If China ends tenure, will its research excellence suffer?

For decades, securing a long-term academic appointment in China has meant more than winning a job. It has meant earning an “iron rice bowl” – the prized security of a profession associated with prestige, stability and a predictable career. That bargain is now being tested.

But Shanghai’s Tongji University has recently announced that professional and technical positions will now be subject to periodic performance assessment. Long-term appointments have not formally disappeared, but the security attached to them has changed fundamentally. Professors in these positions will face a six-year assessment, with an intermediate review after three years, while other categories face more frequent reviews. Poor performance can lead to non-renewal or other employment consequences.

Tongji is not necessarily an isolated case. Universities elsewhere in China have already introduced forms of post-professorial performance review, with potentially serious consequences for academics judged to be underperforming. A law professor at a university in Henan, who asked not to be named, told me that her institution has adopted a four-tier assessment system for professors, with those placed in the lowest, “D”, category potentially facing dismissal.

What makes Tongji’s announcement particularly significant is the university’s status as one of China’s leading higher education institutions, located in the country’s most economically developed and internationally connected city. If an institution of Tongji’s standing is prepared to make long-term academic employment more conditional, less well-resourced universities may find it increasingly difficult to justify maintaining stronger guarantees.

But Tongji’s decision raises a question that extends far beyond China: what happens to academic excellence when employment security becomes conditional on recurring performance assessments?

In the US, Virginia Commonwealth University has operated a post-tenure review system since 1997. More recently, South Dakota introduced five-yearly post-tenure reviews in 2026. But these reviews do not undermine the tenure system as such: professors retain it even as they become subject to periodic accountability and, where necessary, remediation. Tongji’s emerging model appears more consequential because the long-term appointment itself becomes subject to periodic renewal.

Universities certainly need credible mechanisms to respond to academics who have ceased to contribute meaningfully to research, teaching or academic life. Academic freedom and employment security cannot reasonably mean permanent exemption from accountability. Yet the relationship between accountability and academic excellence is subtle; the former is not necessarily a route to the latter.

A 2026 study of the effect of post-tenure review on tenured finance faculty found that working-paper production increased by 21 per cent, while several measures of research quality remained unchanged or improved. Yet the policy also appeared to have broader effects on the academic workforce: universities engaging in post-tenure review subsequently hired assistant professors with weaker research records, while research-active tenured faculty were more likely to leave.

Post-tenure review may also affect what kinds of research a university’s scholars are willing to undertake. Some of the most consequential research does not fit neatly into a predictable performance timetable. Mathematician Hong Wang, awarded a Fields Medal this year for her contributions to harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, offers a striking example. Her breakthrough work with Joshua Zahl on the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a problem whose solution had eluded mathematicians for decades, demanded an exceptional level of abstraction and technical depth – precisely the kind of research whose value may be impossible to demonstrate within a short evaluation cycle.

The question, then, is not whether academics should be accountable. It is what kind of accountability produces the kind of scholarship universities claim to value.

Of course, a drive for excellence is not the only factor at play here. There is also a financial element to the question of whether tenure should be retained. Universities worldwide are grappling with rising costs, uncertain student numbers and mounting constraints on public funding. These pressures have intensified amid the economic slowdown following the pandemic, prompting institutions to reconsider the costs and inflexibility associated with permanent academic employment.

The UK, where tenure was abolished decades ago, offers a stark example. Financial pressures are driving widespread restructuring, redundancies and cuts to permanent academic posts across the higher education sector, sometimes driven by explicitly performance-related metrics. The US is wrestling with similar pressures, not only through post-tenure review but also via the expansion of non-tenure-track employment.

China is now confronting the same underlying question: how much employment security can universities provide when their finances and ability to attract students are increasingly uncertain? More than three decades of rapid expansion in Chinese higher education have created increasing pressure on funding and resources allocation, and that pressure is only likely to be intensified further by demographic decline, slowing economic growth and changing perceptions of the returns offered by higher education.

More importantly, the reform reflects a broader institutional transformation in China’s university personnel systems. Since 2016, the Ministry of Education has promoted the idea that appointments and promotions should only be granted on the basis of academic performance assessment. Tongji’s post-appointment review can therefore be understood as the next step in this broader shift towards continuous performance-based academic management. That, above all, is why it is likely to be imitated elsewhere.

The risk is that if China takes away the iron rice bowl, it may also overturn the incentive to do the kind of risky, long-term research that has propelled the country up the global rankings in recent decades – and which many believe drives the kind of genuinely ground-breaking innovation that can transform economies.

Grace W. F. Chau is an educator, writer and independent researcher whose work focuses on Chinese migration and politics. She is an affiliate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow.