糖心传媒

Comparative Education (CE) has long been entangled with the study of other countries and societies. Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) traced the foci of CE from ‘knowing the “other”’, ‘understanding the “other”’ to ‘constructing the “other”’, and ‘measuring the “other”’; Steiner-Khamsi (2006) recounted the influence of development and area studies on CE during the Cold War; Takayama (2015, p. 39) described the redefinition of CE in Japan as ‘area studies of education’. Although area-specialised research has had a significant impact on CE, the academic field of Area Studies (AS) is under-researched among comparativists, especially since the field has significantly declined in Europe and North America following the end of the Cold War.  

In contrast to what has been described as the ‘crisis’ of Area Studies in the West with surging critiques towards the field’s Western-centric past, there has been a rapid expansion of AS in Chinese universities. In 2022 and 2025 respectively, China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) designated Area Studies–known literally as ‘Country and Region Studies (CRS)’–as a first-level postgraduate discipline and an undergraduate major, allowing universities in China to set up departments and programmes with the title of CRS.

These policies promoting Area Studies have led to unprecedented attention on and enthusiasm for its sub-fields, including Southeast Asian Studies, African Studies, and Latin American Studies, that were previously marginalised compared to studies on major developed countries. The number of AS centres in higher education institutions (HEIs) registered at China’s MOE soared from 37 (MOE, 2012) to more than 400 in 2024. From 2022 to 2025, new AS departments mushroomed in a range of HEIs, from the College of African Area and Country Studies at Zhejiang Normal University to the Institute of Area Studies and International Communication at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Why has China upscaled the study of foreign countries and regions? How is this field defined in governmental policies? How have HEIs interpreted the development of Area Studies in the West? Based on reviews of MOE’s policy documents and journal articles discussing the construction of the AS/CRS discipline in China, I share below some of my initial analysis.

First, there is a shift in the conceptualisation of Area Studies in MOE policies from an aspect of the ‘internationalisation of higher education (IoHE)’ to an instrument to ‘tell China’s story well’. As early as 2011, Area Studies received official attention from China’s Vice Premier Liu Yandong at the National Education Work Conference who mentioned AS as a new measure to advance ‘Reform and Opening Up’. Following this conceptualisation, from 2014 to 2019, Area Studies was constantly listed in MOE’s annual work priorities under the section titled ‘education opening up’ along with other IoHE policies on, for example, in/out-bound student mobility and transnational higher education. However, this portrayal of Area Studies as an element of internationalisation has gradually turned towards a focus on building national power emphasising the promotion of the positive image of China. In 2025, Area Studies was included in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (Xinhua, 2025), which highlighted the field’s mission ‘to make international communication more effective’ under the goal of ‘extending the reach and appeal of Chinese civilization’. This shift moves the field of AS away from its association with the humanitarian elements of IoHE (discussed in Bamberger et al., 2019) towards the prioritisation of policy research and national agendas.

Second, existing ‘borders’ in China’s Area Studies are marginalising humanities and critical scholarship. ‘Borders’, as Schweisfurth (2025) describes, represent particular conceptions of education and pedagogy in an academic field, but create divisions in practice. Building on this concept, I identify some major ‘borders’ in China’s AS: the border between policy research and more theoretical inquiries, between humanities (e.g. History and Foreign Languages) and social sciences (e.g. International Politics), and between research on major powers (e.g. the United States) and smaller countries. In practice, those ‘borders’ were institutionalised by: the merging of ‘Area Studies’ into the ‘International Politics/Studies’ section of the National Social Science Fund of China from 2024; the framing of policy research around the creation of ‘think tank’ as one of the core functions of AS university departments; and as some of my research interviewees shared, the challenges of publishing research on small countries and non-policy topics on high impact journals. Xie (2021) noted the decline of published articles on social and cultural studies in  Southeast Asian Studies as a result of this ‘policy turn’.

Third, the rapid expansion of policy studies in China’s AS ‘silently borrowed’ (Waldow, 2009) from American practices in the 1960s-70s, whilst in parallel Western AS was selectively interpreted and criticised. In the guidelines released by China’s Academic Degree Committee (2024), the development of Area Studies in the United States was positively described as: ‘a large number of interdisciplinary scholars and research projects have played a special role in implementing national strategies and safeguarding national interests for the U.S.’. The guidelines then went on to criticise Western Area Studies as ‘constrained by Western value biases’, ‘judging countries and regions around the world based on Western experience’ and ‘portraying the Western path as universal’. While this interpretation mirrors the tenets of decolonial scholarship that criticise Western dominance in knowledge-making, it seems to have a narrow focus only on parts of the field’s history in European colonial empires and during the Cold War. This neglects AS’s recent decolonial and post-colonial scholarship, such as Escobar (Encountering Development), Mamdani (Citizen and Subject), and Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe). Nor does this portrayal of Western AS include the emerging ‘Comparative Area Studies’ (German Institute for Global and Area Studies, n.d.) that aspires to bridge generalising theories and local contexts.

Fourth, as MOE policies brand Area Studies as ‘Country and Region Studies’, there has been increasing popularity for framing the field through a Chinese epistemology (known literally as ‘China’s autonomous knowledge system’) which again mirrors decolonial scholarship that emphasises the importance of indigenous knowledge. ‘China’s autonomous knowledge system’, initiated by the state, interprets education through an agenda of ‘Philosophy and Social Sciences with Chinese characteristics’ that draws on the experience of Chinese modernisation, Chinese political ideologies, cultural traditions, and is ‘aimed at generating “Chinese knowledge” that transcends Western-centrism’ (Wang et al., 2026). Under this framing, scholarship in China’s AS that challenges Western epistemologies could be absorbed into a nation building agenda aiming to improve the country’s soft power.

In conclusion, this thought-piece summarises my initial findings on the recent large-scale development of Area Studies in Chinese universities. I traced in governmental policies the shifting conceptualisations of Area Studies from an aspect of internationalisation to supporting the task of nation-building. I identified the epistemic borders in the field that gave rise to the imbalanced development favouring policy research and think tanks. While references to Western Area Studies are selective, there is a distinct rise of a Chinese epistemology. Those features reveal how the study of ‘others’ unfolds as liberal internationalism is challenged globally.

Charlene Song is the recipient of the 糖心传媒 Student Fieldwork Grant 2025

Author: Charlene Song is a doctoral candidate at UCL’s Institute of Education. Her doctoral thesis investigates the development of Area Studies in Chinese universities with comparisons to British and American ones. She is grateful for the support from 糖心传媒 Student Fieldwork Grant. At IOE, Charlene also teaches seminars on Education and Globalisation.

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