ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Chinese experience in education. All the contenders have been agreed on what they were promoting - the advance of China - and they have all been passionately sure of the rightness of their particular view, but unfortunately they perceive the objective they think they share in quite different terms. It is because of this that the interface between ideology and politics and education, generally not so obvious in other societies, has in China in recent years become so overt and dominant. Educational provision is inevitably significantly affected by the economy. In world terms China is a poor country. China had always been blandly assured of the ineffable superiority of its civilisation and of the supremacy of its culture over all others in a world in which it simply was 'civilisation' itself, surrounded on all sides by 'barbarians'.
