Abstract
The paper proposes the use of the idea of glocalization as a productive lens to look at transnational education and it show its application to the Chinese experience. The paper provides a summary of the framework for transnational education in China which is put in relation with the development of the idea of glocalization. The conclusion is that the concept of glocalization can be productive in interpreting tensions observed in transnational partnerships in China. In the second part, the lens of glocalization is applied to analyze Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities (SFCUs). Through the lens, it is shown how local arrangements, far from being compromises, can be understood as original solutions to the tensions originating from the interpenetration of global and local forces at play in the implementation of collaborative transnational educational partnerships in China. Examples of tensions are offered discussing the ideals of liberal art education embedded into the curriculum of SFCUs, the treatment of students as adults, the focus on student-centered learning, the use of English as medium of instruction, and the multicultural make-up of the academic staff. The conclusions highlight potential for further research using this approach both within China and beyond.
Keywords
Transnational education has been a major trend in the internationalization of higher education since the 2000s accompanying the ebb and flow of globalization (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Knight, 2010, 2016; Wilkins, 2016) and globalization continues to be a popular interpretative lens to look at transnational education (Hill et al., 2022; Huang, 2023) despite increasing criticism toward the explanatory power of the concept (Roudometof, 2025). The purpose of this paper is to offer an alternative view of transnational education through the prism of glocalization by showing the generative properties of this concept in analyzing transnational education in China.
To develop this argument, the paper first discusses the status of transnational education in China and then reviews how the concept of glocalization has evolved. In the second part, the paper analyzes the case of Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities to illustrate how a glocal lens can reveal cultural tensions leading to creative arrangements in the practices of students and educators.
The Cooperative Framework of Transnational Education in China
As a first step toward the main argument, it is necessary to clarify how transnational education has developed in the Chinese higher education context. Transnational education has been broadly defined as “study programs where learners are located in a country other than the one in which the awarding institution is based” (Wilkins, 2016, p, 3) or as the “offering overseas of a ‘home university’ course and award” that typically involves teaching to students in a language different from their native tongue (Stafford & Taylor, 2016, p. 625). Another widely adopted definition equates transnational education to “international programme and provider mobility” (Knight & Mcnamara, 2017, p. 6) as opposed to the mobility of students.
Within these broad categorizations, transnational higher education has taken unique features in China where transnational programs and institutes are based on the cooperation between a local and a foreign partner (Miani & Picucci-Huang, 2023a, 2023b; Mok & Han, 2016; Yang, 2023). The regulatory framework was formalized in 2003 through the promulgation of the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (Li, 2024; Liu, 2025). At the core, this regulatory framework refers to “activities of the cooperation between foreign educational institutions and Chinese educational institutions in establishing educational institutions within the territory of China to provide educational services mainly to Chinese citizens” (Zhen et al., 2021, p. 156). It is then important to stress that transnational education in China has strict requirements for physical presence and enrollment quota for Chinese citizens passing the university entrance examination known as Gaokao.
This cooperation can take place at three levels (Hu & Willis, 2017): single program, institute delivering several programs, and full-scale university (Sino-Foreign cooperative universities, SFCU, 中外合作办学大学, zhōngwàihézuò bànxué dàxué). There is a general agreement that the collaborative nature of transnational education in China is one of its distinctive features (Hu & Willis, 2017; Mok & Han, 2016; Yang, 2023; Yang, 2008). The importance of looking at this aspect is addressed by Knight and Mcnamara (2017), who, while discussing a general framework, emphasized the opposition between independent and partnership initiatives as a key differentiator in looking at transnational education projects. While the partnership between overseas and mainland Chinese institutions is an integral part of the regulatory framework, the role of the local government must be emphasized as it provides both resources and additional regulations (Li, 2024, p. 186; Liu & Pan, 2024). The involvement of the local government makes transnational educational in China a multi-stakeholder initiative, with regulatory bodies and quality assurance agency in China and overseas also playing a role.
After a period of consolidation around 2018, when a number of programs were terminated (Liu, 2025), transnational education remains today a thriving sector in the higher education landscape in China as it can be assessed by looking at the number of collaborations listed on the online platform for the supervision of cooperative programs (https://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn) maintained by the Chinese Ministry of Education. During the first quarter of 2025, the database showed 1,490 entries, 1,079 attributable to institutes and SFCUs (the database does not distinguish between the two) and the rest being stand-alone programs. Countries or regions with the largest number of cooperative programs included the United States (368 entries), the United Kingdom (248), France (135), Australia (117), Russia (115), South Korea (89), Hong Kong SAR (63), Germany (52), Ireland (36), and New Zealand (19). It has been calculated that around 400,000 students were enrolled in transnational programs in China in 2022, representing 1.8% of the total bachelor’s and master’s degree students (N. Zhou et al., 2024).
Glocalization and Transnational Education
The concept of glocalization emerged in the Nineties, first used as a business buzzword, before it was adopted in sociological analyses in reaction to globalization narratives based on ideas of homogenization in an attempt to provide a more nuanced view of the effects of an increasingly interconnected world (Cox, 1997; Featherstone et al., 1995). Robertson, probably the most eminent advocate of the term, argued that glocalization should have replaced the term globalization, in that it communicates better the interpenetration between local and global, particularistic and universal tendencies, while globalization seems to posit global and local as mutually exclusive, the ends of a continuum that cannot be recomposed (Robertson, 1995). The concept has regained traction in recent years as narratives about the failures, if not the outright end, of globalization have started to emerge both from academic (King, 2017; Livesey, 2017) and business commentators (Manners-Bell, 2023). Glocalization is another face of a declining globalization or, as Robertson put it in later writings, “a self-limiting aspect of globalization” to the point that globalization can be seen as “self-defeating” (Robertson, 2014, p. 18). Glocalization remains a contested concept (Roudometof, 2016) and can be alternatively utilized as a descriptive term, ideally capturing the local outcomes of internationalization processes, and as an aspirational ideal, setting a goal for what ‘good’ globalization should look like.
The concept of transnational education emerged during a similar period of time (Knight, 2010, 2016; Wilkins, 2016; Wilkins & Juusola, 2018) and mirrored narratives of economic globalization with both advocates, praising its contribution to developing countries’ educational systems (Ilieva et al., 2022; van der Wende, 2007), and critics, seeing it as another Western export to maintain cultural and economic dominance (Guo et al., 2022). As globalization cannot be understood as a unidirectional and homogeneous process, transnational education outcomes cannot be described as a simple export of educational programs, as some definitions reviewed in the previous section may suggest. Rather, a tension between global, national, and local cultures is inherent to the experience of transnational education, both at the institutional level (Guimón & Narula, 2020; Shams & Huisman, 2016; Y. Zhang et al., 2024) and in the classroom (Cortazzi & Jin, 2013; Miani, 2023; Picucci-Huang et al., 2025).
Sometimes this interpenetration is described in rather simplicist terms as adaptation to local cultures. For example, Francois suggests that “the teaching and learning in collectivist societies may emphasize a lot on group integration, whereas individualistic societies may encourage individuals to work independently” (Francois, 2015, p. 129). However, as it has already been shown in a long streak of literature (Cortazzi & Jin, 2013; Li & Wegerif, 2014; Shirk, 1982), the identification of essentialist cultural features to determine the best pedagogical approach may lead to underestimating the complexity of a classroom with multicultural elements, and the encounter of different pedagogical cultures and expectations will invariably generate negotiations that may find different degrees of resolution.
The same unsatisfaction with the term globalization that prompted some critics to prefer the term glocalization has led some educational scholars to prefer the concept of glocalized education over transnational or, sometimes, international education (Francois, 2015). The concepts of glocalized and transnational education are overlapping, but only partially, as there are situations where they do not connect. One can think of an online degree offered to learners in an overseas country that has no features of glocalized education but could still fit a broad definition of transnational education. Vice-versa, any school could adopt a self-described glocal curriculum without any transnational dimension in its organization.
Several scholars have made a link between transnational curricula and glocalization (Francois, 2015; Hasanen, 2020; Niemczyk, 2019; Sidhu & Christie, 2015; Trippestad, 2015). Trippestad (2015) framed the idea of a glocal educational teacher agency as a way to overcome a simplified narrative of a good for all globalization. In this view, a glocal teacher should address “the personal and the local, the polis and the common culture, and the global and the universal, to create a harmonious and balanced education” (p. 22). Francois (2015) built a proposal for a global education with local perspective and introduced the term of glocal competence as “the knowledge, skills, comprehension, and attitudes that one acquires through the interwoven of previous global abilities with the curiosity, personal interactions, and immersion in a specific society” (Francois, 2015, p. 148). Glocal pedagogies have been trialed in transnational education, for example in relation to sustainability education. Arizona State University developed an online transnational classroom where learners and teachers could develop actions with local impact and framed this intervention as an example of glocal curriculum (Caniglia et al., 2018). The views exemplified by Trippestad and Francois are based on the use of the concept of glocal education as a way to indicate both the descriptive and the aspirational outcomes of the internationalization of higher education, thanks to the interpenetration of different cultural, institutional and political levels.
The interpenetration evoked by the term glocal is productive in describing the outcomes of transnational partnerships, specifically in China, given their cooperative nature described in the previous section. The term glocal is also fitting for the Chinese contexts as China exemplifies the limits of globalization narratives based on the assumption of homogenizing outcomes, with developing countries passively on the receiving end. In the field of education, China has already shown the possibility of ‘reversed’ transnational education, where Chinese universities have built campuses overseas (He & Wilkins, 2018) or attracted students from the Global North (Chiocca & Zhang, 2023). Furthermore, rather than being a passive receiver, the Chinese government has shown the ability to frame transnational educational partnerships as a way to achieve its strategic objectives, for example linked to the Belt and Road Initiative (Si & Lim, 2023). Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Education, acting as a gatekeeper for the initiation of new programs, has time to time actively influenced transnational partnership to focus on the disciplinary areas regarded as strategic for the overall Chinese economy and society (Li, 2024). The impact of these policies is evident in the changing profile of the transnational offering in China that has moved more toward STEM disciplines (Huang, 2023). Historically, since the 19th century, Chinese educational systems have been characterized by this interpenetration between local and international influences, a trend synthesized by the motto “Chinese learning as substance, Western learning for application” (Lai & Jung, 2025, p. 10), so today’s trends in transnational education in China are influenced by a long home-grown tradition of integration of local and global needs in the curricula.
Other scholars have noted this interpenetration speaking of hybridization (Lai & Jung, 2024, 2025) or explicitly using the term glocalization (Qu & Dai, 2025) when discussing transnational education in China. This paper goes beyond these applications by focusing on the tensions that a glocal perspective reveals. The word tension suggests pulling from different directions and is evocative of a situation that, to some degree, remains unresolved, with the pulls constantly altering the perimeter of the surface under stress. The next section elaborates on a case study to show the interpretative richness offered by the lens of glocalization in understanding tensions in Sino-foreign cooperative universities.
The Case of Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities
Why Not International Branch Campuses?
In this section I intentionally avoid the use of the term international branch campus (IBC) to describe legally independent transnational universities in China. I prefer the label of Sino-foreign cooperative university (SFCUs), aligning with the terminology used in Chinese regulatory documents. However, SFCUs and even specific collaborative institutes in China continue to be called IBCs (Cai et al., 2024; Guimón & Narula, 2020; Xu, 2023; H. Yang & Wu, 2021). The list of IBCs around the world maintained by the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT, 2023) may have contributed to this terminological divergence. The inclusion of Sino-foreign partnerships in this list may look consistent with their definition of an international branch campus as “an entity that is owned, at least in part, by a foreign higher education provider; operated in the name of the foreign education provider; and provides an entire academic program, substantially on site, leading to a degree awarded by the foreign education provider” (Garrett et al., 2017, p. 10). However, when these points are scrutinized, some may not entirely apply to transnational partnerships in China where the balance of powers between the partners may vary case by case (Li, 2024).
The choice of not using the term IBC in this paper is not meant to disprove the value of the definition of IBC and stems from the connotative implications of the label. Hu & Willis (2017) noted that sometimes the use of the term IBC may be preferred when the overseas institution’s perspective is employed, even if this may conflict with the ownership structure. Given the collaborative nature of transnational education in China, the shared ownership, and the often hybrid naming of these campuses, the term SFCU seems more appropriate. For the same reason, this paper avoids using the terms “home” or “sending” institution to refer to the overseas partner, as they indicate a prominence in the relationship that is not a given.
Overview and Development
This case study is based on a critical review of the research published (Miani & Picucci-Huang, 2023a; Qin & Te, 2016) and publicly available documents filtered through the experience of the author who has worked in an SFCU for a decade (Stake, 1995). As mentioned above, SFCUs are one of the three levels of cooperation for transnational educational partnerships in China and is perhaps the most distinctive as it generates a stand-alone university with legal personality where all aspects of students’ experience are managed under one banner.
First Nine Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities
After a stop around 2018, the establishment of SFCUs was restarted in 2021. To this list, Sun et al. (2022) added the partnership between Brunel University London and North China University of Technology established in 2021. Another notable addition to the pre-2018 list is the SFCU jointly established by Guangzhou University and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2022 (Zhuang et al., 2024). Additionally, in 2023 the first independent fully foreign owned university, Hainan Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (BiUH), began operations (China News Service, 2025). The special provisions applied to this institution, however, make it debatable whether it is an SFCU; for instance, students graduating are not automatically granted a degree from the overseas partner, as it is the norm for other SFCUs. New projects continue to be announced (Zhou, 2024).
It would be misleading to think that SFCUs are all the same; they differ greatly in size, student profile, management style and, even more importantly, the role played by the Chinese institution in the learning and teaching which depends on the balance of influences between the partners (Li, 2024, p. 186). The naming choice of the SFCU can be a telling sign of the perceived prestige of the partners as they attempt to maximize their reputational resources (Liu & Pan, 2024, p. 7). Generally, it is acknowledged that the Chinese partner is usually more involved in student administration while the foreign institution takes a larger role in the academic affairs and quality assurance (Li, 2024, p. 188). However, even this broadly accepted view requires local understanding with Chinese partners being prominently featured in the academic operations in some SFCUs. It has also been noted that there is a tendency for some of these partnerships to evolve toward a direction of autonomy from the partner institutions (Postiglione et al., 2016). With the awareness of this diversity, the rest of the section focuses on some commonalities where the lens of glocalization can help shed light on the unique local arrangements developed in these institutions.
Glocal Tensions
A comparative analysis of three SFCUs conducted by Zhang and Kinser (2016) is a good starting point to describe these institutions through the lens of glocalization. They identified five distinctive characteristics of these institutions: “(1) a focus on broad-enriching education (2) treating students as adults, (3) student-centered teaching and learning, (4) emphasis on faculty teaching, and (5) administrative professionalism” (Zhang & Kinser, 2016, p. 331). Other two points that should be considered are the use of English as a medium of instruction (Han, 2022), which generally happens even when the teaching language of the overseas partner is not English, and the multicultural composition of the academic staff (Ma et al., 2019). The rest of the discussion highlights the tensions between global and local forces emerging in relation to the ideal of a broad-enriching curriculum, treatment of students as adults, student-centered teaching, English medium instruction, and multicultural composition of staff.
Analyzing the focus on the broad-enriching curriculum is of particular interest as it shows how these glocal tensions can unfold over time. The case of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, the first SFCU founded in 2004, is well explored in the literature. Its founding president, Yang Fujia, a Chinese scholar who had raised to the role of Chancellor of the University of Nottingham in the UK, promoted the idea of Boya, which can be regarded as loosely parallel to the concept of liberal art education, as a distinguishing feature of the new university (He, 2023). Yu (2021) noted that since the beginning the notion of liberal art education within the context of this SFCU meant a “sophisticated localisation attempt” (p. 226), blending individual and societal aspirations, Western and Eastern priorities. Yu’s study points out how the founder’s vision was morphed into discourses of marketisation and employability in later stages of the organization’s development. Looking at more recent reports, the ideal of liberal art education to foster well-rounded individuals eventually found its manifestation in extra and co-curricular activities rather than in the courses part of credit-bearing programs of the institution (Zhang & Veecock, 2023). However, when the partner is an American university, where a general education curriculum is the norm, the liberal arts components can regain prominence; this is evident, for example, in the comparison between UNNC and NYSH developed by Li (2024). So, tensions can arise or be relaxed depending on the partners’ traditions and their constraining or enabling force on the desired arrangements in an SFCU.
The second point is related to the framing of students as adults. The framing would suggest that SFCUs can offer students opportunities for self-determination and to express their voice. This can be reflected in importing into the Chinese partnerships formats such as consultative forums with students, student unions, and the embedding of students into committees. However, these arrangements are sometimes at odds with disciplinary regulations that can be observed in codes of conduct for students. Such documents often articulate standards and procedures influenced by local regulatory frameworks and institutions creating a governance environment that can feel more regulated than typical overseas campuses. In other words, the idea of treating students as adults is sometimes an ideal with arrangements deriving from the tensions related to “divergent academic values that simultaneously promote academic freedom and impose constrained discourse” (Lai & Jung, 2025, p. 11).
The student-centered education that is prominently features in the marketing material of several SFCUs, along with the idea of world-class education (Xu, 2023), is another source of tensions. Zhen et al. (2021, pp. 159–160) noted how “Chinese students are more exam-orientated and are more receptive to a teacher-centered/instruction-based method. However, foreign professors often put greater emphasis on class participation and group discussion”. This tension has been reported by many educators in SFCUs and has led to personal compromises and hybrid solutions, such as the introduction of small group interactions to prepare seminar participants for class-wide discussion (Ergenc, 2020). Other studies have shown the nuanced transformation of techniques related to brainstorming in a transnational context (Miani, 2023) and how the use of co-teaching in similar settings can lead to unique benefits for students, especially in terms of language learning (Picucci-Huang et al., 2025). Overall, what these studies have shown is the creation of unique local pedagogical approaches enacted by mediating the aspiration for global standards of education (which mostly stands for Western ideals) and the needs of local students.
The ideal of SFCUs as English-medium instruction (EMI) universities is also a contested reality (Liao et al., 2025). English remains a critical factor for students’ academic integration into SFCUs (Li Zhong et al., 2025). However, students may have different levels of language proficiency. An author reported how in some of these programs, students struggled in interacting in the classroom in English and this may mean for some professors the need to lower expectations leading to teachers’ frustration (Zhen et al., 2021, p. 159). The reality is that in these institutions there are several languages at play in the learning experience of the students, who effectively engage in translanguaging in order to meet the academic needs of the institution even if the language policies state “English only” for all instructional and administrative activities (Liao et al., 2025; Ou & Gu, 2020). English acts simultaneously as an inclusionary and exclusionary arrangement. While the language requirements tend to filter certain individuals (both teachers and students) who could afford developing a second language and may constrain their ability to participate in knowledge-creation processes (Zheng & Qiu, 2024), within this group English can be said to play an inclusive role, by permitting individuals with diverse backgrounds to come together. In this context, the intentional use of translanguaging in an English for academic purposes course at DKU (Hiller, 2021) is relevant as it shows the potential to embed linguistic diversity into the curriculum, in what can be seen as an attempt to bring the linguistic tensions to the forefront.
SFCUs staff tend to be multicultural, with nationalities represented beyond those of China and the foreign partner. An extensive survey conducted in 2016 with 808 programs providing information on 29,142 staff members (Li, 2024, p. 202) can help put this aspect into perspective. According to the data, the programs were employing teaching staff from 87 countries or regions (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau), with US, UK, Australia, Russia, Canada, South Korea, Germany, France, Ireland, and Japan as the ten most represented countries (Li, 2024, p. 203). Yet, the staffing profile pointed toward a glocal model, considering that only 23,65% of the educators was from overseas (Li, 2024, p. 202), so collaboration between local and international staff, often numerically a minority, becomes essential. The research also pointed out to the prevalence of a “flight-teaching model”, with international faculty not living permanently in the mainland but only coming for periods, ranging from a few days to a few months, to deliver their modules (Li, 2024, p. 208). This is in stark contrast with SFCUs where most of the teaching staff is employed full time and generally lives in China. However, SFCUs are not immune from the tension between ensuring a balance between local and international staff, with often explicit objectives on the quota of overseas academics. Cooperation between multicultural staff can bring tensions but also development in educators’ belief about teaching and learning in which different cultural perspectives are integrated (Wang & Kim, 2023, p. 12).
In summary, on several aspects identified as characteristics of SFCUs, a glocal lens allows to gain insights on underlying tensions, sometimes played out over time, that can be productive of unique arrangements in the administrative and pedagogical practices of transnational universities in China. Given these arrangements, SFCUs can hardly be regarded as branches of overseas universities.
Conclusions
The tensions reviewed related to SFCUs well represent the interpenetration between local and global that is at the heart of the idea of glocalization. These tensions can be painful but can also be productive of innovative arrangements promoting understanding among the parties involved. The local arrangements should not be seen as compromises, but rather as creative examples of cultural synergies (Cortazzi & Jin, 2013) fostered through the interpenetration of global and local needs brought together in a transnational setting.
The analysis presented demonstrates that glocalization offers a productive lens to look at transnational education in China, as illustrated by the analysis of tensions in SFCUs, and a way to overcome simplistic accounts of cultural adaptation or global homogenization in educational settings (Gu & Schweisfurth, 2006). There is no doubt that concerns with hegemonic (Liu, 2025) or westernizing (Guo et al., 2022) practices in transnational education and in the internationalization of Chinese universities are legitimate. The glocal perspective can add further depth to these concerns and re-focus the attention to the intricated negotiations that these pedagogical and institutional practices are subject in transnational sites. This change of focus is not meant to overshadow potential unintended consequences and can help appreciate the agency and creativity behind the practices experienced in these transnational sites.
The paper has focused on the case of China which remains a key terrain for the formation of transnational partnerships. A glocal perspective on transnational partnerships outside China could also be productive as challenges mirroring those described in this paper have been documented in research on transnational education in other parts of the world (Shams & Huisman, 2016). As a case in point, the call for conceptualizing the interaction between American branch campuses in Qatar and their host country as encounters (Reynolds, 2021; Vora, 2014), rather than mechanic interpretations of the neoliberal playbook, is highly resonant with the themes of this paper. The benefit of a glocal perspective in uncovering tensions and resulting arrangements may rest on its flexibility in encompassing both institutional and individual practices.
The conceptualization offered in this paper can be useful for decision makers in transnational programs in China, as it can help to predict and navigate tensions that may arise given the glocal nature of these partnerships. Further research could apply the concept of glocalization to transnational cooperation in China at the program or institute level or beyond the Chinese context. A limitation of the present study lies in its offering a case study analyzing SFCUs as a whole, while, as cautioned earlier, each of them rely on very specific arrangements and in-depth single-case studies may reveal more nuanced effects of the glocal tensions examined.
Footnotes
Ethical Consideration
Only publicly available information has been used.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Given the conceptual nature of the paper, no data beyond those published are available.