Leading university’s role inregional cooperation andintegration
Wanhua Ma Dr.
Peking University
Hma@pku.edu.cn

Regional cooperation andintegration
Regional cooperation and integration is a term
extensively used in political science and economy inrelation with national policies between countries in agiven geographical region or regions.
Traditionally, countries according to their economic
development level, governmental form, politicalstructures or security need formed alliance.
In the process of economic globalization, there appears a
new situation for “regionalization.”
My presentation will focus on leading universities’ role in
the process of “regionalization.”

Economic Regional organizations
and higher education
Relatively from 1970s, there appeared different kinds ofregional economic organizations: regional and crossregional organizations.
Such as EU is very much a regional organization, and sodoes with ASEAN, ASEAN + 3 and NAFTA. APEC andShanghai Cooperation Organization could be consideredas cross regional organizations.
No doubt, those organizations play very important roles in
the integration of regional economy or global economy,
and they also affect higher education in many aspects.

Glocalization and higher education
Higher education is very much influenced by thoseregional organizations, such as now in EU, highereducation just experiences an integration under theBologna process.
In Asia, there is no such a political framework as EU toprovide support for higher education integration.
So in the field of higher education in East Asia orspecially in China, researchers seldom talk about regional
cooperation, but internationalization and globalization, or
sometimes localization.

Internationalization
Internationalization for higher education has been definedin many ways. For this presentation, internationalizationis considered “as a proactive effort on the part ofuniversities to embrace their universal nature by opening
their curriculum, research, classrooms, and networks tothe world.” (Egron-Polak, E.2005, p59).
First, internationalization (Englishnization) is very
fundamental to Chinese leading universities, all of thestudents have to take English level 6 examination in orderfor them to secure a job after their graduation.

Globalization and students mobility
Economic globalization has produced great influence to highereducation. In GATTS, higher education is viewed as a service sectorof an economy.
** Higher education has been considered as a very important industry to
many advanced countries, such as in Australia, Britain, Canada andthe United States, thousand of Chinese students brought millions ofdollars to those countries.
**Statistics shows that just in mainland China, in 2007, 67,723 students
went to the United States.
** But to Japan in 2007, for short term study, there was only 8,368, toSouth Korea, it was only 7000 students.
**

“Americanizaiton” and localization
Many research shows that higher education
reform worldwide or institutional change has verymuch influenced by the US model, there are someconcerns on the convergence of higher learning
institutions, the concept of localization is used topreserve academic, institutional or system
diversity.
For this process, Simon Marginson creates a term
“Glocalization” to describe the situation.

National policy change
Due to those different developmental process, it is easy toobserve national policy change either in developed ordeveloping countries for higher education,.
Such as in South Korea, there is BK21( Brain South
Korea for the 21st century), in Japan, legalization ofpublic universities in 2003, and the establishment of COEprograms; and in China, 211 and 985 projects.
Those are considered as country efforts to promote thegrowth of leading universities in East Asia and to furtherdifferentiate the internal system of higher education.

Leading universities
In the field of high education, “theflagship university”, “the world-classuniversity”, “the emerging global
research universities” are used todescribe new developmental trend ofleading universities both in developingor developed countries.

Networking of Leading universities•

Like regional economic organizations, leading universities
are also organized together.

•Such as in East Asia, the four university presidents(Tokyo university, National Seoul university, Pekinguniversity, and Henoi University) meet annually to
discuss commonly concerned issues.
There are regional or international university associations,such as AC21, APRU, Universities 21, Association of
East Asia Research Universities, Eurasia-Pacific Uninet
International Association of Research Universities.
Those organizations provide cooperative frameworks for
institutional cooperation regionally or internationally.

••

Internationalizing the campus
Leading universities are trying to internationalize
their campuses by strengthening English
teaching, reforming their curriculum, adding newteaching or research programs.
At Peking University, only in the past 5 years,
270 international meeting and conferences were
held from University presidents forum to thesymposium for culture study and environmentalprotections.

Develop joint training programs
Developing joint programs between leading universities.
At Peking university, there are Yale joint undergraduate
program, Cornell joint undergraduate program, Stanford
undergraduate program, and etc

Similarly, at Waseda U. there is Confucius schoolfor the promotion of cultural understanding.

Collaborative on research projects
Developing multilateral collaborative projects
among leading universities is another aspects forinternational collaboration.
At Peking U, many research projects establishedwith joint efforts from universities in othercountries.
Similarly, Waseda U, Singapore U, and Hong
Kong University all set up many joint research
projects, some are bilateral or regionally based
and some are multilateral with global reach.

Becoming more socially involved
In many cases, leading universities become more sociallyinvolved, they work as links or bridges between the local
and the global communities for multi-culturalunderstanding, social change and economic development.
Traditionally Chinese universities, especially leading
universities seldom cooperate with local governments orpay attention to local communities, but the situation ischanging now. Leading universities become more andmore local focused by using their knowledge in helping
communities to solve practical problems.

Global focused
For leading universities, in their strategic planning or daily
operation, they are very much global focused,
Such as at Peking University, more than 200 hundred
universities have signed exchange agreements withPeking University. The regional distributions:
In Asia, there are 57 institutions
In Europe, there are 69 intuitions
In North America, there are 44 institutions
In South America, there are 6 institutions
In Africa, there are 4 institutions
In Oceania, there are 8 institutions.
The cooperation are very much beyond the region.

The need to strengthen regional
cooperation
In Mainland, China, up to 2005, there were 1000
joint or cooperative programs in the country,
Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools(CFCRS)
Besides, Taiwan and Hong Kong regions, US, Australia,
Candia, Japan, Singapore, England, France, German andSouth Korea are listed at the top.

But the dominance of cooperation is still fromNorth America and Australia. In many aspects, it
is lack of regional cooperation in Asialanguage issue to regional
cooperation
In 2007, there was a survey at Peking U. asking students ifthey were given an opportunity to go abroad for another
degree, where they want to go, United States , England,and Australia are still the first choice. As for the reasons,language is the first .
This indicates that for regional integration, we may come tothe language challenge. In China, in the big cities, kids
start English training at very earlier years.

Inclusiveness in regional cooperation
Another situation has to be pointed out when
we talk about regional cooperation ofhigher education: smaller and lessdeveloped countries do not seem to haveopportunities to participate in the process.
Even in Asia, there are plenty of examples.

The need for mutual recognition
Eg.: Countries which signed agreements on
mutual recognition of academic degrees
with China, in Asia, there were only
Srilanka and Mongolia.
If we want to see a real regional
integration, mutual recognition of academic
degree may be the first step to begin with.

Finance for Regional Cooperation
The dominance of the global markets and the shrinking ofappropriations from public sources for higher education
create a hot competition between leading universities forhuman and financial resources worldwide.
While the leading universities compete or co-operateregionally or worldwide in developing transnational or
cross-border programs, leading universities in lessdeveloped countries are certainly in a disadvantaged
position, because lack of resources.

In my previous research on the emerging
global research university, I strongly feelthe need of regional cooperation in highereducation, so here I suggest that we should
establish a mechanism to facilitate theongoing discussions and I am willing to bepart of the process.

Thank you