Globalization transforms higher education in multifold and unprecedented ways. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in students' global mobility, the emergence of English as the predominant language for teaching and research, expansion of branch campuses, and a flourishing of cross-national research collaboration. Internationalization now plays a pivotal role in shaping and reshaping all aspects of higher education (Deardorff, Wit, Heyl, and Adams, 2012) . This is evidenced by the fact that published articles on the internationalization of higher education (IoHE) have come to outnumber those published on the broader topic of higher education itself since the mid-2000s (Yemini and Sagie, 2016) .
Whereas scholarships and mobility schemes once formed the cornerstone of joint international cooperation, schools and governments have adopted increasingly competitive and commercialized approaches, shifting their focus to trans-national and offshore education to promote student recruitment and faculty exchanges (de Wit, 2013) . IoHE constitutes a convoluted development that sees universities cooperating in equipping graduates with transnational competencies, transferable skills and foreign language abilities, while competing to recruit international students and professors in the global education market. By its nature, IoHE invariably involves contradictory demands. While universities are committed to the lofty ideal of advancing universal knowledge, the reality is that government is a dominant force that controls higher education for the country's own specific purposes, even when these purposes may be contrary to the interest of the internationalization of learning and teaching (Kerr, 1990) . In other words, IoHE is an ongoing, dynamic process characterized by inherent context-specific tensions.
Research into the development of IoHE and its theorization by Jones, Coelen, Beelen, and de Wit (2016) emphasizes how local responses to internationalization vary according to national contexts. For example, while cross-border mobility represents a global trend, it also bears the specific hallmarks of the local higher education contexts in which it occurs. Interaction between the global and the local settings is increasingly complex (Bamberger et al., 2019) . Therefore, de Wit et al., 2015b , stress that contextualization is a theoretical and practical prerequisite for appropriately linking internationalization with local context.
Although understanding the nexus between IoHE and global and local levels is crucial, dialog and connection between local contexts and international dimensions often remains limited (Jones et al., 2016; Proctor and Rumbley, 2018) . To overcome this shortcoming, focusing on local responses to policies relating to higher education internationalization can be informative. In particular, zeroing-in on the interplay between global and local dimensions can elucidate the motivations that shape and drive policy and initiatives related to internationalization. Research into how structural forces impact internationalization in the U.K. reveals national policy's immense power to influence institutional discourses and strategies, and shape the understandings and activities of actors in the field of higher education (Lomer, 2017) .
Governments routinely exploit internationalization for domestic purposes, and political controversy can actually be a decisive factor driving it (Bamberger et al., 2019) . In a study on higher education in Japan, for example, Hill and Hupe (2002) explicate the tension between the intent to preserve national identity and a desire to build a global profile. In addition, the way in which the rise of hard-right parties in certain European countries fuels anti-immigration sentiment and impinges on the internationalization of higher education bears consideration. National security concerns or economic downturns may prompt governments to introduce restrictions to tighten control and oversight over the flow of international students (Altbach and Reisberg, 2017) . Donald Trump's 'America First' platform and the Brexit saga can be seen as embodiments of this tendency for some states to retract inward in times of perceived distress-circling the wagons, so to speak-as opposed to reaching out to internationalize.
Indeed, the dramatic rise in nationalism over the past decade could reasonably be predicted to affect internationalization profoundly. Consider, for example, the enduring effects of the Trump administration's 2019 travel ban on individuals from Muslim countries, and concurrent increases in the stringency of immigration restrictions and visa requirements. The danger lies in such inward-looking political orientations clouding the issues surrounding IoHE (Knight and . Indeed, the waters have become so muddied that some scholars are predicting that the unlimited growth of higher education internationalization may soon come to an end (Altbach and .
The conflict between internationalization and nationalism exacerbates existing stress from the growing commercialization of IoHE. In Japan, for example, the strong sense of national identity discovered in universities is perceived as a serious hurdle to Japan's development of higher education in the global marketplace (Yonezawa and Shimmi, 2015) . It remains uncertain exactly how the rising tide of nationalism will affect higher education's internationalization and how nationalist ideology will translate into IoHE (Altbach and deWit, 2017) . This paper therefore concentrates on how political controversies influence IoHE policy development in the context of a fledgling democracy-Taiwan.
In Taiwan, an island country of nearly 24 million people, a deepseeded conflict over national identity that essentially hinges on whether one identifies as Taiwanese or Chinese has simmered for decades. The study aims to examine empirically how the island's historically inwardlooking political climate exerts its influence on IoHE policy. The fact that traditional Confucian values still permeate the higher education system and the state's continuing insistence on a hands-on role in university governance (Marginson, 2011) also make Taiwan a particularly interesting case study. Moreover, Taiwan's higher education system has undergone enormous transformation (Chou and Ching, 2012) , including heightened efforts to promote IoHE by a succession of elected government administrations since the mid-1990s.
Hanging over this unique historical backdrop like the proverbial sword of Damocles is the constant political tension between Taiwan and China. Conflicting visions of the international status of the former threaten to erupt into armed conflict, should China perceive the island has gone too far towards declaring official independence. The Confucian legacy, the strongly interventionist state, and the inherent instability of the cross-Strait dynamic with China combine to engender tensions between internationalization and nationalism that play out in the development of IoHE in Taiwan.
By reviewing IoHE policy developments, the study aims to understand how internationalization can simultaneously be exploited as an instrument for achieving domestic purposes and used to foment political controversy. The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) is applied as the underlying theoretical approach, because it is sophisticated enough to uncover the complex interplay among various forces associated with global, regional and national settings. More specifically, the study explicates the change of IoHE policies in Taiwan and attempts to tease out the drivers for policy changes. Incorporating the research results into the ACF, the study develops a conceptual framework for explaining policy change in IoHE in the age of globalization.
Taiwan's emergence as a modern political entity is entwined inextricably with China. In the thirteenth century, the first Chinese settled in Taiwan. Others from China's Fujian and Guangdong provinces followed in droves in the seventeenth century. In 1949, President Chiang Kai-Shek lost the Civil War and relocated his government-in-exile to Taiwan from mainland China, and Taiwan became known as the Republic of China (R.O.C.). Meanwhile, across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese Communist Party established the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.). Since then, the two rival political regimes have been embroiled in an intense diplomatic struggle for sole possession of the legitimate right to use the name 'China'. Cross-strait relations, which remain complicated with changes in the nature of the interactions between the R.O.C. and the P.R.C., have refined national identity on the island (Law, 2002) .
After retreating with his forces to Taiwan, President Chiang exercised tight political control through sweeping restrictions on civil liberties under martial law. Under Chiang, Chinese values and culture were assiduously inculcated in Taiwanese society, with the result that people adopted a distinctly Chinese worldview. Many even referred to themselves as 'children of the Yellow River', reflecting their perception of possessing Chinese identity (Yu and Kwan, 2008) . In 1971, the R.O.C. lost its U.N. membership, thus frequently categorized as an unrecognized state under international law. Since then, a locus of polityseeking nationalism has been embedded in Taiwan (Wu, 2016) .
When martial law ended in the late 1980s, Taiwan transitioned to full democracy. Lee Teng-hui's election by popular vote in 1988 made him the first native Taiwanese president in the country's history. Following his inauguration, Lee encouraged further loosening of social strictures. The governing Kuomintang (i.e. the Chinese Nationalist Party, hereinafter KMT) began allowing Taiwanese citizens to travel to China to visit kin. Beijing, for its part, adopted an open-door policy and touted the benefits of economic integration. This increased interaction across the Strait actually served to demarcate the differences between the two societies, however. The evident wide disparity in economic development made many Taiwanese reluctant to embrace the Chinese Communist Party, preferring instead to distance themselves from the political regime in mainland China (Chen, 2013) . It has been argued that democratization ushered in an era of emergent Taiwanese consciousness (Yu and Kwan, 2008) . Wu (2016) even suggests that Taiwan's democratization gave rise to Taiwanese nationalism.
The Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) 2000 election win ended the KMT's 55-year uninterrupted rule, marking a sea change with the transition from a KMT-dominated polity to a multiparty one (Chen, 2013) . Moreover, President Chen Shui-Bian vocally advocated Taiwan's independence from China, stressed Taiwanese national identity, and exhorted constituents to put 'Taiwan First'. Chen's administration has been described as decidedly Taiwan-centered (Law, 2002; Lo and Chan, 2018) . National identity became a highly contentious issue in Taiwan as pro-independence politicians sought to raise the profile of Taiwanese culture. Their strong advocacy of Taiwanization had a profound impact on public policy making (Zhong, 2016 ).
Chen's DPP government deliberately demarcated Taiwanese as distinct from Chinese in social, historical and cultural realms (Yu and Kwan, 2008) . The DPP under Chen promoted Taiwanese identity through the educational system, incorporating the local dialect and indigenous languages into primary school curricula. Textbooks were rewritten, with Taiwan-specific content supplanting material about China. During this time, Taiwan's heritage and traditions largely replaced Chinese identity (Chou and Ching, 2012) .
Faced with these developments, the PRC government clung to its One-China policy, claiming Taiwan as part of its territory. Beijing passed the 2005 Anti-Secession Law, asserting its right to employ all necessary means, including military force, to protect China's sovereignty against Taiwan independence. Military intimidation has been accompanied by a concerted campaign to increase Taiwan's diplomatic isolation by luring or coercing Taiwan's allies to switch their diplomatic allegiance to the PRC (Yu and Kwan, 2008) . In the absence of official recognition of R.O.C.'s statehood by the international community, Taiwan cannot use the country's official name in diplomatic relations, sign treaties, or participate in international organizations or global summits. These moves by Beijing have alienated many Taiwanese, prompting the gradual emergence of a strong sense of Taiwanese identity in contemporary society (Chen, 2013; Lo and Chan, 2018) .
In 2008, President Chen was replaced by Ma Ying-jeou. President Ma's KMT administration espoused a pro-China approach (Wu, 2016) and initiated policies to promote exchanges and collaboration, including establishing the "three direct links", comprising postal service, direct trade, and transportation. When the government signed a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) without prior public consultation in 2014, a large-scale protest popularly known as "the Sunflower movement" sprung up in response. Led by students, this movement highlighted the disenchantment of many Taiwanese with China's growing influence and was a precursor to the KMT's dismal showing in 2014 local elections (Lo and Chan, 2018) . The DPP under Tsai Ing-wen won the presidential election in 2016, at which time national policy reverted to a pro-independence and Taiwanese-nationalist approach (Wu, 2016) .
According to Zhong (2016) , the majority of people in Taiwan now perceive themselves as Taiwanese and are opposed to being regarded as nationals or citizens of the PRC. They identify instead as Taiwanese nationals, living in a sovereign state. The survey also revealed that a significant proportion of Taiwanese are opposed to unification and favor the use of the name Chinese Taipei instead of ROC to distinguish Taiwan from mainland China. The government has added the word 'Taiwan' on passports to indicate the holder is not from the PRC.
The development of international higher education in Taiwan can be roughly divided into three stages based on certain critical external system events. Stage one started from the retreat of KMT forces from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. Stage two features the liberalization triggered by the abolition of martial law in 1987. Stage three represents the emergence of IoHE in Taiwan due to the change of the ruling political party in 2000, as a result of democratization, as well as the influence of globalization on the higher education system.
3.1. International education as a tool for Chinese solidarity (1949−1986) After retreating from mainland China, the ROC government came to regard ethnic Chinese living abroad as a bulwark against Communist incursions from the PRC. In order to develop bonds with overseas Chinese communities, win their support, and connect with future ethnic elite in Asia, the government sought to attract Chinese students to attend college and university in Taiwan (Ma, 2014) . The conflict with the PRC over the official status of China in international affairs intensified when the ROC lost its seat in the United Nations in 1971, and sparked another fight. Since the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, Taiwan has demonstrated strong commitment to preserving Chinese culture and arguably has done a better job of doing so than the PRC has (Zhong, 2016) . From a sociocultural perspective, the government recruited Chinese students to study in Taiwan based on the rationale of protecting Chinese culture and values (Ma, 2014) .
International higher education in Taiwan had a close connection to ethnic solidarity during the early stage of its development. The Ministry of Education introduced regulations for the applications of overseas Chinese students for guaranteed admission to tertiary education in Taiwan in 1951 (MOE, 1987 . In 1973, the government stipulated regulations on foreign students studying in Taiwan. The primary strategy for developing the IoHE was government expenditure, and scholarships were offered to encourage overseas students to pursue higher education in Taiwan (MOE, 1996) . According to official archives, more than 40,000 overseas Chinese had come to Taiwan for education and the number of graduates exceeded 19,000 by 1973 (MOE, 1974) . The approximate number of overseas Chinese who obtained a college degree from 1951 to 1993 was 61,000. One third of those people came from Hong Kong and Macao, constituting the largest proportion, and the others were mainly from Southeast Asia (MOE, 1996) . The data show that the scope of recruiting Chinese students was limited to the regional level during this period, given that most of the target students resided in Southeast Asia.
Taiwanese society entered an age of liberalization after martial law was lifted in 1987. The government gradually loosened political restrictions and initiated progressive reforms, moving toward democratization (Lo and Chan, 2018) . Liberalization and deregulation thus played a decisive part in stimulating the process of higher education reform (Mok, 2000) . As Taiwan's policies toward the PRC became more relaxed, academic exchanges and cultural collaboration with mainland China gradually increased and continued to thrive. Chinese academics, as well as outstanding students in academic, sporting, and artistic fields were permitted to travel to Taiwan for educational and cultural purposes. Around 6200 professionals, including scholars and students from mainland China, visited Taiwan between 1987 and 1993 (MOE, 1996 . Many Taiwanese perceived such activities as a diplomatic mission to liberate mainland Chinese from the shackles of Marxism (Law, 1996) . The rationale, which could be described as public diplomacy or "soft power", continued to shape Taiwan's IoHE as cross-strait relations evolved. Furthermore, a bar on higher education exchanges with socialist countries was also removed. In 1990 the Ministry of Education imposed official directions of inviting foreign personnel to Taiwan for short-term visits (MOE, 2012) . Influential university executives and distinguished academics were invited to visit Taiwan on international exchanges. The government offered grants for higher education institutions to support international activities and develop partnerships, for example, participation in the International Association of University Presidents and the association known as the University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific, in 1993 (MOE, 1996 .
Taiwan's policy on recruiting overseas students was politically driven in the early years (Ma, 2014) . Beyond political diplomacy, academic rationales gradually shaped the development of IoHE. Taiwan's society began its transformation after a blanket ban under martial law was gradually lifted. Political democratization and social liberalization stimulated public demand for university education. The government responded with reforms aimed at expanding higher education capacity and providing more higher education opportunity. Foreign education services were imported and international higher education was perceived as a viable alternative for upgrading one's academic training or qualifications (Ma, 2014) . In addition, the government endeavored to reform international higher education, which had been heretofore hindered by restrictions on the recruitment of overseas students and academics, as well granting wider recognition to foreign higher education degrees and academic credits. The majority of foreign students and academics in Taiwan at that time were limited to language-related programs. The government removed certain regulations and initiated programs to stimulate academic exchanges and collaboration as a means to broaden formal academic contacts with foreign countries. For example, the Ministry of Education provided scholarship programs in 1989 in order to encourage outstanding oversees students to choose Taiwan as a destination country. A total of 942 foreign students were offered scholarships to Taiwan under the program by 1994. Most came from the United States and aimed to study Chinese (MOE, 1996) .
The KMT dominated the administrative and legislative branches of government, monopolizing mainstream policy beliefs and education policy development in Taiwan for over five decades. Following the KMT victory in the first direct presidential election in 1996, local elections precipitated a shakeup of single-party rule, and the DPP seized political power in 2000. Following two terms of DPP governance, the KMT won the 2008 presidential election and held power for eight years, until Tsai Ing-Wen's election in 2016. Ever since 2000, the systemic governing coalition in Taiwan has undergone a transformation from authoritarian to pluralist under democratization. As the ruling party wields formal legal authority over policy decisions, the changed coalition opportunity structure has had a profound impact on Taiwan's IoHE development.
DPP politicians stressed protecting Taiwan's sovereign interests and tended to be more conservative in recruiting Chinese students, compared with the KMT. Chan (2011) suggests this is because individuals who identified as pro-Taiwanese felt Chinese students with different political beliefs and culture could threaten Taiwan's national security and social stability. The Chinese students are viewed as potential competition for Taiwanese who are seeking employment and educational opportunities. At the end of Chen's presidency, the regulations known as Three Restrictions and Six Prohibitions were promulgated in 2008. They limited the number of mainland Chinese students, restricted their employment, and barred them from entering the civil service in Taiwan (National Academy for Educational Research, 2009). The regulations focused on controlling cross-Strait student mobility and exchanges in order to protect Taiwan's interests.
The KMT government, in contrast, angled for closer ties with China. President Ma, for example, touted this as a path to promote democracy, enhance personal liberty, build mutual trust, and ensure peace across the Taiwan Strait. The government launched initiatives to improve cross-Strait relations and proactively recruited Chinese students. Promulgated in 2011, the Regulations Governing the Assessment and Recognition of Academic Credentials for Higher Education Institutions in Mainland China helped facilitate this. The Ma administration also changed its policy to recognize diplomas awarded by prestigious Chinese higher education institutions soon after revising both the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area and the University Act in 2010. Taiwanese universities were permitted to recruit Chinese students and initiate co-teaching programs to allow Chinese professors to teach part-time in Taiwan (National Academy for Educational Research, 2010 Research, , 2011 .
Under the 'stage heuristic' assumption, the process of policymaking is perceived as being sliced into linear stages, such as agenda setting, policy formulation and policy implementation (Sabatier, 2007, p. 6) . To overcome the potential pitfall of this approach leading to oversimplification of the interactions between different policy elements and actors, it has been suggested that policy should be conceived as being multidimensional, so that researchers can improve the understanding of the complexity involved in the phenomenon of policy change (Campbell, 2004 , Howlett, 2009 , Sabatier, 2007 . As IoHE is perceived as a multifaceted concept, and different stakeholder groups bring different views and expectations to this domain (Knight, 1997) , the present study followed an approach of multi-level analysis and applied policy taxonomies derived from the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) (Sabatier, 1988; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993) to analyze and explain the policy development of IoHE in Taiwan.
The ACF develops hypotheses based on the premise that participants in any given policy subsystem coordinate with one another according to their own belief systems. Subsystem actors form advocacy coalitions if their policy beliefs are compatible regarding a particular policy problem or issue within a particular territorial area. That is, the policy actors who are aggregated into an advocacy coalition share sets of ideas relating to the core policy issue. In addition, theorists perceive belief systems as the key attributes that can explain the adoption of different policies in different local contexts (Sabatier and Weible, 2007; Weible et al., 2012) . In this study, the policy subsystem of IoHE in Taiwan is the primary unit of analysis. The term includes the subsystem actors involved in the policymaking process of IoHE policies and the belief system that consists of several policy ideas relevant to IoHE.
The policy ideas play a crucial part in policy development. The belief system is conceptualized as a hierarchical structure, incorporating multi-tiered policy ideas. The policy beliefs at the broadest level are termed "deep core beliefs". They involve fundamental values and assumptions that can be applicable to most policy subsystems. In contrast, the policy ideas at the next level are policy specific and known as "policy core belief", which are bound by scope and topic to the policy subsystem. At the narrowest level, "secondary beliefs" refer to specific instruments for dealing with a subset of the policy subsystem (Sabatier and Weible, 2007) . As Wihlborg and Robson (2018) indicated, the political climate challenges the purposes and process of internationalization, resulting in increasingly diverse rationales for IoHE. Deep core beliefs in this study are symbolized by national identity, which binds actors together and shapes their coordinated activities in all policy domain activities in Taiwan. Policy core beliefs and secondary beliefs are embedded in policy rationales and strategies for IoHE, respectively, in the policy subsystem.
Subsystem actors' preferences are diverse in that they are rooted in pre-existing institutional configurations. The ACF has identified certain categories of factors outside the policy subsystem to explain the process of policy change. Relative stable parameters and external subsystem events both condition the resources, values and institutional structures, which in turn affect the behaviors of actors and their ability to change policy within the policy subsystem. However, the prior set of factors is likely to endure for a longer period of time than the later set. Moreover, external subsystem affairsincluding for example, socioeconomic crises and change in the composition of governing coalitionsare deemed to be the key to major policy change. The influence of the two sets of external categories on the policy subsystem is driven by intermediary factors that provide long term or short term opportunities and constraints for actors to operate (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2018; Sabatier and Weible, 2007) .
To explore the policy context and ideas covering four decades in Taiwan, the study relied on the research approach of document analysis. Bowen (2009) deemed the analysis of documents as an appropriate specialized primary method for historical research which requires detailed descriptions of a phenomenon.
The choice of document analysis, instead of interviews, was beneficial for providing broad coverage of data, especially taking into account the passage of time and the potential effects this might have on individual actors' recollections of events. In addition, personal prejudice and potential bias would be an inevitable problem when interviewing subjects about issues colored by controversial ideology and political conflicts. In contrast to this subjectivity and potential bias, official reports and written documents tend to be non-reactive, and constitute a more readily accessible and reliable source of data than interview transcripts would. More specifically, the tracing of policy development pertinent to IoHE followed a twofold path in order to incorporate a wide variety of information and different types of document sources. Firstly, the study reviewed the education yearbooks of the Republic of China published by the Ministry of Education and those by the National Academy for Educational Research. Those periodic reports -containing laws, policies, regulations, historical statistics, and survey data regarding significant educational matters -provided information on the policy context within which IoHE transformed over time. Secondly, the governmental documents were examined to uncover the statements of intent and plans for action, which decision-makers expressed in the formulation process relevant to international higher education policies and laws. The content analysis relied on a corpus of resources purposively collected from the Executive Yuan Gazette Online (https:// gazette.nat.gov.tw/egFront/indexEng.do), which assembles governmental initiatives, proposals, policy manuals, and official proceedings of the central government for information disclosure.
The analytical procedure entailed three steps. The first was the identification of meaningful passages of texts pertinent to international higher education policies. Particular attention was paid to the deliberations of committee meetings and focused on the minutes and public records of interpellation sessions held by the Legislative Yuan. In order to incorporate as many segments of texts as possible from the governmental online database in the list of texts to explore, the study applied the broad terms "international" and "higher education", rather than using keywords with potentially overly specific meanings, e.g. "national identity". As a result, 135 items were collected from the period between 2001 and 2018 as the documents relevant to the issues being explored.
After gathering relevant texts, the second stage was to develop a coding scheme as a standardized operational procedure for categorizing relevant concepts and attributes. The research team members as analysts, including the author and three postgraduate students employed as research assistants, accessed each piece of text and organized the texts according to the following six aspects, which are related to the central concepts derived from the ACF theoretical framework: 1) The title of the IoHE policy to which the policy ideas refer; 2) The year when the relevant policy idea was articulated; 3) The political affiliation of the subsystem actor who expressed the policy idea; 4) The deep core belief expressed by subsystem actor 1 ; 5) The policy core belief, referring to the policy rationale for motivating the subsystem actor to develop IoHE 2 ; 6) The secondary belief which is conceptualized as policy strategy devised by the policy actor for IoHE. The policy strategies can be differentiated into five types, as shown in Table 2 .
The document gathering was informed by the above-mentioned categories, which also determined what was searched for and how to code the documents. It bears noting that coding certain items proved challenging. For instance, text no. 6 in the appendix contained only the policy ideas relevant to policy beliefs and left the policy rationales and strategies undefined, and therefore not applicable. Moreover, it was recognized that policy beliefs could be an amalgamation of internationalization and Taiwanization, if a policy actor took a middleground approach to national identity. For these "hybrid" cases, the analysts coded actors' expressions of the policy ideas based on their professional judgement, following a process of debate and discussion among the research team members.
In the third step, the researchers quantified the coding results, which appear in the appendix, as the raw data for the last step of the document analysis. The descriptive analysis, with indications of the occurrence frequency of each of the above-mentioned categories, aimed to provide an overall picture of the relations among the theoretical concepts.
Based on the ACF theoretical framework, this section describes the dynamics of the policy subsystem in the transformation of IoHE in Tawain after 2000. Perceiving policy actors as the center of the policy subsystem, the section focuses on three policy elements related to IoHE: policy beliefs, rationales, and strategies.
The results of the document analysis are presented in Fig. 1 , in which 135 policy ideas were extracted and coded from a national online (Law, 2002) or Taiwanese nationalism (Lo and Chan, 2018; Wu, 2016) . General speaking, the term relates to an ideology that emphasizes Taiwanese culture, society, identity, and the interests of residents of Taiwan, by means of promoting "the concept of Taiwan (rather than mainland china) as home country to people in Taiwan" (Law, 1996, p. 57 ). 2 Given the fact that policy rationales may not be mutually exclusive, the rubric that was used to code the documents in terms of policy rationales were was based on the conceptual framework provided by Helms et al. (2015) . Table 1 lists the various rationales (in no particular order).
C.-C. Hsieh International Journal of Educational Development 78 (2020) 102245 database. Fig. 1 shows that the IoHE policy subsystem during three presidencies between 2001 and 2018 accommodated divergent policy beliefs (i.e. Taiwanization and internationalization), pointing to the inclusivity of Taiwan's modern political environment. This sharply contrasts with conditions before political reform in the 1990s. As Bamberger et al. (2019) argued, IoHE can be a political and ideological act. In Taiwan, opening up of the political system and changes in national identity have influenced IoHE policy development. Taiwan is a democratic society with an institutionalized electoral system and multiparty polity, and the people have embraced liberal values following the repeal of martial law. The democratic system and values have become fundamental components of the Taiwanese identity that binds people together, and can be clearly distinguished from mainland China (Law, 2002) . The sharp contrast between the PRC and the ROC stokes the sense of Taiwanese national identity and engenders a sense of alienation from mainland China among a majority of Taiwanese. From an ACF perspective, Taiwan's espousal of electoral democracy changed the composition of governing coalitions and completely transformed Taiwan's political opportunity structure. These changes, in turn, affected the policy subsystem and influenced IoHE policy development.
The results show that IoHE policy making in Taiwan has been conditioned by conflict and compromise between the two major political parties. Fig. 2 shows that most of the policy beliefs collected and coded as originating from policy actors affiliated with the KMT are indicative of prioritizing internationalization, whereas those originating from the DDP tend to exhibit a mindset indicative of Taiwanization.
The DPP has promoted the perspective of Taiwan (as opposed to mainland China) as the homeland since the party won the 2000 election. Actors who advocate Taiwanization stress the importance of preserving Taiwan's cultural heritage, including learning the Taiwanese language and/or aboriginal dialects. These actors believe language and culture combine to reflect a Taiwanese national identity free from affiliation with mainland China. They view Taiwanization as protection against PRC intimidation and coercion. The PRC, for its part, has never wavered in claiming its jurisdiction over the island and its determination to integrate. Hence, DPP advocates and policymakers also argue the importance of protecting the domestic education market from mainland Chinese incursion.
In contrast, KMT actors tend to emphasize expansion of Taiwan's external international relations, including strengthening ties with the PRC. Most KMT actors therefore endorse what might be called a Chinese national identity. When it comes to internationalization, they stress the mastery of foreign languages and emphasize the role of transnational competence in improving global competitiveness. Advocates of internationalization urge the educational system to open its doors to foreign students and service providers, including those from mainland China, to reap the benefits of economic globalization. Chen (2013) found that Chinese national identity was normally defended by the KMT, while the Taiwanese identity was supported by the DPP. The results of the present study echo the previous finding and further indicate that policy actors' political party affiliations can be a decisive factor in predicting their national identity orientation, as well as a determinant of their perspective on the IoHE. 6.2. Actors' policy rationales de Wit (2002) argued that as a constantly evolving process, IoHE can take different forms, depending on the local context and the actors who 'tend to use it in the way that best suits their purpose'. In Taiwan, preferences regarding IoHE (as expressed in policy rationales for internationalization) clearly changed over time (see Table 3 , which shows the results of the document analysis indicating the frequencies of various expressed policy rationales underlying IoHE policy by year).
In Table 3 , the occurrence frequencies during 2001 and 2008 reveal the insignificance of social/cultural and political rationales for the policymakers. This is fundamentally different from the situation during the early stage of development, when international higher education in Taiwan centered on building ties with overseas Chinese. The lifting of martial law was a watershed for Taiwanese society. Moving to the 1990s, political democratization and social liberalization gradually loosened constraints on the educational sector, precipitating a dramatic transformation in response to public pressure. The government leaned toward a more academic perspective as advocates clamored for equal opportunity to access higher education. Internationalization started to be viewed as an instrument to improve the quality of education and research when the system expanded rapidly in the 1990s. Ministry of Education statistics indicate there were 28 higher education institutions in 1986. By 1990, the number had grown to 46, with approximately 240,000 enrolled students. By 2000, these figures had reached 163 and 1,345,000, respectively.
Moving to the period of 2009 and 2016, the frequencies of political rationales indicated in Table 3 became more salient than in the previous stage. Higher education was strategically considered an approach to improving international development (categorized as 3C), strengthening diplomatic relations (3A), and protecting national security (3B). Most KMT policymakers believed that raising the visibility and stature of its higher education system on the world stage could be a potential tactic for overcoming Taiwan's isolation from the international community. Ma (2014) labeled this approach a vehicle of "soft power diplomacy" for garnering international recognition and support for Taiwan. President Ma declared his government's intention to employ this tactic during his Presidency (National Academy for Educational Research, 2009) .
Economic motives are commonly viewed as de-facto driving forces in the IoHE context. It is widely believed that recruiting international students can serve the purpose of establishing national capacity for development by cultivating human resources and workforce power (Collins, Lee, Hawkins, and Neubauer, 2016) . 2B in Table 3 represents the above-mentioned policy rationale of encouraging workforce development. Furthermore, from a neoliberal, market-oriented standpoint, increasing international student mobility can increase revenue, which eases the financial burdens of higher education institutions when higher education supply outstrips demand. This economic rationale (coded as 2C in Table 3 ) refers to looking forward to long-term national economic development. The research results show that Taiwan's government formulated IoHE policy around the economic considerations labeled as 2B and 2C. In addition, the government's rationales for IoHE were only tangentially related to 2A, i.e. concerning the generating of short-term revenue and financial benefits. As Ma (2014) noted, efforts by Taiwan's government and the universities to actively enroll international students were remotely related to attracting those individuals to reside in Taiwan. International student mobility was barely seen as a source of institutional and national revenue intrinsically linked to the commercial facet of internationalization, at least before the 2010s. In the cases of most countries, economic and political rationales are more dominant than academic ones for national policies related to IoHE (,b; Proctor and Rumbley, 2018) . In contrast, the results for Taiwan tell a different story. Rather than concerning itself with turning out qualified workers or becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, the government focused instead on academic rationales. Fig. 3 lists the proportions accounted for by various IoHE policy rationales coded from relevant official documents spanning the years 2000-2018 in Taiwan. We can see that academic rationales (57 %) represent the most dominant category of IoHE policy discourse. More specifically, university rankings and the international profile of Taiwan's higher education (37 %) have been the central concerns pertaining to university governance in Taiwan. Social/cultural rationales (2%) relating to fostering students' international perspectives were the least prevalent, in terms of frequency of occurrence.
In particular, the most frequently occurring rationale for IoHE during the years being looked at is related to prestige and rankings, categorized as 1C in Table 3 . The express goals of building world-class universities and recruiting more international students were tied to policy initiatives to bolster Taiwan's academic reputation abroad. Starting in 2002, the Enhancing University International Competitiveness Project promoted international exchanges and increased foreign student numbers in Taiwan. In 2003, the government launched its ambitious World Class Research University plan to push at least one Taiwanese university into the top 100 globally ranked HE institutions. Subsequently, the government's 2005 Top University Plan (i.e. Development Plan for World Class Universities and Research Centers of Excellence) gave $1.56 billion USD in grants to several universities over five years to boost their research capacity to a world-class level. The policy subsystem adopted international benchmarking as a strategy for competiveness and garnering international recognition. In addition, the improvement of higher education quality, categorized as 1B in Table 3 , also constituted a substantial academic rationale. This is related to the dramatic expansion of higher education in the 2000s, which raised concerns among politicians and academics about improving the quality and status of universities.
Under economic globalization, training for proficiency in information technology and foreign languages represent practical approaches to ensuring participation. Scholars have claimed that economic benefits have replaced political and academic rationales and become the principle driving force for higher education internationalization from the 1990s onwards, as shown by case studies of the United States, Europe and Australia (de Wit, 2002; de Wit et al., 2015a,; Helms et al., 2015) . The Taiwan case, however, represents another scenario, in which the government's grounds for IoHE were more tangentially related to economic reasons than academic rationales (see Fig. 3 ).
After Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002, the higher education system needed to be opened up to adhere to the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which required cross-border trade barriers to be removed. The introduction of market economy principles and neoliberalist strategies to the education system forced the government to address IoHE from the perspectives of global competitiveness and the knowledge economy. While economic perspectives have gradually made inroads into the policy subsystem, constraints on the resources available to actors have also changed.
A demographic shift in the face of a shrinking school-age population has significantly impacted the higher education system. Policy makers hope the IoHE will save a predicted drop in enrolment and fill student vacancies in higher education institutions. They tend to believe that government policies must go beyond merely aiming to recruit overseas students in order to mitigate this predicament. That means the recruitment of international students, whether for degree programs, exchange programs, or learning Mandarin, was not merely anticipated to bring direct economic benefits to universities through tuition fees and to surrounding communities, but has been of paramount importance to the easing of the university oversupply problem. In Canada, Guo and Guo (2017) characterize IoHE as a successful marketing strategy for addressing similar problems. A  B  C  D  A  B  C  A  B  C  A  B  C   2001  0  1  1  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  2002  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 Note: A, B, C and D represent the specific types of policy goals and motivations falling within the broader rationale categories appearing as column headers. For example, column A under the "Academic rationales" header indicates rationales referring specifically to expanding higher education capacity. Fig. 4 shows frequencies of IoHE policy strategies appearing in documents. "Comprehensive Internationalization Strategies" comprised the most common type of strategy overall and specifically dominated in relation to academic rationales. Such strategies frequently aim at establishing multifaceted connections and collaboration between higher education in the home country and in specific geographic regions or countries. According to de de Wit et al., 2015a expanded use of such strategies relates to the trend toward globalization.
In the face of competition for talent, Taiwan's government relied primarily on providing scholarships to attract international students. Working jointly, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and National Science Council established the Taiwan Scholarship Program in 2004, to encourage exceptional international students to pursue degrees in Taiwan (MOE, 2012) . Besides scholarships, the government also streamlined work permit application procedures, relaxed criteria for foreign specialists, and extended the legal duration of their stay from six months up to three years. Revisions to the Employment Services Act eased constraints on so-called cram schools importing foreign language teachers, and more importantly, provided support to encourage foreign academics, hightechnology specialists, and professionals to stay in Taiwan.
Compared with the DPP, the KMT government formulated IoHE policy more around economic considerations. The Ma administration made flexible salaries possible for faculty members starting in 2010. This relaxation sought not only to retain academic talent and reverse a much-lamented brain drain, but also to specifically enhance Taiwan's competitiveness with mainland China for recruiting foreign professional talent (MOE, 2012) . In 2011, the above-mentioned rationale formed part of Ma's proffered vision of transforming Taiwan into a hub of advanced learning in East Asia, with higher education seen as both an export and a service industry. The KMT government thus initiated complementary programs to attract students from Vietnam, Malaysia, C. -C. Hsieh International Journal of Educational Development 78 (2020) 102245 and Indonesia, to Taiwan. The Ministry of Education Award for University Faculty to Promote Internationalization Plan was promulgated in 2009. One of its stated goals was to increase the foreign student enrollment ratio (MOE, 2012) . This rationale also informed President Tsai Ing-Wen's New Southbound Policy (NSP), a major plank in her successful presidential bid in 2016. Aiming to reduce Taiwan's economic reliance on China, the NSP stresses building and diversifying economic relations and establishing regional cooperation between Taiwan and countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Australasia. The NSP targets student recruitment, particularly from Southeast Asia, primarily as a means to generate revenue (National Academy for Educational Research, 2016).
In Table 4 , we can find that dominant policy actors affiliated with the DPP tend toward academic and economic rationales for IoHE policy, whereas their KMT counterparts typically rely on academic and political rationales. Interestingly, Table 6 also shows that policy-makers' advocacy of comprehensive internationalization strategies was not strongly linked to their political party affiliation. That is, while actors' policy beliefs (e.g. nationalist or internationalist ideas) were determinative of their policy rationales for IoHE, they were not necessarily determinative of IoHE policy strategies.
According to Weible and Sabatier (2009) , policy ideas that are the most susceptible to scientific and technical information (i.e. policy strategies coded in the present study) are more likely to change over time compared to what we might call broader policy ideas (i.e. policy rationales coded in the present study). This observation explains the situation, as revealed by our data, in Taiwan. From an ACF perspective, policy strategies share the characteristic of being empirically oriented, and are thus amenable to practical situations based on technical information.
Local responses to IoHE constitute a puzzling phenomenon for academics. This study analyzed the transformation of IoHE policy in Taiwan, aiming to uncover how international higher education policy changed in response to the interplay between globalization, international, and local dynamics. This section first sum up the development of IoHE in Taiwan and divide the process into three stages, based on the features identified by the research results. Second, the ACF is applied to explain the transformation and provides a theoretical perspective on understanding IoHE. Taiwan 7.1.1. Stage 1 (1949 7.1.1. Stage 1 ( −1986 After the KMT retreat from mainland China to Taiwan, relations with mainland China influenced the policy subsystem of international higher education in Taiwan before the 1990s. The KMT government viewed international higher education as a vehicle for maintaining Chinese culture, values, and national security. Recruitment of international students was targeted primarily at overseas Chinese, to build ethnic solidarity and build bridges with overseas Chinese communities. Building on the rationale of exerting cultural influence over overseas Chinese, the government introduced preferential admission policies and scholarships to increase inbound student mobility.
The abolition of martial law in 1987 ushered in political and social liberalization, which played a pivotal role in stimulating the policy subsystem to engage in IoHE policy formulation. The government perceived student and research mobility across the Taiwan Strait as a diplomatic strategy to liberate mainland Chinese from the Communist Party's "poison" influence. Political concern over the relationship with mainland China drove governmental efforts surrounding IoHE during this period. In addition, international higher education started to be viewed as an instrument to improve higher education capacity and quality, given that more and more people were demanding access to higher education. The government created scholarship schemes for international study and provided grants to send students and faculty abroad, with the goal of establishing institutional partnerships and bolstering research collaboration. As one of the Four Asian Tigers, Taiwan experienced a rapid economic boom, but the government's grounds for IoHE remained grounded in political and academic rationales, rather than economic ones, before the 2000s.
Since the DPP won the 2000 presidential election and held the political power for the very first time, education has become a matter of major political controversy, reflecting the openness of the political system. Policy beliefs related to national identity moved to the forefront of higher education reform. Some politicians used Taiwanization as a selling point to curry favor with constituents and win elections. Other policy actors were moved to engage in the policy subsystem of IoHE by their beliefs about globalization and internationalization. When the KMT assumed power again in 2008, Taiwan's policy on recruiting overseas students became significantly politically-driven, specifically by concerns about international diplomacy and development.
Another factor influencing the policy subsystem of IoHE during the third stage is the prevailing situation of higher education supply outstripping demand, with a predicted sharp drop in enrolment (based on the birthrate and other demographic data). Considering a shrinking school-age population and a resource-constrained higher education system, policymakers actively promoted market mechanisms to try to ease the university oversupply problem. They also recognized the importance of the cross-border flow of people and knowledge, and touted IoHE's ability to bring economic benefits with it. IoHE in Taiwan thus started to center on economic rationales, especially after the 2010s. IoHE came to be viewed as a tradeable commodity under the rubric of globalization. In recent years, Taiwan's government has increasingly targeted Southeast Asia for student recruitment and hoped the IoHE will boost enrolment to fill vacancies in higher education and increase the workforce, as it has done elsewhere. Following the trend toward economic globalization, the government has devised IoHE strategies with a specific geographic focus.
In contrast to the political and economic rationales, academic reasons have continued to play a significant part in Taiwan's IoHE, despite the impact of political democratization and economic globalization, not to mention the fact that relations between Taiwan and mainland China have morphed over time. In particular, maintaining Taiwan's competitiveness in regional and global markets has remained the main priority. Comprehensive Internationalization Strategies have been widely adopted to serve the purposes of improving university prestige and rankings, such as the building of so-called "world class universities".
Summing up the key elements of the three stages, Table 5 shows the policy development of IoHE in Taiwan.
Taiwan's IoHE appears to be a unique case, if compared with developments in other countries. In contrast to the Western experience, the policy rationales for IoHE were more related to non-economic considerations in Taiwan, at least before the 2000s. According to the ACF, IoHE policy has shifted due to relative stable parameters (such as Sinicization and liberalization) and constantly evolving external system events (i.e. retreat to Taiwan and abolition of martial law). Both sets of factors, which are by definition outside the policy subsystem of IoHE, created an inward-looking political climate in Taiwan. They were the impetus for the transformation of IoHE and its policy subsystem, in which policy actors often exploit IoHE as an instrument for various domestic purposes. The subsystem actors' ideas regarding national identity, policy rationales and strategies are the significant components that would explain the features of IoHE policy.
Since the 2000, democratization not only changed the ruling political party, but also restructured the governing coalitions and provoked political controversies. From an ACF theoretical perspective, the island's nascent political openness stands Taiwan in stark contrast to Western industrialized democracies. Local politics in Taiwan thus have much more heavy impacts on the development of IoHE, even in an era of globalization. Economic globalization eventually reached the point of wielding influence on Taiwan's IoHE. In the face of a steep decline in birthrates, Taiwanese society has to force the higher education system to produce necessary responses to the resource constraints caused by higher education supply outstripping demand. As a result, economic rationales for IoHE and comprehensive global strategies have become increasingly dominant.
The long term and short term contexts outside the policy subsystem of IoHE are depicted in Fig. 5 . According to the theoretical concepts derived from the ACF, the influencing factors outside the policy subsystem sparked conflict between policy actors over nationalism, which has influenced the development of IoHE in Taiwan from the beginning.
Particularly, the research results show that the actors' national identity, which has a connection to their affiliation to political parties, would influence their policy rationales for IoHE. That is, the findings reveal the prominence of national identity in driving and shaping IoHE policy in Taiwan. Clearly, local politics heavily impact the development of IoHE, even in an era of globalization where market principles, performance metrics, and university autonomy are valued. The inwardlooking political climate in Taiwan thus made the island a crucible in which policy actors vied for control over the development of IoHE.
Moreover, our analysis of official documents revealed that the policy strategies preferred by the actors could not be fully explained by their affiliations to political parties. Based on the ACF theories, the policy strategies, in contrast to express policy rationales, are more empirically-oriented, and thus show more variance and are more inconsistently supported within stakeholder groups. To wit, the influence of Taiwan's inward-looking political climate is less apparent in policy strategies, than in policy rationales per se. The implication for policymakers and scholars is that the policy rationales for IoHE are more susceptible to the policy actors' national identity orientations and political affiliations, if compared to the policy strategies applied to promote IoHE (or the IoHE policy components that are amenable to practical situations based on technical information).
The study identified the main explanatory factors for the dynamic process of policy change in IoHE, with a particular focus on the stage of agenda setting. The findings constitute a valuable addition to the established field of research on higher education internationalization from a policy theory perspective. In particular, the article argues that the dynamics of the policy subsystem, in which policy actors change their preferences in terms of policy beliefs and ideas, are the key to explaining the policy development of IoHE in different country contexts. In addition, the present findings provide insights into complex phenomena of internationalization resulting from the actions and mindsets of particular participants in specific context, within which inward-looking political climate matters. Fig. 5 can assist with suggesting promising hypotheses and causal mechanisms to spur further relevant research, although the present findings on Taiwan's experience are not intended for generalization elsewhere. Further research could investigate the impacts of inward-looking climate on higher education, with particular attention given to a comprehensively international travel ban coinciding with the COVID-19 outbreak in the beginning of the spring 2020 semester, which prevented foreign students across the border to attend classes.
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.