Part II: Policies and Institutional Changes Chapter 6 Policy and Implementation in the Processes of China’s Higher Education Development and De-Sovietization: Reflections from Global, Cross-National, and Institutional Perspectives Hantian Wu, 1 Yuzhu Gu, 2 Qiang Zha, 3 and Qiubo Yang 2 Abstract Since the 1990s, China’s higher education (HE) system has set ambitious goals to simultaneously push for rapid enrollment growth, create new governance structures, and build world-class universities. The aggregate enrollment in the HE sector grew from 3.4 million in 1998 4 to 36.5 million in 2015. The number of institutions increased from 1,022 to 2,852 in the same time span, or by 2.8 times. Now China’s HE stands out as the world’s largest system, and a large proportion of high school leavers in the country are able to continue their education at the tertiary level, formerly a privilege for the very few. In the meantime, the Chinese government has been making large investments in elite universities (e.g., Projects 211 and 985) to raise some universities and programs to a world-class level. China’s HE has exhibited systemic transformations since the early 1990s, and this chapter aims to shed new light on the dynamics and drivers behind these changes. Specifically, we address two research questions: (1) What caused these changes in Chinese higher education –given their breadth and depth? And (2) Were these changes driven by internal motives or external forces – given their efficiency and impacts? Moreover, at the institutional level, the transformation and development of specific Chinese HE institutions (HEIs) in the past two decades tends to reflect the 1 East China Normal University, Faculty of Education, Shanghai, China; wuhantian7@gmail.com. 2 Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. 3 York University, Faculty of Education, Toronto, Canada. 4 The year immediately before the latest expansion, which aimed to massify the system.