From pyramid to "five-finger mountain": spatial metaphors and the discursive reordering of Chinese higher education

Policies that classify higher education institutions are usually examined through the resources and governance arrangements they establish, and less often through the vocabulary in which they describe the order they seek to create. This article analyses how spatial metaphors construct and revise the imagined order of Chinese higher education. It examines a registered corpus of 39 entries—37 distinct Chinese-language sources issued between 1993 and 2026, comprising central policy texts, provincial implementation schemes, institutional self-descriptions, official replies and interpretations, and media commentary—using a metaphor-led critical discourse analysis in which metaphorical expressions were identified, coded on six dimensions, and aggregated into conceptual keys. The order is organised by height rather than by type, and the routes between positions are explicitly closed; height, however, is not carried by spatial vocabulary alone, since terms of level, quality and excellence assign standing without any spatial figure. The re-description of that order proceeds by negating rank while retaining the vocabulary of layout and position, so that change and persistence are announced in the same formulation. On this reading, replacing a metaphor is not the same as moving an order. The study extends the concept of academic drift from institutional behaviour to the level of discourse and specifies a boundary condition for it: where the state sets the categories and closes movement between them, re-description becomes the available mode of description. It also makes explicit a boundary between spatial metaphor and scalar grading that metaphor-only analysis tends to leave unexamined.