Understanding Policy-Making in an Authoritarian State: An Ontology-Driven Framework for Analyzing Chinese Higher Education Policymaking

Studying Chinese higher education internationalization policy-making requires paying attention to the political ontology of China's top-designed policy-making system before proceeding to methodological approaches. The ontology is two-fold: a fixed reality grounded in the structure and agency of the one-party state, and an emergent reality that derives from the pervasive practice of using policy documents to govern. A two-pronged epistemology is proposed to uncover these realities: interpretative and poststructural problematization. Interpretative problematization helps discern how policy-makers frame a problem–solution discourse in policy documents to achieve predetermined strategic objectives. Contrastingly, poststructural problematization views policy documents as prescriptive texts that offer rules on how to behave. The potential methodologies drawn from the tradition of critical policy sociology can be employed to study these two problematizations, thereby unpacking the fixed and emergent realities.