harmony and meritocratic mobility. Yang’s argument is that these are not merely different policy preferences but structurally different ways of generating public value.

The reviewers sharpen this point by distinguishing three levels at which the structural differences operate. At the normative level, the two traditions answer differently what a university is for: individual enrichment and economic productivity in the Anglo-American frame, versus self-perfection and collective flourishing in the Confucian frame. At the institutional level, they differ in how funding, governance and evaluation distribute responsibility between state, market and society, with Chinese higher education embedding the state more deeply in defining educational purpose, as seen in debates over the gaokao entrance examination and its double constraints. At the subjective level, students and academics internalise these divergent logics, shaping how individuals imagine their own agency, obligation and belonging within the university.

What makes the review—and the book it examines—technically significant for the field is the concept of epistemic justice, borrowed from Miranda Fricker’s 2007 work on power and the ethics of knowing. Applied to higher education research, epistemic injustice means that knowledge produced in non-Western traditions is systematically discounted, translated into Western categories or treated as exotic raw material rather than as theory in its own right. Tao and Li argue that Yang’s comparison directly challenges this Western-centrism. By drawing on Chinese philosophical resources with the same seriousness conventionally reserved for liberal political theory, the book performs what the reviewers call an advance in epistemic justice: it insists that the Chinese tradition can generate concepts, not merely case studies.

The most conceptually charged of these resources is tianxia, often translated as all-under-heaven, an classical Chinese vision of world order in which political and moral community extends across the entire known world rather than being bounded by nation-states. In recent years, philosopher Zhao Tingyang has revived tianxia as an ontological argument for a new world order, and Yang and her collaborators—including Simon Marginson and Xin Xu—have developed it as a heuristic for higher education, proposing a world-centred rather than nation-centred imaginary for global academia. Their 2024 article in Globalisation, Societies and Education, titled Thinking through the world, and their 2025 Higher Education paper on the global aspirations of Chinese universities both treat tianxia as a lens for imagining universities as contributors to a shared human world rather than competitors in a zero-sum rankings game.

Yet the review is refreshingly candid about the disputes this agenda has provoked, and it engages critics rather than dismissing them. Four risks receive sustained attention: reductionism, essentialism, re-orientalism and the co-optation of tianxia. Reductionism is the danger of flattening vast, internally diverse civilisations into single explanatory formulas. Essentialism treats Chinese and Western cultures as fixed, homogenous essences rather than dynamic, hybridising formations—a concern echoed by W.W. Lo and Rui Yang’s work on hybridisation and recombination in Chinese societies, and by Zhu, Shen and Yang’s 2025 Higher Education study showing how Chinese humanities and social science scholars actively transform traditions into academic resources rather than merely inheriting them.

Re-orientalism poses a subtler trap. Building on Edward Said’s 1977 critique of Orientalism and subsequent debates in Chinese scholarship by scholars such as Wang Ning and Zhou Ning, the reviewers note that even well-intentioned efforts to celebrate Chinese traditions can reproduce the same East-West binary that Orientalism created, positioning China as a mystical civilisational Other. Mulvey’s 2026 article in Comparative Education goes further, asking whether the essentialisation of China within so-called critical internationalisation studies constitutes a new Orientalism. The tianxia concept attracts the sharpest critique of all: Fei Yan’s 2026 article, The darker side of Tianxia, warns that the framework carries imperial histories and could be co-opted to serve state power, while Moreno García and Pines’s comparative historical work on Maat and Tianxia reminds readers that ancient world-order ideologies, Egyptian and Chinese alike, were instruments of rule as much as philosophies of harmony. Berlin debates between Zhao and Western philosophers, documented in World Philosophy, show that these objections are not merely external attacks but live controversies within the tianxia literature itself.

The reviewers’ response to these disputes is arguably the review’s most important analytical move. Rather than concluding that tradition-based research is too dangerous or too essentialist to pursue, they argue that the risks are internal to any serious cross-cultural scholarship and must be managed through methodological reflexivity, attention to hybridity and genuine two-way dialogue. They situate Yang’s book within a broader movement documented across the field: Xu’s work on epistemic diversity in comparative research and on a Chinese definition of internationalisation; Bamberger, Mulvey and Yan’s 2026 call for internationalisation scholarship beyond the Western horizon; Jackson and Kwak’s probing question of whether philosophy of education is Western at all; and parallel non-Western resources such as Dladla’s Ubuntu philosophy of liberation and Mun and Min’s account of the Korean public good as jeong. Seen together, these works suggest a discipline in the midst of an epistemic diversification whose trajectory Yang’s book may well consolidate.

The practical stakes extend well beyond theory. For policymakers, the three-level framework—normative, institutional, subjective—offers a diagnostic tool for understanding why policy transplants so often fail: a governance model detached from its civilisational soil produces different, and sometimes perverse, effects when grafted onto another tradition. For university leaders navigating international partnerships, the review implies that cooperation grounded in mutual conceptual translation will be more durable than arrangements that quietly assume Anglo-American categories are universal. For students, particularly the growing cohort of globally mobile learners whose identity negotiations are documented in Xiaoshi Li’s own research on Chinese master’s students in Hong Kong, the debate determines whether their educational traditions are treated as liabilities to be overcome or as resources to be drawn upon.

Tao and Li close with a forward-looking assessment: Yang’s book, they conclude, will prompt more equal and meaningful cross-cultural dialogues in the field, making it invaluable to researchers, policymakers, students and anyone interested in what they call civilisational dialogues. The phrase is telling. What began as a book review has become a statement about the future epistemology of higher education research itself—a field long dominated by centres in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and increasingly challenged by scholarship from East Asia and the Global South. Whether tianxia, Confucian self-cultivation and kindred concepts can enrich a genuinely global conversation without hardening into new orthodoxies remains an open question. But the review makes clear that the question can no longer be avoided, and that the answer will shape how universities everywhere understand their public purpose.

Subject of Research: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research

Article Title: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects

Article References: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Keywords: higher education, public good, cross-cultural dialogue, tianxia, epistemic justice, comparative education, Chinese tradition, Anglo-American higher education, Western-centrism, civilisational dialogue, Lili Yang, internationalisation