Abstract for:Framing alternative policies to achieve university mission: a case study of a Chinese regional university

Starting from 1995, China launched a series of incentive projects to steer the development of universities towards expressed priorities (“211” in 1995, “985” in 1998 and “double first-rate” in 2017). These policies has formulated universities’ management strategy and generated fierce competition among universities regarding both student enrollment and research productivity. However, we found that the university in the aforementioned projects are always the same with few exceptions (see Table 1), which replicate the so-called "success to successful" system archetype. In this sense, what impact does these policies has on the development of universities, especially the universities that are not selected in the incentive project? How should these universities cope with the challenge to achieve university mission? University management is characterized by multi-subjects, multi-objects and intense interactions among them, which is dynamic and long-term in nature. Therefore, a Dynamic Performance Management perspective (Bianchi, 2016) is adopted to frame the development of university and the impact of incentive project is evaluated. At last, alternative polices are suggested for regional universities to achieve university mission.