ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Chinese educational encounter with the "west" to rethink the situated meanings of globalization beyond the conventional lenses of isomorphism and divergence. The case of China illustrates that globalization has always moved in more than one direction. Isomorphism and divergence, cultural nativism and self-critique, centripetal and centrifugal forces are sides of the same coin that constitute what is nebulously termed globalization. This chapter WuJinting shows that the celebrated globalization of Chinese education today needs to be understood in the context of a historical longue duree, that the unique Chinese path to globalization has already been "historically 'contaminated' by cultural and cross-cultural appropriations that belong to the whole of Chinese-Western relationships" and that China's conscious pursuit of global membership through educational reform quintessentially reflects its self-imposed orientalism and its construction of the relationship between itself and others.
