Cultivating top-notch innovative talent independently is a hallmark of a strong educational nation. At this critical stage of building China into both an education powerhouse and an innovationdriven country, it is imperative to position doctoral education as the cornerstone for nurturing elite innovators. China must develop a worldclass doctoral education system with distinctive Chinese characteristics, accelerate the establishment of globally significant doctoral education hubs, and strategically train talents for national strategic needs and critical shortage areas. To cultivate top-notch innovators through doctoral education requires both institutional safeguards and paradigm shifts in pedagogy. This involves breaking down institutional barriers to create integrated training mechanisms, developing a "dualtrack" cultivation model through categorized approaches, and reshaping doctoral education paradigms based on strategic national demands.

From the dual perspectives of policy objectives and policy measures, this study conducts a content analysis of 152 national-level policies on the cultivation of top-notch innovative talents issued since China′s reform and opening-up. The findings reveal that policy objectives have evolved through stages of centralization, equalization, and stratification; Policy measures have gradually progressed from fragmentation and formation to maturity. Overall, the policies still exhibit areas for improvement: in the dimension of objectives, there is a weak emphasis on social and individual-oriented goals; In selection, planning-oriented thinking remains dominant; In cultivation, there is a heavy reliance on a singular path; In evaluation, there is an overemphasis on managerial value orientation. Future policies for cultivating top-notch innovative talents should reinforce a pluralistic value orientation and enhance the coordination of three-dimensional policy goals; Deepen the concept of dynamic identification and establish large-scale, normalized talent selection mechanisms; Integrate diverse training forces and explore systematic and organized cultivation strategies; Leverage artificial intelligence technologies to build multidimensional and multi-level value-added evaluation systems.

The success of top innovative talents lies in the organic cooperation between selection and cultivation. From the current selection and cultivation of the top innovative talents, it is found that: the cultivation pattern of top innovative talents based on the perspective of selection is trapped in the contradiction between the certainty and uncertainty of the selection process, which is manifested as the imbalance of the selection of excellence between the justice and differentiation of the examination, the illusion of competition for excellence between the comparison and the ranking, and the questioning of excellence between the specialization and the closure of the excellence promotion. Based on the cultivation perspective, the pattern of cultivating outstanding and innovative talents faces the conflict between the sustainable guarantee and unsustainable risk of the cultivation process, which is manifested in the deviation between the result goal of having ability and the process goal of ignoring aspiration, the contradiction between the ideal mode of characteristic cultivation and the realistic action of convergence strategy, and the argument between the interdisciplinary expectation of knowledge and the disciplinecentered knowledge adherence. Based on this, it is necessary to seek the emergence of top innovative talents in the unification between selection and cultivation, which is manifested in identifying and guiding the leaders who match the development of fields and the pioneers who nurture and expect for the breakthroughs in crossfield research.

Diversification is the basic characteristic and fundamental trend of the popularization stage of higher education. From the perspective of the triple logic of history, theory, and practice, the diversification of higher education has different generation motives and evolution paths, responding to the development demands of the state, society, market, universities, and individuals. Diversification in higher education refers to the allround diversification from external structure to specific educational and teaching processes and methods, covering heterogeneous restructuring of structural elements, dynamic balance of power relations, and personalized adaptation of talent cultivation. China should promote the reform of universities by classification, establish a dynamic adjustment and characteristic development mechanism; Build a diversified collaborative governance system to promote the activation of natural person subjectivity; Improve the strategic layout of talent, institutional support, and technological empowerment throughout the entire process of talent cultivation.

Diversified development will become a key strategy for the development of colleges and universities and the construction of a highquality higher education system in the future. From the perspective of the basic paths for the diversified development of research universities in Europe and America, autonomous schoolrunning is the foundation for maintaining the diversified development of universities; Marketdriven forces serve as the driving force to promote such diversified development; Organizational and institutional freedom is the key to realizing it; Balance and compromise constitute an effective strategy for universities to sustain their diversified development. To advance the diversified development of universities, it is necessary to avoid excessive competition between universities and various institutions, guard against the potential impact of "academic drift" on such development, and fully recognize that diversified development is a longterm strategy shaped by the joint action of the government, the market, universities′ autonomous operation, and their diversified organizational systems.

The essence of university diversification development and youth development-oriented city construction is a three-dimensional reconstruction process of "space-function-emotion" with "sustainable innovation ecosystem" as the value core, which is rooted in the symbiotic coupling relationship between knowledge production, resource circulation and value co-creation. This coupling relationship relies on the interaction of university, city and youth to form a four-dimensional spiral progressive system of professional ability, urban identity, innovation concentration and cultural temperature, and forms a city-university interaction picture of knowledge hub, innovation hub and talent hub under the bonding effect of field culture. However, in the era of rapid social change, the twoway interaction between diversified university development and youth development city is facing the reality impact of population loss crisis, diploma worship, resource sharing barrier and weak urban transformation. It is urgent to meet the future challenges with high-quality interaction of "university-youth-city". The construction of a diversified university development enabling youth development city needs to build a symbiosis mechanism between people and cities based on youth-friendly ecology, promote the integration of schools and cities by relying on the cooperation of government, industry, university and research, promote the sharing of urban resources for youth innovation and entrepreneurship needs, and shape social resonance with a multiinclusive evaluation system.

The pursuit of global development and worldclass excellence constitutes the fundamental mission for China′s "Double Firstclass" universities. These institutions′ global development strategies currently face serious challenges from deglobalization trends, geopolitical competition among major powers, and populist ideologies. Conversely, strategic opportunities arise from the persistent evolution of globalization, growing demands for transnational governance, and China′s path of peaceful development. "Double Firstclass" universities should adopt responsibilitydriven global development strategies. Guided by the concept of the community with a shared future for mankind, these universities should implement a cosmopolitan development idea and maintain a "beauty shared by all" attitude in intercultural communication. The realization of their global development and contributions to global public goods can be achieved through globalization transformation in three dimensions: human capital, institutions, and technology.

 With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, global education systems are undergoing profound transformations. Higher Education 5.0, as a new paradigm integrating technological empowerment with humanistic guidance, is emerging as a key driver in building world-class education systems. The core connotation of Higher Education 5.0 is to strengthen the construction of a new educational paradigm that integrates technological empowerment and humanistic guidance. Policy empowerment, policy support, industryacademia collaboration, and technological foundation have provided key impetus and systematic guarantee for the systematic transformation of China′s higher education system and the realization of the goal of becoming an education powerhouse. To promote the transformation and upgrading of Higher Education 5.0, China should build a human-oriented and innovative teaching model, deepen the collaborative education mechanism among industry, academia and research, accelerate the construction of an educational digital ecosystem, strengthen the deep integration of intelligent technologies, and optimize the collaborative mechanism of the three pillars. It is necessary to further improve the new quality education and new quality talent cultivation system, enhance students′ digital literacy and lifelong learning ability, and promote the joint efforts of multiple subjects to participate in the construction of Higher Education 5.0, thereby providing a theoretical framework and practical solutions for promoting the connotative development of higher education and serving the construction of an education powerhouse.

Digital transformation serves as both a critical foundation for realizing the digital-intelligentization of higher education governance and a practical necessity to promote the synergy among governance subjects and the ecologicalization of governance environments in higher education. In the digital-intelligent era, driven by the strong intervention of digital-intelligent technologies and drastic changes in governance environments, higher education governance has undergone fundamental shifts: its mode has transformed from "experience-based inertia" to "digital-intelligent-driven"; its subjects have shifted from "unipolar dominance" to "pluralistic co-governance"; and its environment has evolved from "meaning interpretation" to "environment construction". In practice, however, the landscape order structured by digital technologies has trapped higher education governance in illusions triggered by digital-intelligentization, such as technological enchantment, organizational exploitation, and environmental disorder. Looking ahead, higher education must adhere to the governance principle of unifying "technological empowerment" and "technological persistence", establish a governance structure that coordinates "organizational enablement" and "subject initiative", and advance the construction of a governance system where "environmental empowerment" and "clear responsibility and authority" are matched. Only in this way can the educational value of higher education governance models in the digital-intelligent era be fully unleashed.

Based on the provincial panel data from 2003 to 2022, this paper constructs an index system of new quality productive forces from three dimensions: labourer, means of labor and labor objects, and analyzes the influence of human capital structure upgrading of higher education on new quality productive  forces. The results show that: on the whole, the upgrading of human capital structure of higher education has significantly promoted the development of new quality productive forces, but this promotion effect is not significant in the central region and northeast region; From the subdimensions heterogeneity of new quality productive forces, the upgrading of human capital structure in higher education has the greatest influence on the labor dimension of new quality productive forces, and the influence on the labor tools and labor objects is roughly the same; The regulatory effect shows that the promotion effect of higher education human capital structure upgrading to new quality productive forces is significantly regulated by higher education human capital agglomeration; Threshold regression shows that there is a significant threshold "self-reinforcement" effect in the process of upgrading the human capital structure of higher education to promote the development of new quality productive forces. Therefore, the future higher education should pay attention to structural optimization, focus on the industrial demand of developing new quality productivitive forces, and create a highland for the gathering of higher education human capital, so as to inject sustained impetus into the development of new quality productivitive forces.