Hong Kong’s education research communities have attracted leading education scholars from all over the world and have served as a global and regional hub in education research. Simultaneously, the expected role of education research in the development of education policies and practices in Hong Kong and China is evolving into a crucial matter. This paper details the history, current conditions, and future perspectives of Hong Kong’s education research communities from local, national, regional, and global standpoints. Copyright © 2022 AERA.

This presentation reports the initial findings of a study that examines university governance in relation to the institutional and cultural settings of the higher education systems of three Chinese societies – Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The research employs a mixed-method strategy that consists of semi-structured interviews and a small-scale survey. The qualitative part of the research sought to explain the coordination mechanism in university governance through an analysis of data generated from 57 interviews. Evidences collected from the interviews revealed the interactions and relationships amongst the various actors on governance matters, and constructed a taxonomy of institutional balance of power in the higher education systems of the three Chinese societies. The qualitative research also generated 12 situations of governance matters in relation to cultural hybridity, informed by corresponding theoretical components. The small-scale survey, in which 261 manager-academics from the three societies rated the 12 scenarios of cultural hybridity in terms of their realism and acceptableness, then captured cultural differences in handling governance matters in the three higher education systems. This quantitative research reveals that Macau has greater acceptance of these cultural scenarios in comparison with Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, the figures show that most of these cultural situations are generally considered unacceptable, though their likelihood varies in the three places. These findings offers insights into the relationships between institutional forms and cultural features of higher education governance in the three societies. Copyright © 2020 CHER-Hong Kong.

A major cluster of economic engines that have changed Asian higher education, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan have all developed high-income societies as well as world-class universities which linked local “knowledge economies” to global science and created hubs for international collaborations and mobility. However, there has been limited analysis of interdependencies between the rise of world-class universities and changes in the flows of international talent. This paper elaborates on the concept of higher education internationalization that aims at enhancing geopolitical equity in global mobility and re-positioning local students for improved access to the world-class excellence. The paper compares key themes and patterns that define the Tiger societies’ unique positions in the field of global higher education. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).

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. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).

Literature suggests that state–market relations in Asian transnational education appear as a hybrid of economic socialism and economic liberalism as well as of supra-territoriality and sovereignty. Such a notion of hybrid focuses on how Asian states manage the struggles over the meaning and value of higher education, thereby addressing various ways in which states participate in neoliberal globalisation. This paper argues that Asian states’ higher education policy choices are restricted by local politics and the resulting policy agendas. This argument explains the paradoxical situation that Malaysia continuously encounters when developing its regulatory regime to govern transnational education. The argument also illuminates the recalibrations that appeared in the transnational education policies of Singapore and Hong Kong. The paradox and recalibrations reveal how a political perspective on transnational education is important to understand Asian states’ responses to globalisation in higher education regardless of the nature of their regulatory regimes. Copyright © 2021 Society for Research into Higher Education.

This paper provides a critical account of the role of universities in the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong.To do so, the paper examines the political economy of Hong Kong's innovation and technology development. It outlines a finance-led regime, under which the vision of long-term innovation initiatives is transformed into short-term finance events, and the development of an entrepreneurial culture in society and in universities is neglected. The paper also suggests that the current research funding system and the rise of managerialism in the higher education sector restrict the development of academic entrepreneurship, though universities play a significant role in the innovation system. The paper closes by examining the recent changes in higher education policy and governance, the intensification of integration with mainland China and their implications for prospects of advocating a culture of innovation and promoting innovation and technology in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2019 Association for Tertiary Education Management and the LH Martin Institute for Tertiary Education Leadership and Management.

This paper discerns hybridity in higher education in Hong Kong taking the socio-political approach. The socio-political approach holds that higher education is a system essentially located within the social, political, and economic environment. On this basis, the discourse of the hybridity is divided in two stages: colonial era and post-colonial era. The former embeds this discourse in Hong Kong’s colonial history (1842-1997). Though the university was imported to Hong Kong by the British colonial government as an imperialist project that institutionalized Western civilisation in China, it was simultaneously connected to Chinese nationalism. This blend of colonialism and nationalism denotes a collaborative colonial governmentality and illustrates a paradigm of hybridity in the colonial era. The later draws heavily on the social, political and economic changes in post-colonial Hong Kong. Several incidents involving individual academic freedom and institutional autonomy of universities that occurred in Hong Kong after 1997 are studied. These controversial incidents and associated confrontations in the university sector are regarded as signals of an ongoing hybridization process in the city. Copyright © 2018 CIES. All Rights Reserved.

With the processes of inter- and intranationalization, higher education in Hong Kong has been rapidly expanding in an effort to develop the city into a regional education hub. This chapter explores the trends and developments of higher education research (HER) in Hong Kong in the context of inter- and intranationalization. By drawing on the data from the Scopus database, this chapter analyzes a selection of journal chapters on higher education published in Hong Kong over the past three decades. Findings show that a significant growth and some new outputs have been seen in the field during the study period. In addition, local researchers have complied with the rule by forming more transnational and intranational research teams and by conducting more nonlocal studies. Interestingly, many of them have not abandoned local collaboration and studies, but they further developed their roots. These findings reveal that some internal signs of cosmopolitanization have been recorded in the field.