4: System Leadership for Promoting Collective Responsibility and Communities of Learners: Insights from China

Midway through preparing this chapter, the COVID-19 virus surfaced and spread worldwide, much like ink dropped into water. The outbreak was first detected in Wuhan, China. China imposed a raft of draconian social distancing and ‘lockdown’ rules which, at the time, stunned the global community. Massive resources were mobilised to build two hospitals in Wuhan in one week and tens of thousands of health-care workers conscripted from all corners of the country to support the medical system in Hubei Province. Many of these decisions were contentious to both insiders and outsiders. As the Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson (2020) wrote in the New York Times, ‘outsiders … fixate on China’s authoritarian political system’, and this causes them to discount the possible value and relevance of some of its decisions, and how they are made. In this chapter, we explore system leadership in education in China. Our discussion focusses on the shape and impact of strong central decision-making on schooling and learning effectiveness and its implications at the international scale.