A Collaborative Governance Model of Sino-Foreign Higher Education Institutions in the Post-crisis Era

In the past few years, the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of populism, anti-globalization, unilateralism, and nationalism, geopolitical crises such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the prolonged economic downturn have brought the world to a crossroads on globalization. In such a context, internalization of higher education is confronted with great challenges, while Sino-foreign institutions have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of the crises and have been forced to respond to the challenges and explore alternative crisis-response methods through new crisis management strategies. Taking Covid-19 pandemic crisis as a case, the current study collected policy documents, news reports, and announcements concerning pandemic crisis governance from the Ministry of Education (MOE), provincial education departments, and Sino-foreign universities within one year after the outbreak the pandemic. Based on these materials, the actions of Sino-foreign institutions associated with crisis management were summarized and tabulated based on the grounded theory method. This study put forward a public crisis collaborative governance model of Sino-Foreign institutions as "the government guides, the university leads, and the society participates", showing the successful application of collaborative governance in Sino-foreign institutions. This study contributes to the collaborative governance theory, and provides theoretical and practical references for universities, government and society in terms of improving governance abilities and optimizing governance systems for the future.