Author: Bruce Chapman, ANU

A sustained effort to upgrade human capital is needed for countries in Southeast Asia to increase living standards to those of the advanced economies. Higher education and access to it are essential in boosting long-term productivity and supporting economic outcomes that are crucial to a country’s ability to integrate into the increasingly knowledge-based global economy.

Public investment is one element in improving higher education, but fully subsidising higher education has been shown to be inefficient and expensive. Read more…

Author: Gavin Jones, ANU

Thailand went through its fertility transition more quickly than almost any other country, with the average number of children born to the average woman declining from about six to two in little more than two decades, between about 1970 and 1990.

Fertility rates have since gone still lower, now standing at around 30 per cent below replacement level (the level that would lead to long-run population stability). This does not mean that Thailand’s population has stopped increasing. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum

The death toll from Thailand’s worst floods in more than half a century is more than 600, millions of hectares of farmland have been inundated, 20,000 factories and plants have been damaged, some that are not likely to reopen, leaving at least 1.5 million unemployed.

As the clean-up continues, accusations of incompetence and corruption in the management of the crisis and the allocation of relief, have dominated the media and the Parliament. Read more…

Author: Hu Shuli, Caixin Media

Asia is not without notable examples of women who have made it to the top in the political arena, but this does not mean the gap between male and female participation in politics is anywhere near being closed.

And while many women have played a pivotal role in the modern politics of various Asian countries, it would be wrong to think that the ability to reel off a list of political stars is an indicator of wider participation. Read more…

Author: Arjuna Dibley, ANU

Eclipsed by the clamorous debate surrounding a 14 year-old Australian boy allegedly caught purchasing marijuana in Bali recently, some important developments in Australia’s relationship with Indonesia went largely unnoticed.

In Jakarta, 20 Australians and Indonesians met at the inaugural Indonesia-Australia Dialogue (IAD) on 5–6 October. Read more…

Author: Liu Lili, CCPS

China is a united multicultural country. The development of each national minority (with its unique language, culture, location and shared experience) has different requirements and the educational needs of each nationality within China involve unique challenges.

Author: Geoffrey K. See, Choson Exchange

Choson Exchange recently prepared a program for North Korean students to learn business, finance and economics overseas through university courses and internships.

They consulted a range of North Koreans on how it should structure such a program and ‘the Australia National University’ often came back as the model to follow. Up until 2006, ANU hosted North Korean trainees studying economics under programs supported by international and Australian aid agencies. The Australian exchange program was clearly well-regarded by outward-looking North Koreans.

Read more…

Author: Neil J. Diamant, Dickinson College

The recent flare-up over the Diaoyu Islands—a Chinese fishing boat captain was arrested by the Japanese Coast Guard—has followed a well-worn script. An international incident, say, the publication of a Japanese textbook, the bombing of a Chinese Embassy or pro-Tibet protests in France or even a disputed football match, quickly leads to protests in China, which are quickly defined as ‘nationalist’.

The international press duly reports on outraged citizens shouting slogans, bearing flags, threatening boycotts and some form of retaliation against those who have dared to offend China (The New York Times article of September 19, 2010 features a photograph of a bellicose bare-chested man with a tattoo of the national flag). Read more…

Author: David McNeill, Sophia University and Japan Focus

As Japan watchers warn that the island nation is becoming more insular, the government’s newest bid to internationalise Japan’s stuffy higher-education system, the misnamed Global 30, is off to a wobbly start.

The goal was to recruit 30 universities and support their internationalisation efforts. Beginning last year on a 3.2 billion yen, or about US $38 million, budget, the project aims to significantly increase the number of foreign students in the country and Japanese students studying abroad. Read more…

Author: Amitendu Palit, NUS

China and India are often perplexing to analysts. One of the best examples of such shared perplexity is over higher education. From the vantage point of western education service providers, China and India are typical cases of being ‘so near, yet so far’.

This need not be the case. Both China and India wish to expand their higher education sector. Both realise that government efforts alone are insufficient to match the growing demand for higher education. Read more…

Author: Tim Southphommasane, Monash University

It is a cliché, but one of the great rituals of growing up in a multicultural society is to sit alongside other children in school to compare lunches.

For much of my schooling I never got too much of a chance to make interesting comparisons. I never thought twice about tucking into the stir fried pork or chicken on rice that my mother or father would prepare for my lunch. After all, most of my classmates had something similar. Even at the school canteen, it was possible to order some fried rice—a choice that quickly became more popular than sausage rolls and meat pies. Read more…

Author: Peter Friedman, Akin Gump LLP

Much has been made about whether China is a rising power that can go the distance. The numbers posted by the world’s soon to be second largest economy indicate that China has already gone this distance and is positioned for more growth, but what happens behind the numbers is not always as clear-cut. China’s economic miracle, built largely on major capital investments and inexpensive labour, is now attempting to shift to the next level of economic development, built upon innovation and design or the value-add components of economic growth. China’s universities will be the source of much of the brainpower propelling China to this next level. But problems endemic to China’s higher education system, specifically plagiarism and the lack of academic integrity, will render this journey quite difficult.

When given English-language writing assignments, it is common for Chinese students to rely upon translating Chinese sources into English and passing it off as their own work, or simply copying and pasting directly from Wikipedia.^[1] Read more…

Author: Andrei Lankov, Kookmin University

When considering the future of North and South Korea, we can see that the time has come to raise an alternative elite, the kind that meets the expectations of the modern world and has no relationship with the Kim Jong Il regime.

However, it is impossible to participate in any political activity or gain a great deal of knowledge while inside North Korea. For North Korean intellectuals with a sense of the modern world, the birthplace of the alternative elite is the defector community in South Korea. Read more…

Author: Andrew Kipnis, ANU

A household survey I undertook in China in 2005 and 2006 revealed that all of the families surveyed wanted their child to attend university.The sample included a representative number of students from wealthy and relatively impoverished families and of students with above- and below-average academic records. Most of the people I spoke to were shocked that I could even ask such a question. ‘Of course’, or ‘Doesn’t everybody want that?’ were common replies.

The educational desire revealed by this survey is an important social fact about contemporary China. It influences household and national economic priorities, strategies for political legitimation, birth rates, ethnic relations between Han and non-Han groups, gender and family relations and much more. Read more…

Author: Rajiv Kumar, ICRIER

Last week I went back to Seoul after 26 years. The city is transformed and so is the economy. In 1984, when I visited the export processing zones, Masan and Iri contributed at least 60 per cent of total exports from South Korea. Posco had been established as a public sector company to take on established global giants and out-competed all of them despite having to import 100 per cent of its raw materials by relying on latest technology, economies of scale and above all, sheer hard work and dedication. And, at the same time, Korea was reaching full employment levels by furiously expanding labour intensive exports.

The question arose in my mind that if Korea could successfully combine the latest technology with large-scale employment generation, could India do it as well? Read more…