Lili Yang

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Faculty of Education

Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the c...

The idea of the public good of higher education is closely related to the political, social and educational cultures in which higher education is embedded. It varies across contexts. However, widely used notions of the 'public' aspects of higher education, including the concepts of economic public goods and private goods, conventionally assume Angl...

On the world stage of the humanities and social sciences (HSS), ethnic Chinese scholars and their scholarship as a whole are arguably not yet considered mainstream. However, a growing number of ethnic Chinese HSS scholars have become internationally recognized in their respective fields, producing scholarship of global and lasting influence. These...

This article explores the global aspirations of Chinese universities by examining the Chinese scholarly conceptualisation of guoji yingxiangli (literally meaning international influence) and its connection to the world-centred idea of tianxia. We interviewed 22 Chinese experts in education and conducted a documentary analysis of relevant Chinese ac...

Higher education has long established primary importance to the formation of students, manifest in ideas such as Confucian xiushen (self-cultivation) and Bildung. However, despite the shared focus on the idea of humans becoming humans, xiushen and Bildung are built on divergent philosophical traditions. The divergence has led to varied practice in...

Scientific collaboration between the Global North and South has expanded significantly over the last three decades. However, this expansion has yet to bring about equal international research collaborations (IRC) for all collaborating sides. Through a case study of a Ghanaian elite university, this study examines how these inequalities manifest in...

UK higher education is highly internationalised. Two-thirds of science papers with UK authors involve international collaboration, one-quarter of higher education students are international, and their fees constitute more than a fifth of institutional income. What then are the contributions of higher education and research to the global public good...

While it is generally agreed that higher education is a public good and produces public goods, it remains unclear what this means. An important reason for the unclarity is the conceptual ambiguity and cultural nuances of the concept of the public good in higher education. Coupled with the Western dominance of discourse in higher education and langu...

This paper explores contributions to public good(s) in higher education in Ontario, Canada. In a break from the trend of this special issue, this paper does not offer a comprehensive national study. Rather, it is based on a multiple case study conducted in a single predominantly English-speaking province, Ontario, drawing on 19 semi-structured inte...

In the Anglophone jurisdictions, higher education policy is over-determined by economic policy and subjected to neoliberal regulation based on quasi-market competition between corporatised institutions, regulated by performative comparisons, tuition fees, and outputs imagined as commodities. England installed marketisation in successive policy chan...

The rapid increase in international mobility in higher education has sparked considerable interest in the intersection between international higher education (IHE) and cross-border connections. Previous studies primarily center around the embedded national interests of IHE and suggest that IHE can strengthen the linkage between home and host countr...

Purpose Students develop and grow throughout higher education. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Building on the premise that individuals develop and grow through interacting with the world, this study explores how students develop, grow, and become empowered in higher education through the lens of I–world interactions. Design/App...

This edited volume argues for positioning students at the centre of higher education, drawing from the concepts of student agency and self-formation. The volume highlights that higher education has broader and more important purposes than what a neoliberal human capital approach would suggest, and explores how students exercise their agency and rea...

Students experience development and growth during their higher education journey, but the exact mechanisms behind this process remain relatively unknown. This chapter seeks to shed light on how students develop, grow, and attain empowerment in higher education by focusing on the interactions between individuals and their surroundings (referred to a...

This chapter introduces the main argument of this edited volume, which is to position students at the heart of higher education. The chapter highlights the concepts of agency and self-formation to do so. The chapter includes a historical overview of higher learning, starting from the medieval university, which constitutes the roots of higher educat...

This editorial piece sets out the background of the special issue 'Redesigning higher education in East Asia for a better future'. On the one hand, East Asian higher education has made phenomenal achievements in the last two decades, in both quantity and quality. On the other hand, it faces lingering intrinsic and extrinsic challenges. A major sour...

In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector’s contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public...

The global research system is pluralising as more researchers and institutions around the world contribute to knowledge creation. However, global research remains highly unequal because of the hegemonic influence yielded by Global North/West. The unequal dynamics impact the dynamics of international research collaboration (IRC). Through in-depth qu...

When students enter higher education, they not only start learning and studying but begin a journey of becoming someone new in relation to themselves and to society. Scholarly research has increasingly emphasised this transformative element of higher education yet, to date, the role of assessment has received little attention in the processes of be...

Global science is more networked and connected than ever before. The rise of research collaborations occurs not only in the established Euro-American science systems that hold 'central' nodes in the globally networked science, but also in other parts of the world as science systems pluralise and multipolarise. Yet, research collaborations between t...

There is an increasing awareness of the significance of intellectual pluriversality worldwide in response to Western epistemic dominance in higher education. Yet, such a call has not been met by research that identifies concrete actions and structured efforts to promote diversity and the inclusion of knowledge. This article focuses on how to integr...

Scientific publications are no longer practised by only a few established countries. The scholarly literature increasingly acknowledges that global science is pluralising. However, the existing literature mostly focuses on the national and global scales of science and overlooks the regional scale, especially regions in the Global South. This paper...

In this monograph, Lili Yang compares core ideas about the state, society, and higher education in two major world traditions. She explores the broad cultural and philosophical ideas underlying the public good of higher education in the two traditions, reveals their different social imaginaries, and works through five areas where higher education i...

This is the presentation of our recently published paper.

Global science is not an equal ground. Certain national science systems are more centrally positioned in global science than others. However, recent trends indicate a move towards a more plural global science. For example, traditionally non-'core' science systems exercise their agency in expanding collaboration among themselves, thus leading to inc...

For further details and sign up: https://ln.edu.hk/sgs/student-graduate-agency-and-self-formation-a-hong-kong-symposium?fbclid=IwAR1x7NJwsFVEe2JOJrwedlyQhB675LbqGmJLN0djrwUy5wQY9N7DFy7Jw2Y Conceptual note: What is higher education? What is the role of students in it? The existing scholarly literature mostly posits higher education as a place fo...

This paper draws on the Chinese and English literature on the Chinese idea of tianxia (literally meaning all under heaven), with the objective of shedding new light on the discussion of the global in global higher education (studies). It argues that the tianxia idea embodies an approach to viewing the world that is fundamentally different from the...

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. Sh...

The global higher education space is becoming increasingly multipolar. Though the existing inequalities among national higher education systems persist, increased international connectivity and collaborations create new opportunities. This study examines the interconnections between the higher education systems of two countries located at the oppos...

The ongoing pandemic has affected all aspects of human life globally. Universities have faced significant challenges in continuing their educational and research activities while at the same time becoming more visible due to their work on identifying treatments, developing vaccines, understanding the impact of the pandemic and exploring the ways of...

The 70th year of the IAU has been marked not only by the Covid-19 pandemic but by the geopolitical tension between the United States and China. After almost four decades of cooperation, which began in shared opposition to Soviet Russia and a shared interest in China’s modernisation, the leaders of each country have become strident critics of the ot...

This study compares the ideas of social equity in the liberal Anglo-American and Chinese political cultures and seeks potential hybridisations. Through a conceptual examination of scholarly works, this study identifies differences and similarities of social equity between the two political cultures. A common conceptual bridge, deriving from the com...

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This webinar will ask the question of whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies – the “Young Thousand Talen...

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This paper examines whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies—the ‘Young Thousand Talents’ policy (Y1000T)—...

The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of ‘public good’ and ‘public goods’ and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective po...

The paper employs a glonacal agency heuristic to explore how certain research-intensive Chinese universities exercise agency in response to global and national impacts in creating the world-class university. Two global forces (international scholarly discussions on the world-class university and global university rankings) and one national force (C...

This paper compares the research productivity between two groups of Chinese early-and mid-career researchers, who both got their PhDs in research leading institutions outside Mainland China. One group was recruited back to mainland China under a specific scheme, called "Young Thousand Talents" ("Y1000T")-a clear attempt by the Chinese Government to...

The New Silk Road strategy and the rise of China in higher education raises the stakes in the engagement between China’s universities and their Western counterparts, including Anglo-American universities. The chapter focuses on the similarities and differences between Sinic and Anglo-American political and educational cultures (state, society, fami...

Higher education in (times of) crisis The coronavirus crisis has disrupted almost all domains of human activity. The United Nations (UN) recognises that the crisis exposed "deep weaknesses in the delivery of public services and structural inequalities that impede access to them". Concerns are growing that the virus will exacerbate existing social s...

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 outbreak, an emergency policy initiative called “Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning” was launched by the Chinese government to continue teaching activities as schools across the country were closed to contain the virus. However, there is ambiguity and disagreement about what to teach, how to teach, the...

While it is commonly agreed that globally bred talent returning to China greatly contributes to the enhancement of research capacity, whether returnees perform better than those who stay overseas remains to be examined. We compared the research productivity of Chinese “Young Thousand Talents” (Y1000Ts) and Chinese researchers remaining in the Unite...

It is commonly accepted that higher education plays a public role and produces public goods. However, there is a lack of clarity about what this means. This paper examines higher learning’s public contribution as well as the governmental and popular support it received in Imperial China in order to better understand higher education as a public goo...