Policy Responses of the TNE Institutions in China to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Proposal of a Crisis Management Framework

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely to have long-lasting impacts on higher education (HE) because of the global disruption it continues to cause. Transnational education (TNE) has been particularly vulnerable and been forced to respond to the disaster through new policies and management strategies. Taking pandemic as a case of crisis management, this paper first applies an integrative review method to synthesize the impacts of the pandemic on TNE institutions in China, and then uses the policy analysis method to explore their real-time governance policies from January 2020 to January 2021. A Pandemic Crisis Management Matrix for TNE is developed and used for the analysis of policies for phases before, during, and after the event. The findings suggest that TNE institutions in China took proactive measures to maintain normal operation during and after the crisis, but paid less attention to pandemic preparedness. In addition, some policies were changing according to the evolving epidemiology, whereas the crisis management objective had remained durable. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the crisis management theory in HE and TNE contexts. Practically, constructive recommendations are provided for government agencies, universities, and TNE institutions in terms of building long-term and transformative resilience and preparing for future crises. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.