Oriental wisdom meets occidental construct: How Chinese University students perceive sustainability?

Abstract: Sustainability is a global issue, whilst the extant sustainability research is largely inclined towards the global north. China as one of most prominent emerging countries, itsimportance in sustainability research has been emphasized by many scholars. As one small step towards fulfilling the quest, this research explores how Chinese universitystudents perceive sustainability as a concept and sustainability related issues. The qualitative research method is being adopted in this research, to complement the few quantitative research done in China. In order to enable comparison and further analysis between respondents, also to simplify the societal structure complex, students’ perceptionon individual, organizational, national and international level are explored. Being inspiredby an ongoing project in Finland, one extra topic regarding the bottom-up approach insustainability initiatives is further included in the research. Research findings indicates: 1) student’s perception on sustainability as a concept is biased towards environmental aspect, with moderate awareness on economic and social sustainability; 2) The awareness regarding sustainability in higher education is found to be low among students, while they all perceive the sustainability performances of universities as good; 3) Students are largely skeptical about corporation’s sustainability performances,while they all hold high expectations for corporation’s role in improving sustainability performances of the society at large; 4) An universal optimistic stance is being observed among students, perceiving the sustainability performances of China as a country is good. Likewise, a univocal endorsement for China to help undeveloped countries to improve their sustainability performances, is being identified; 5) The awareness of achievements that have been made worldwide is low among students, with the most known one as the Paris Agreement, while very few only briefly heard of the SDGs. 6) Majority students perceivethe bottom-up approach should be considered in China, to work as complement of the traditional dominating top-down approach.The institutional logic perspective is chosen as the theoretical framework to understand why students perceive sustainability and related issues the way they do. It has been presented to account for both homogeneity and heterogeneity observed in research findings, with the formal caused by domination of the state logic, and the latter caused by the competition between the market logic, the community logic and the dominating statelogic. These findings advanced our understanding in this field, and could be deemed as contributions of this research.