This thesis conceptually explores, compares, and searches for potential complementarities, hybridisations, and synergies of ideas concerning the public (good) of higher education in the Sinic and liberal Anglo-American traditions. A common trope, particularly in the liberal Anglo-American tradition, is the notion that higher education produces public goods. However, there is a lack of clarity about what this means; and the dominant economic or political explanations of higher education’s p...