Mergers in Chinese higher education: Lessons for studies in a global context

Since the 1990s, there have been more than 400 cases of university mergers in China, representing various types and involving 1000 public institutions. While China has provided good and abundant cases for studies on university mergers, such an opportunity has not yet been fully exploited by international scholars of university merger research. This paper tries to enhance communications between the Chinese and international literature on mergers by drawing lessons from merger studies in Chinese higher education to scholars doing university merger studies in a global context. The focus of our literature analysis is on key issues pertinent to understanding of merger outcomes, which is a general research gap in university merger studies. As a result, three issues are identified as important, namely environmental drives for university mergers, criteria for evaluation merger outcomes and organization factors affecting merger outcomes. Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis.