Book excerpt: This reissue (1996) provides an in-depth analysis of the development of the Chinese university during the twentieth century – a period of momentous social, economic, cultural and political change. It brings together reflections on the Chinese university and its role in the two great experiments of modern China: Nationalist efforts to create a modern state as part of capitalist modernisation, and the Communist project of socialist construction under Soviet tutelage. In addition to these two frames of discourse, other models and patterns are examined: for instance, the persistence of cultural patterns, or Maoist revolutionary thought.