ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical overview of cross-national attraction and educational transfer in China. There is an impressive corpus of research and publication on educational reform and policy borrowing in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter examines a summary and highlights the issues relevant to the topic on educational borrowing in China. In understanding China's education reform, it is important to situate it within the context of China's modernisation efforts that began towards the second half of the nineteenth century. The introduction of the school system was the culmination of many decades of internal discussion and debates after China's defeat by Western forces in the First Opium War; it embodied China's desire to strengthen itself by learning from the West. Western educational ideas and practices were borrowed to aid education reform in China, such as the promotion of holistic development in students through quality-oriented education and the introduction of elective courses in some schools.
