This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: China's leading universities face two overlapping pressures: competing globally while remaining aligned with national strategic priorities. A study of 132 university president–party secretary pairs, conducted by a Hiroshima University researcher, found that 53% had different but potentially complementary backgrounds and experience, the most common of three leadership configurations.
The study describes China's university governance system as a dual leadership system that formally assigns administrative authority to university presidents and political authority to party secretaries. The findings suggest that professional and political forms of authority can be combined, rather than professionalization necessarily pushing universities toward a Western-style managerial model. The study was published in the journal Studies in Higher Education on July 16, 2026.
"The central message of the study is that leadership in China's leading universities has become increasingly professional, internationally experienced and managerially specialized, but these changes have occurred within—rather than instead of—continued centralized party control," says Futao Huang, a professor at Hiroshima University's Research Institute for Higher Education and author of the study. "A striking finding is that doctorate-holding leaders rose from 73.2% to 88.5% among party secretaries and from 82.1% to 93.7% among presidents, while Communist Party membership remained nearly universal." Previous research has documented increasing professionalization alongside continued political authority but has largely examined leaders individually. Huang instead analyzed university presidents and party secretaries as leadership pairs to examine how these forms of authority are configured together within institutions.
"The study addresses how the sociodemographic, academic and career profiles of leaders in China's leading universities changed between 2013 and 2023, and what these changes reveal about the relationship between leadership professionalization, global competitiveness and continuing party-state control," says Huang. "It also examines whether leadership patterns differ between former 985 Project universities and other leading institutions. This question is important because university leadership has become central to the implementation of China's Double First-Class (DFC) reforms and to institutional performance ...
The study helps explain how Chinese universities combine rising academic qualifications, international experience and managerial specialization with persistent political supervision." Huang introduced the concept of leadership coupling to study the relational configurations of leadership within Chinese universities. He defined leadership coupling "as the patterns of interaction, alignment and coordination between party secretaries and university presidents within a given institution"; identified three key dimensions of leadership coupling ("professional alignment," "international orientation" and "institutional mobility"); and developed a typology that captures the degree of variation in leadership coupling ("aligned," "complementary" and "fragmented"). He then examined how leadership relations are structured in China's leading universities and what this reveals about their governance, with particular attention to the differences between former 985 Project universities and non-985 Project universities now part of the DFC Initiative.
Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. Biographical data on senior leaders in China's leading universities were collected from a variety of primary and verified secondary sources. After processing, the full data set contained 147 DFC universities, and the final data set contained 132 leadership pairs, or 264 individuals.
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