How references to other education systems are constructed and employed in education policy-making has long been an important topic of educational research (see Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). Among other things, they serve to situate education in one’s own country in relation to its environment. However, references to “elsewhere” are not only made to individual “reference societies”, i.e. individual nation states, but also to whole geographic regions (e.g. “Asia”) or clusters of countries that are perceived to be united by a characteristic trait (e.g. “the developing countries”). Also, individual reference societies often are perceived as being embedded in and representative of wider contexts. In this paper, we will take a closer look at points of reference functioning in a similar way to individual reference societies, but comprising larger units than individual countries. We term these “transnational reference clusters”. The paper combines a “borrowing and lending”-perspective with a comparative approach. It studies how transnational reference clusters were being constructed and used in the media discourse on education policy-making in Germany and mainland China in the wake of PISA between 2000 – 2020 (see also Ning, 2023). We will focus specifically on two transnational reference regions which play an important role both in the Chinese and the German media discourse and of which Germany and Mainland China are parts of, respectively: “Western industrialised countries” and “Asia”. The rise of large-scale assessments has had consequences for how education systems situate themselves in relation to others and particularly in relation to a non-egalitarian world order. Both Germany and China were challenged by PISA in how they made sense of their position in this order, since both experienced “PISA-shocks”, although in diametrically different ways: German observers were shocked by the fact that the results of their country were much lower than anticipated, while many Chinese observers were surprised by the positive results obtained by participating Chinese regions and cities (especially Shanghai). The comparison enables us to see more clearly the specific ways in which these shocks were processed in the two cases and how this processing was connected to long-standing perceptions of the world order shaped by colonialism: the German discourse reflects a process of othering “Asia” aimed at reinforcing the discursive superiority of “Western” education. Chinese media adopt parts of the ‘Western-centred’ stereotyping of ‘Asian’ education while at the same time attempting to legitimise the superiority of China’s own education system over others.

Ning, H. (2023). Der Mediendiskurs zu Referenzgesellschaften und PISA: Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland und Festlandchina im Rahmen des Projektionsansatzes unter Berücksichtigung der postkolonialen Perspektive. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Waldow, F., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2019). Understanding PISA's attractiveness: Critical analyses in comparative policy studies. London: Bloomsbury.