Japan-based education experts discuss how rising geopolitical tensions are reshaping the internationalisation of higher education in East Asia, highlighting the need to balance security concerns with collaboration, social responsibility, and intercultural engagement.

In photo (from left to right): Prof Futao Huang (Hiroshima University, Japan), Prof Jing Liu (Tohoku University, Japan), and Prof Rodger Williamson (The University of Kitakyushu, Japan) during their panel presentation at ACE2025

Worldwide increasing geopolitical tensions are compromising efforts for more international educational cooperation. In a panel discussion titled ‘Internationalisation of Higher Education in East Asia: Challenges and Opportunities in Comparative Perspective’ moderated by IAFOR Vice-President Professor Grant Black of Chuo University, Japan, panellists Professor Futao Huang of Hiroshima University, Japan, Professor Jing Liu of Tohoku University, Japan, and Professor Rodger Williamson of The University of Kitakyushu, Japan, outlined concerns in internationalisation efforts among East Asian higher education institutions, primarily around shifting geopolitics, the social responsibility of universities, and cultural differences in multicultural classrooms.

‘Geopolitics has moved to the centre of higher education due to security tensions, nationalism, and ideological rivalry’, said Professor Huang in his opening remark. According to him, ‘East Asia has now become a highly sensitive geopolitical space, and higher education is shifting from open globalism to strategic risk-managed internationalisation’. Internationalisation efforts should now be understood as inseparable from broader geopolitical strategy, and Professor Huang added that in East Asia, such efforts are no longer academically driven, but ‘politically charged, strategically selective, and shaped by global fragmentation or geopolitical limitations’. An obvious example of this is the recent transformation of regional clusters as opposed to dominant global networks. In practical terms, this translates to students from Mainland China increasingly choosing to study abroad in neighbouring countries like Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, instead of the United States, the dominant destination until now. Professor Huang concluded that ‘East Asia’s internationalisation efforts are evolving not by retreating from the world, but by adjusting its engagement strategically within a changing global order’. He predicted that universities are expected to adopt a security-oriented approach, rules-based frameworks, and interest-driven partnerships in the near future.

In contrast to this tension-oriented geopolitical framing, Dr Liu focused on institutional social responsibility and cooperation as a form of overcoming hostility. While the traditional model of internationalisation in the form of competition, global rankings, and mobility as prestige still exists, he claimed that a new model is now emerging, which looks at internationalisation for societal good. This includes the university’s responsibility towards society, the role and future of sustainable development, community engagement, resilience building, local knowledge integration, and cross-border problem-solving. He invoked the term ‘knowledge diplomacy’ as elaborated by Professor Jane Knight (Springer, 2022) of the Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education, Canada, to focus on the process of building and strengthening relations between and among countries through international higher education research and innovation. ‘It is a time for us to change the brain race to more mutual development through co-learning, co-producing, and co-creation’, he stated. ‘The university must function as a regional SDG hub. Social responsibility can provide the framework for us to consider the global challenges we are facing’, he further explained. He added that trying to connect local issues with international learning, student mobility, and joint research is also a great way to advance collaboration through internationalisation, by focusing on what unites us rather than what divides us. He further advocated for interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as collaboration between researchers and practitioners, praising IAFOR’s mission of forming cross-border regional alliances focused on mutual development. 

Professor Williamson doubled down on the importance of human connections for maintaining good programmes and partnerships in higher education. ‘All of these [study abroad] programmes at our university have been initiated by faculty who have been overseas for research, where they met faculty, and then came back to Japan’, he explained. He took on a more practical approach within the panel by addressing challenges Japanese universities and students face when engaging in internationalisation efforts. He spoke on the differences between high and low context cultures: a high-context culture relies on implicit communication, such as nonverbal cues, and shared understanding rather than explicit words to convey meaning. He equated low-context cultures to a game of ping-pong, while high-context cultures like Japan are more like a game of golf, where one has to wait for their turn to speak up. As a result, Japanese students often have difficulty speaking up. ‘That’s actually one of the things that studying abroad helps with, because when you leave the country, you have to speak up’, he explained.

Credit transfer is another challenge Japanese higher education is facing. Hinging on institutional rigidity, the reluctance to transfer credits from courses completed abroad makes study abroad programmes unattractive and international collaboration difficult, according to Professor Williamson.

Professor Black followed up with a question about the development of meaningful partnerships through Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) between higher education institutions, asking: ‘How do we move from just a basic agreement to getting to the point of collaboration and real-world exchanges, given the concerns that Professor Huang mentioned about security?’. Dr Liu answered that there is an emerging concept around knowledge security. ‘This really depends on how we understand knowledge’, he explained. ‘If we take it as a public good, then we need more transparency, as Professor Huang mentioned; transparency in collaboration, co-creation, and co-production. But if we take it as a private good, then it will probably be very difficult for universities around the world to collaborate and to create more knowledge and technologies for sustainability’.

From the panel’s discussion, a clear message arose: education cannot be understood without looking at the geopolitical landscape, and since the geopolitical landscape is rapidly changing at the moment, education is inevitably changing as well. ‘What can universities and systems do to ease this geopolitical tension?’, an audience member asked during the panel’s Q&A session. ‘In East Asia, we don’t have a single unified architecture of higher education’, Professor Huang explained. He emphasised dialogue, common reference points, and shared qualification descriptions as mechanisms for initiating collaboration. ‘I think this soft mechanism may gradually reduce tensions among countries in the region’, he concluded. Dr Liu put his faith in the younger generations, claiming that they are the ones who hold the key to long-term peacebuilding through mutual understanding. ‘I think from a perspective of individual teaching, we need to enhance more communication and cultural exchange through the young generations in this region’, he stated. 

On the other hand, Dr Liu cautioned against competitive structures like university rankings, which may no longer be suitable as geopolitical structures are changing. ‘I think this is a good time for us to reconsider whether it is necessary to really join the ranking system or not’, he said. According to him, many universities in China are abandoning the international higher education rankings (e.g., QS rankings) as a form of decolonisation of higher education and internationalisation. He left the audience with a provocation, stating that, ‘this is a good time for us to rethink the so-called standardised globalisation, as these global geopolitical maps are changing’.

Watch the full panel presentation at ACE2025 in the video below.

Banner image: Samwa (samwa95), Unsplash