China’s Global Bridging: The Transformation of University Mobility between Hong Kong and the USA (original) (raw)
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Higher Education
Literature offers a theoretical framework exemplifying the inherent tensions between “becoming Chinese” and “remaining global” in the evolution of the international status of Hong Kong. Adopting this framework, this paper examines the global position of Hong Kong’s higher education through an investigation of universities’ participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Greater Bay Area development plan. Specifically, drawing on data from interviews about universities’ engagement with the two Chinese grand strategies, the paper discusses university leaders and academics’ experience and perception of Hong Kong’s global status against a policy context that foregrounds a deeper integration with the Chinese national development. This discussion offers a theoretical dialogue that reveals different but overlapping scenarios for the future of Hong Kong’s higher education and sheds light on the link between the changing geopolitical contexts and international higher education.
China (PRC) acquired seven universities-three of which are among the top 10 in Asia-with over 5,000 full-time academic staff.' At least five are larger than more than 90 percent of China's universities.2 Hong Kong universities and their faculty differ in fundamental ways from those on the mainland, especially in their distinct Western academic traditions and autonomy, as well as their organization, governance, finance, and institutional cultures. The greater global integration of academics in Hong Kong is as much a function of technological resources as of academic freedom.3 Maintaining Hong Kong's universities as they are is a major challenge for the new Special Administrative Region (SAR) government as well as Beijing. Academics are the driving force in Hong Kong universities. Compared with China's professoriate, Hong Kong's has greater influence on the flow and control of knowledge, as well as on academic policies at the department, school, and institutional levels.4 This has been due not only to the freedom of Hong Kong society but also to the composition of the professoriate, which includes a high proportion of overseas Chinese (most with foreign pass-
International Journal of Educational Reform, 2008
With the rapid growth and expansion of the Asian economies in recent years, there has been a continued rise of students in Asia who are studying outside their home countries. This study attempts to highlight the major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Hong Kong's higher education in relation to its potential of being a regional education hub in Asia. The article concludes by examining the implications for the Hong Kong government and the higher education sector in their seeking to capture these increasingly growing Asian markets.
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Internationalization is known to enhance university capacities in cross-border learning and encourage institutional transformations for improved quality of scholarship and education. Studies on internationalization of research and teaching are, however, under-problematized with regard to asymmetries that pervade different collaborating systems and cultures. This paper addresses this gap by elucidating asymmetries in the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA), which is dealing with differences in legacies and experiences of internationalization in university research and teaching. At a time when the governments in the three constituent juris- dictions of GBA—Guangdong Province, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), and Macao SAR—encourage universities to collaborate across jurisdictional borders, this study applies a bibliographic analysis to shed light on asymmetries and mitigation strategies in internationalization of research and teaching.
International competition drives research universities to find ways to anchor globalization for academic productivity and innovation through cross-border collaboration. This paper examines the case of pre-and postcolonial Hong Kong and how its universities transited from undergraduate institutions to highly ranked research universities within 30 years. While this is attributed to an enabling environment of institutional autonomy, open borders and cross-cultural capacity, a case study of one research university points to the role played in all of Hong Kong's universities by network agents, institutional arrangements, and brain circulation to recruit and retain international scholars and scientists. While this has strengthened capacity, it cannot be sustained without indigenous academic leadership to ensure that globalization is anchored in local culture. The paper makes the case that the Hong Kong model can be generalizable as a cosmopolitan model for developing countries, as it has in the Chinese mainland, even Hong Kong research universities continues to align with the general rise and development of highquality universities in Beijing and Shanghai.
Transnational education in China: Joint venture Sino-US universities and their impact
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In recent years US universities have been diving into the Chinese higher education field by partnering with Chinese universities to create new joint venture Sino-US universities in China. From my field research interviewing students and professors at the NYU Shanghai and Duke Kunshan University campuses, I drew my main research questions: 1) What is the practical purpose of having JV Sino-US universities from the perspectives of the stakeholders-the home universities, governments, and students involved? 2) When we consider the ideal role and purpose of a university within society, what do these new transnational universities add to the conversation? I informed my research with the literature of international education, Chinese higher education, and critique of the modern Western university. From my research, I found that recruiting international students is a practical and value-laden challenge, and that the finances to support financial aid incentives may be an issue in the future. Concerning academic freedom, JVs have special privileges to operate in China with full freedom, but subtle issues of self-censoring or visas may still cause friction. Overall, these JV schools seem to suffer from the same issues that affect Western higher education in general, but they may be pioneers in re-evaluating liberal arts and discovering better ways to teach a broad range of students from different backgrounds.
International student mobility has emerged as a key source of societal and educational transformations in the booming economies of East Asia. International competencies are increasingly valued by employees and employers alike. Given the uneven distribution of international student flows, and the inequitable levels of benefit that they bring to various locales and institutions, some jurisdictions are seeking the optimal policy instruments for leveraging public and private interests in the mobility of human resources and knowledge. This case study of Hong Kong looks at the outbound–inbound student flows and explains how the government facilitates cross-border education balances. The researchers utilized the four modes of the General Agreement on Trades in Services framework, and found it to be a helpful tool in analyzing the government's balancing act, despite the challenges associated with the conceptualization of international student mobility as a commodity or trade in services.