Inter-provincial disparities in the unity: unpacking the written and unwritten rules in China’s foreign faculty recruitment policies

Foreign faculty recruitment policies are significant in the international mobility of academics and key indicators of a country’s talent system in the dimension of openness. However, few studies have considered the ways such policies are recontextualized and implemented at the provincial level. This empirical study of foreign faculty recruitment policies and 46 stakeholders in two case provinces of China shows that the effectiveness of foreign faculty recruitment policy in economically developed regions is better than in less developed regions, and the contribution of public universities is directly proportional to their rank in the higher education system. From the perspective of T. B. Smith’s policy implementation process, this result is related not only to the policy text, the power structure of implementing agencies, and the allocation principle of resources at the level of written rules but also to unwritten rules, including the abilities and beliefs of policy implementers, environmental factors of regions, and individual differences of foreign faculty. The study demonstrates how China’s governance system ensures policy consistency across provinces while allowing for regional adaptations. For the comparison of two case provinces, the high-level promotion by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the mechanism of the state hierarchy system have guaranteed inter-provincial commonalities, while the comprehensive strengths and their executive way of organizations and individuals are at the roots of inter-provincial discrepancies. Meanwhile, this study also involves the complex interaction of four key factors in the policy implementation process, including the multidimensional resolution of policy implementation “conflicts” in the ways of politics, economy, and culture in the Chinese case.