ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comparative context for analysing the distinctiveness of Chinese development, and the role of education within it. In post-Mao China, by contrast, education has reinforced deep social divisions between urban and rural residents, and the middle classes and the rest, fostering the entrenchment of contradictory vested interests. In order to assess the relevance of the so-called 'East Asian model' to China's educational development, the chapter examines what it actually denotes. The influence of East Asian models on Chinese modernisation goes back a long way, with Japan's impact especially early and profound. The extent to which the earlier experiences of Japan and its smaller neighbours can offer developmental templates for sub-continental giants like China and India is certainly debatable. In alluding to possible links between China's 'developmental state' and Taiwan's, Green observes that 'it remains for historians to trace fully their common and variant inheritances from the legacies of the Chinese nationalism of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek'.
