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Silent Revolution--Social Origins And University Matriculation At Peking University And Suzhou University, 1952-2002, Danching Ruan, Chan Liang, James Lee, Hao Zhang, Lan Li, Cameron Campbell, Shanhua Yang

Dr. RUAN, Danching

China has witnessed a revolution in higher education since 1949. One important fact of this revolution is undergraduate admissions to China’s elite universities, which in spite of the many profound political, social, and economic changes over the last half-century, have remained consistently open. Students from worker or peasant families rapidly replaced a previous monopoly by students from upper-class families on elite education. Moreover, the proportion of such working-class students has remained quite large until the end of the twentieth century. This silent revolution in higher education is a product not just of China’s emphasis on expanding primary and high school …