THE RISE of the CHINESE KNOWLEDGE DIASPORA: Possibilities, Problems and Prospects for South and North
October 9, 2007 at 5:54 pm 3 comments
Anthony Welch, University of Sydney and Zhang Zhen, University of Sydney, and Tianjin University
This paper can be downloaded from http://www.wun.ac.uk/theglobaluniversity/workshop.html
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Adam Nelson | October 29, 2007 at 2:38 pm
This paper offers a superb analysis of the “Chinese Knowledge Diaspora.” The paper argues convincingly that these “knowledge bridges” (10) involving Chinese scholars both inside and outside China “can be seen as a key potential resource rather than an instance of brain drain.”
This analysis, I think, requires us to acknowledge the continuing salience of the nation-state as the primary locus of activity in the globalization of higher education. Whereas Rosemary Deem’s paper hints at the diminution of national-level governance in the face of emerging supra-national schemes of organization (particularly in the EU), Welch and Zhang’s paper suggests that attachments to the nation-state (if not national interests) drive much of the process of “globalization” in contemporary higher education. Indeed, despite evidence of global convergence in certain university “reforms,” European concerns about the ebbing of national-level governance may reflect circumstances in the EU but may be more exception than rule: universities in China, India, and the United States, for example, continue to strategize (to a great extent) in national rather than supra-national terms.
Welch and Zhang see the Chinese Knowledge Diaspora as a resource for “development” in China’s higher education sector, and they also note the extremely “stratified nature” of global knowledge flows (particularly in North-South divides). Do Welch and Zhang find any lessons in their study for other countries facing “brain drain,” particularly countries in the South? As countries in the North look for ever-more-aggressive ways to attract the “best and brightest” away from the South (e.g., new visa protocols in the United States favoring the most highly educated), what can states in the South learn from the success of China’s Knowledge Diaspora?
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Ian Wei | November 5, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Thank you very much for a great paper. I’d like to ask questions in the light of previous comments from Professor Nelson.
Professor Nelson suggests that this paper ‘requires us to acknowledge the continuing salience of the nation-state as the primary locus of activity in the globalization of higher education’. I see his point entirely. At the same time, however, Professor Welch and Professor Zhang conclude that ‘the notion of diaspora […] presents a challenge to the taken-for-granted status of the nation state in education’ (p. 22). So I have two sets of questions:
1. Does the diaspora create an opportunity for nation states to exploit (as perhaps Professor Nelson is suggesting), or does it create structures that nation states simply cannot control?
2. Were the interviewees in the study at the heart of the paper asked about their own sense of identity? In what sense do they see themselves as ‘Chinese’? In what sense, if any, do they see themselves as Australian? Is there any sense in which they see themselves as ‘international’ scholars with ambivalent feelings about national identity? In twelfth-century Europe, Hugh of Saint Victor used the image of exile in writing about the ideal scholar. For him this ultimately meant rejection of the world in all its manifestations in favour of spiritual concerns, but it explicitly included abandonment of love of one’s homeland. Are any such ideals in evidence today?
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Professor Rosemary Deem | November 11, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Welch and Zhang’s paper provides a rich and detailed analysis of a developing Chinese knowledge diaspora, which for me connected well with two papers given at a recent ESRC seminar series on geometries of power and geographies of knowledge, one from Wei Shen, a PhD student at Loughborough University (UK) about Chinese student migration to elite French business schools, why they go and what happens when/if they return to China and a paper from Johannah Waters at Liverpool (UK) on the experiences of young people from Hong Kong sent by their families in the late 1990s (when the future of HK looked somewhat uncertain) to finish their school education and go to university in British Columbia. Like Wei, I think that the precise role of the nation state in higher education is questioned by this paper (since it cannot control the systems to which Chinese young people and academics migrate). In response to Nelson’s point about only Europe being the only place concerned with the role of transnational bodies in higher education, this misses out the extent of the reach of the European Higher Education Area well beyond geographical Europe (Latin America; Erasmus Mundus) and the crucial role of European universities (as well as North American and Australian insititutions) for some of the Chinese diaspora.