Comparative Education
MA Jiani; WEI Yongxin
Institutional opening-up is an important direction for China to promote a new round of high-level opening-up to the outside world, and its connotation has gradually expanded from the traditional economic and trade fields to key areas such as education, and higher education is becoming an important breakthrough in institutional opening-up. This paper focuses on the Free Trade Zone (Port) as a pilot area of institutional opening-up, and explores its unique practice and mechanism innovation in the field of higher education. Through combing the typical experiences of international FTZs in promoting the opening-up of higher education, it summarise the multi-dimensional pathways from five aspects: institutional foundation, regulatory mechanism, policy support, personnel mobility and innovation ecosystem. The study further analyses the institutional exploration of China’s FTZs (Ports) in the field of higher education, including policy experimentation, rule docking and two-way opening-up mechanism, highlighting their experimental and exemplary role in institutional opening-up. On this basis, it puts forward policy suggestions such as optimising the top-level design, improving the regulatory system, strengthening policy synergy and building an ecology of industry-education integration, so as to promote the continuous improvement of the path of institutional opening-up of higher education with Chinese characteristics, and to help the in-depth integration of opening-up of education to the outside world and high-quality development.