The Features and Tasks of the Cooperation between Industry and University in China : Focus on the University-managed Enterprises

This paper examines the historical development of university-managed enterprises and explicates the function and features of these enterprises. In the light of the socialist educational idea, that education must be combined with production labor, Chinese universities established factories and farms since the foundation of the People's Republic of China. At first, the main tasks of these university-managed enterprises were to support the university teaching, to implement practical training for the students and to a very small extent to develop new products. Since the 1990s, along with the cooperation between industry and the academic world, the expansion of autonomy for universities and the diversification of financial resources of universities, the Chinese government adopted a series of preferential policies, including a preferential tax policy, toward the university-managed enterprises and these enterprises obtained a significant development. The university-managed enterprises played a positive role in raising the income for the universities, solving the problem of lacking financial resources, creating employment for the extra university staff, and improving the efficiency of university facilities. This paper analyses the change of the functions of university-managed enterprises, classifies these enterprises into several groups and examines each group by a case study. The university-managed enterprises take the advantages of technological resources to transfer the outcome of research to product and promote the reform of Chinese industrial structure. However, this paper considers that scientific and technological enterprises are declined because of the severe market competition, and the university teaching are somehow influenced by the enterprises. Finally, this paper argues that universities can provide scientific and technological support to the enterprises but should not manage enterprises directly, although these universities-managed enterprises have played a certain role during the high education reform