Building a Quality Floor and an Excellence Ceiling: China's Higher Education Reforms and what Iraq can adapt

Abstract This review focuses on the last thirty years of China's reform of its higher education system, using an original analytical perspective: the dual system of a quality floor (infrastructure for accreditation, evaluation and minimum standards, operating at the system-wide level) and an excellence ceiling. Based on policy borrowing theory, institutional transplantation perspectives, and the literature on the reform of higher education in China and Arab countries, the paper thinks that the reforms of the Chinese higher education are analytically instructive not because of their mechanism of transplanting but because of their approach: iterative experimentation, strategic differentiation, dynamic rather than static designation, and the intentional co-construction of baseline quality assurance and targeted excellence investment. The paper then discusses the reform pathway of Iraq which adopted the Bologna Process in 2023, and analyzes the elements of the Chinese experience that are transferable to the Iraqi context. It concludes that the most relevant lessons for Iraq relate to the assessment infrastructure, differentiation at discipline level, rather than institution level, integration of industry with academia, and control of the risks associated with policy transfer, especially the risks of decoupling between the formal adoption of policy and informal institutional practices. It is based on Iraqi ownership, adaptation to local context, continued investment and political commitment, not on the copying of any foreign model.