Exporting to China: The future of a genuine collaboration with the west

While the western view of China is often that of a huge manufacturing plant making cheap consumer products, the reality is much more complicated than that. Major constructions such as those for the 2008 Olympics, including the BeiJing airport, and the high-speed trains are, indeed, world’s best practice achievements. While Chinese producers are often regarded as mere copyists, many of the ‘copies’ are of outstanding products and often the copies exceed the originals. What’s more important, the industry slogan, “Made in China” has been recently changed to “Made with China”: the latter is designed to emphasize the new approach to industry collaborations between China and the rest of the world. So, why has uptake of modern test theory, in general, and Rasch measurement, in particular been so slow in the middle kingdom? Can it be just resistance to the new? Exacerbated by the dominance of traditional measurement approaches in the professoriat? Is the stumbling progress of Rasch measurement in China due to the lack of sufficient Chinese language references or vice versa? Is it because university publishing houses, rather than independent commercial publishers dominate the academic publishing field. This presentation follows the circuitous paths taken to the publication of a key Rasch measurement text for the Chinese market, and suggests ideas for establishing genuinely collaborative research partnerships to promote the adoption of Rasch measurement in China.