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East Asia is a most dynamic region and its fast developing higher education and research systems are gathering great momentum. East Asian higher education has common cultural roots in Chinese civilization, and in indigenous traditions, each country has been shaped in different ways by Western intervention, and all are building global strategies. Shared educational agendas combine with long political tensions and rising national identities. Hope and fear touch each other. What are the prospects for regional harmony-in-diversity? How do internationalization and indigenization interplay in higher education in this remarkable region, where so much of the future of humanity will be decided? Experts from Australia, China mainland, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK and Vietnam probe these dynamics, with original perspectives, robust evidence and brilliant writing. Changing Higher Education in East Asia deepens our understanding of internationalization and globalization agendas such as world-class universities and international students. It takes readers further, exploring the role of higher education in furthering the global public and common good, world citizenship education, the internationalization of the humanities and social sciences, geopolitics and higher education development, cross-border academic mobility, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on regional student mobility, and future regionalization in East Asia.

In a context of increased primary school enrollment rates, secondary education is appearing as the next big challenge for Latin American and East Asian countries. This report seeks to undertake a detailed diagnostic of secondary education in these two regions, understand some of the main constraints to the expansion and improvement of secondary education, and suggest policy options to address these constraints, with focus on policies that improve the mobilization and use of resources.

Offers a snapshot of key educational stratification issues in East Asian nations, and their evolution in conjunction with changing student populations. This book addresses issues ranging from curricular adaptations to globalization, to persisting and new forms of educational stratification, to new multiculturalism in educational policy.

The name Wang Gungwu is iconic. He is one of the most eminent scholars and historians in Asia today and is renowned for his scholarship on the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia. A well-known scholar aside, Wang Gungwu has been an inspiring educator since he embarked on an academic career first at the University of Malaya and subsequently at the Australian National University before making his mark as vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1995, chairman of the Institute of East Asian Political Economy from 1996 to 1997, and director of the East Asian Institute (EAI) of the National University of Singapore from 1997 to 2007.

Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His proposals accordingly revamped the conventional terms of colonization by representing India as overstocked with labor but vacant of capital and skill that only European settlers could provide. The article concludes with the broader implications of a transimperial analytic framework for writing connected histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

A small group of high-performing East Asian economies dominate the top of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. This has caught the attention of Western policymakers, who want to know why East Asian children obtain such high PISA scores, and what can be done to replicate their success. In this paper I investigate whether children of East Asian descent, who were born and raised in a Western country (Australia), also score highly on the PISA test. I then explore whether their superior performance (relative to children of Australian heritage) can be explained by reasons often given for East Asian students' extraordinary educational achievements. My results suggest that second-generation East Asian immigrants outperform their native Australian peers by approximately 100 test points. Moreover, the magnitude of this achievement gap has increased substantially over the last ten years. Yet there is no 'silver bullet' that can explain why East Asian children obtain such high levels of academic achievement. Rather a combination of factors, each making their own independent contribution, seem to be at play. Consequently, I warn Western policymakers that it may only be possible to catch the leading East Asian economies in the PISA rankings with widespread cultural change.

Concerns of equity with respect to the community college model in East Asia persist in educational research. In this study, we described and analysed students’ “lived experience” in community colleges in Hong Kong in terms of the “warming up” or “cooling out” of their educational desire. Semistructured interviews with 14 graduates of community colleges in Hong Kong were conducted to determine how their experiences at community colleges affected their educational expectations and the extent to which community colleges help students reconsider their educational disadvantages in a competitive, meritocratic and massified higher education system. The qualitative interview data were inductively thematised into four aspects of college experience in relation to their educational expectations. The data revealed that Hong Kong’s community colleges help some students develop their capabilities and change their educational expectations through democratic admissions, liberal pedagogic environments, learner-centred formative assessment and student services for strategic university articulation. Rather than cooling-out students’ educational desire (characterised by gradual disengagement, objective denial, alternative achievement), community colleges in Hong Kong provide a second chance for failing and disadvantaged students to pursue a university education, but this warming-up function applies only to students who benefitted from the liberal mode of assessment and discovered and developed their academic capabilities in their college experience. The paper ends with a critical analysis of the problem of such warming up of educational desire and the extent to which community colleges can empower disadvantaged students for a good life.

East Asian higher education is experiencing a massive growth in doctoral education with the world-class university initiatives. The growth of doctoral education in the region is remarkable especially as seen in the Chinese system which became positioned as the world’s second largest doctoral degree-granting system. Yet, there are growing issues in doctoral education related to system reform, graduate employment in a changing job market, program quality, research funding, and even the identity of doctoral education (professional training vs. training next generation scholars). These are globally emerging issues for policy makers and higher education scholars. This article will encourage academic discussions on the challenges and global trends in doctoral education from the comparative perspective of Anglo-American and European systems.

The literature suggests that recent years have witnessed a fundamental shift in higher education internationalisation. This paper argues that a reorientation of policy, which is upheld through an initiative known as the Higher Education Sprout Project, indicates the fundamental shift in higher education internationalisation in Taiwan. The paper begins with an explanation of how the notion of world-class university induced elitism in East Asian higher education. Next, it reviews the last two decades of Taiwan’s efforts on developing world-class universities. In particular, the paper explains how perceived domestic problems in higher education, such as an overemphasis on certain performance indicators and the resulting effects of homogenisation, and the phenomenon of emphasising research but neglecting teaching, are considered the consequences of emphasising global competition and the associated quest for building world-class universities. The paper argues that the recent policy change reveals an intention to uphold egalitarianism, thereby reaching a balance between fulfilling global ambition and addressing local needs in higher education. This intention highlights the political essence of internationalisation policy for higher education. It also reaffirms the significance of the global–local dynamics in higher education policy.