Can Hong Kong remain a global higher education hub?

It is a seasonably hot, humid Hong Kong afternoon in late June. Inside the multistorey conference space at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), over the clatter of utensils, some 150 university leaders and roughly double that number of administrators, education consultants and assorted staff are making quick work of lunch.

Their plates heaped with Western-style chicken and Chinese fish – reminders of the island’s complex cultural heritage – the presidents and vice-chancellors of some of the world’s most prestigious universities are readying themselves for the next session of Times Higher Education’s Asia Universities Summit. Later, CUHK vice-chancellor and president Rocky Tuan will outline how he sees the island’s place in global higher education.

“Here you can find top-ranked institutions, a truly international faculty base, outstanding infrastructure and the world’s most dynamic innovation and industrial base right on your doorstep,” he tells the audience.

It’s difficult to believe that four years ago, this campus resembled a war zone as student protesters faced off against riot police, exchanging volleys of petrol bombs and tear gas. The protests were part of a year of mass pro-democracy protests across Hong Kong, with CUHK’s campus a particular flashpoint. But the protests petered out when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 and Hong Kong, like China, adopted some of the most stringent measures to contain it. In the same year, China passed a National Security Law that gives Beijing wide-reaching judicial powers in Hong Kong, officially deemed a “special administrative region” of the country. The law criminalised any promotion of secession, subversion or collusion with foreign forces and led to hundreds of arrests of activists and protesters.

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Subsequently, Hong Kong’s population fell for three successive years – a 1.6 per cent dip in 2021-22 amounting to the largest since records began in 1961 – before seeing a 2.1 per cent rise in 2022-23, reaching just under 7.5 million. Attributing causality for the declines either to the National Security Law or the pandemic is difficult, however, and there are no figures available on how many of the émigrés were scholars.

Examples of academics falling foul of the law specifically for their scholarship are also few and far between. For instance, former Lingnan University cultural studies professor Hui Po-keung was arrested in 2022 when he was about to board a plane to take up a position abroad, but he was targeted for his involvement in the pro-democracy movement – reputedly for “collusion with foreign forces”. Nevertheless, there is a sense among scholars in Hong Kong that universities are wary of continuing to employ those who have been involved in activism and that the greater freedoms they used to enjoy compared with their colleagues on the mainland are dissipating amid a culture of anxiety and self-censorship that, for instance, saw CUHK political scientist Ivan Choy stop writing his newspaper column after 15 years because of what he described as a “very poor” political climate.

So are Hong Kong universities’ ambitions to further boost their internationalisation realistic?

The first thing to say is that Hong Kong’s universities are already very international in a formal sense. In Times Higher Education’s 2024 World University Rankings, two of the top 10 and three of the top 25 universities for international outlook (encompassing proportions of international students, staff and co-authorship) are from Hong Kong. And in THE’s 2023 Asia Rankings, five of the top 10 for international outlook are from Hong Kong – with an additional two from Macao, another Chinese special administrative region.

However, very significant proportions of those deemed international staff and students in Hong Kong hail from the Chinese mainland. For instance, of the 14 per cent of CUHK’s 17,600 undergraduates who were “non-local” in 2019, 61 per cent hailed from mainland China. And of CUHK’s 13,200 postgraduates, non-locals made up 46 per cent, “most of whom” came from the mainland.

Perhaps this preponderance of mainland students among Hong Kong’s formally international cohort is part of the reason that the cohort appears to have held up so well despite the onset of the pandemic. For instance, in 2021-22, non-locals still made up 13 per cent of CUHK undergraduates and 60 per cent of postgraduates, although no breakdown is available on the proportions hailing from the mainland.

CUHK, like many of its peers, has also seen a gain in international scholars. According to data submitted to THE for ranking purposes, CUHK employed 570 international scholars in 2021 – up slightly from 544 in 2019. Figures are similar for the other five Hong Kong universities that submit data to THE, with slight gains on pre-pandemic figures except at the city’s most international institution according to the rankings, City University of Hong Kong, whose overseas faculty numbers fell from 638 in 2019 to 561 in 2021.

Of course, these figures don’t show how many faculty left or arrived – or from where. Hence, they don’t offer any insight into the veracity of anecdotal claims that the post-pandemic period brought a high rate of turnover, with the most outspoken voices leaving.

“There was a little blip,” says Tuan, speaking to THE at the summit. “But that blip is over.” Indeed, “some folks who moved from Hong Kong are coming back.”

And although he concedes that some people left because of the National Security Law, he adds that motives are often complex, with the pandemic a “massive tsunami”, too. But he is positive about a strong comeback, expecting CUHK to surpass previous international recruitment figures, including by attracting students from further afield than mainland China.

Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu is certainly upbeat about internationalisation. In September, he visited the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and spoke of his ambition for the city to become an international education hub.

“My team and I will study how Hong Kong can build on this solid foundation and make full use of its unique status – one country, two systems – to attract outstanding talents worldwide to help enhance the city with talents and good education,” he said.

Yet questions remain about how willing Western staff and students, in particular, will be to move to Hong Kong given the concerns about academic freedom. In a room looking out at CUHK’s gleaming, 14-storey research hospital, one of its faculty members tells THE that while life on Hong Kong’s campuses and beyond may look “normal”, it is not “back to normal” in the pre-2019 sense of “normal”.

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“Hong Kong is some kind of compromise place right now,” says the scholar, whose request for anonymity – a request echoed by most of the people THE spoke to for this article – might itself be seen as a reflection of the new, more cautious, normal. “That’s what ‘one country, two systems’ at any level is going to be,” he adds. Security is noticeably tighter these days, the scholar says. Protests of any kind are frowned upon; he saw campus guards filming the small contingent of CUHK students who held up blank pieces of paper to convey frustrations over strict Covid policies, for instance. Moreover, many of the most outspoken student voices have left for overseas, and, by now, most students who took part in the pro-democracy protests have graduated.

For scholars in the humanities or social sciences whose work tackles politically sensitive subjects, taking a job in Hong Kong now comes with a trade-off, the scholar says. They must accept upfront that “we can’t touch certain subjects”. But, for most academics, life in Hong Kong is still very good, he adds: “Pay is great, teaching load is low, and it’s tough to get any [academic] job these days.” Still, given the uncertainty about exactly how much the National Security Law will restrict academic and personal freedom, “I wouldn’t leave a tenured job [elsewhere] to come here,” he says. “There’s too much uncertainty: too many people following different versions of the same agenda. We have a sense of what, five years from now, Singapore, Tokyo and, hopefully, Taipei will be. We don’t have that for Hong Kong. You don’t have that with anywhere that has changed so much recently.”

Another scholar, who also asked not to be named, left Hong Kong in 2021 yet remains largely positive about academia in Hong Kong.

“It was a great place to do research and it still is…so it was a difficult decision to leave,” he says.

Yet for him, too, it was impossible to avoid the academic freedom issue. “Between 2008 and 2019 you could teach basically whatever you wanted,” he says. “I taught Western humanities and English literature. In my final two years, I realised the students would most likely feel nervous talking about political issues even in literature classes.”

That was particularly brought home to him when one of his students asked him for a letter of support after being put on trial for protesting.

“Something happens to you when you hear your student is going to prison,” the academic says. “It just doesn’t compute. That made me really wonder what I was doing. The frightening realisation was that what I had presumed might be good for a university education, for a young student in the humanities, might not be the case here now. I had to rethink what a university education was all about and be mindful of the core histories of an Asian humanities.”

Still, with things quieting down, the island’s recent political history isn’t going to put off the vast majority of academics, he believes: “It’s still a very attractive place to study. I know people who’ve moved there since I left.”

Accounts from scientists, too, back up this perspective. “Quite a few staff left, but…we’re insulated from political issues that some departments in the humanities might face,” says one. “I know many people may be concerned about the political environment, but I’d say it’s not that bad.”

Indeed, she says Hong Kong-based scientists have few qualms about closer ties to the mainland. For instance, many are choosing to apply for funding from mainland sources, in collaboration with scientists based there, because the competition is less intense and the awards are larger. But such tactics are not foisted on them: “I don’t feel any stress from senior administrators to force us to collaborate [with mainland researchers],” she says.

She is worried, however, about controversial proposed reforms to CUHK’s governing council that would make it smaller and also reduce student and faculty representation, with more external seats that could potentially lead to greater political control. And she also worries about what will happen when the 72-year-old Tuan, a former University of Pittsburgh academic who is viewed by many faculty as relatively liberal in his politics, steps down as CUHK vice-chancellor.

“I’m concerned about who will be next,” she concedes.

Across the city, a scholar from another of Hong Kong’s main universities says the mood among social scientists there is one of unease, with colleagues forced to “adapt quickly” in a climate where dissent on political issues is less readily tolerated – to temper their words or to leave.

“In the past, some academics appeared to be too involved in politics, participating in movements…and fell into a political trap,” he says. “From now on, academics, particularly in the social sciences, seem to understand the red lines more.”

He, too, has adapted: “I don’t participate in any political group. I remain an academic without being seen as threatening to any regime.”

But the threats to Hong Kong’s internationalisation are far from being merely political, he warns. The island’s declining birth rate, which has been falling off since a 2010 peak, is also a big concern given the threat this could pose to institutions’ finances.

“University presidents are paid highly: they’re expected to talk about the rosy development of education in Hong Kong, which is understandable. But, ultimately, demographic decline is a serious issue,” the academic says, noting that this is of particular concern to “smaller players” in the sector.

“There is a contradiction here. The government is [inventing] grandiose slogans like ‘Hong Kong as an international education hub’, but at the same time, your local student population is shrinking and yet you have a quota [on international students],” he says, alluding to the island’s 20 per cent cap on non-local undergraduate students. “How are you going to facilitate an influx of international students?”

That quota is in place because, like campuses in many of the world’s most densely populated urban areas, Hong Kong universities face a physical limit on how much they can expand, with land both scarce and expensive. Hence, local leaders have historically been anxious to ensure that local students aren’t crowded out by “non-locals”. Given the demographic circumstances, some change appears to be afoot: Hong Kong’s chief executive was expected this week to announce an upward adjustment (but not an elimination) of the cap on non-local overseas students at Hong Kong’s eight centrally funded universities.

Non-local postgraduate numbers are uncapped, but Hong Kong’s crowded location also translates into high rental costs – and international students are banned from working part-time to support themselves (work opportunities are limited to an internship, lasting up to one year, that is related to a student’s degree field and is arranged or endorsed by their university). Moreover, while fees for non-local students are lower than in the West, they are not insignificant. For instance, CUHK and Lingnan both charge HK$145,000 (£15,000) per year for non-local students; at HKU, the fee is higher still, at HK$182,000 – several times the HK$42,000 these universities charge local students.

Even so, many non-local students still receive government subsidies in the form of scholarships, which are ultimately funded by taxpayers on the island – something that doesn’t sit easy with some Hong Kongers.

Locals also fear that if a drive for greater internationalisation merely means, in practice, recruiting a greater proportion of staff and students from the Chinese mainland, then the historically open character of Hong Kong academia could be further undermined. As Philip Altbach, a professor at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education, previously told Times Higher Education: “There is much debate concerning whether Hong Kong’s universities will, in time, simply be the same as other mainland Chinese universities – things do seem to be moving in that direction.” And if they “lose their distinctiveness and characteristics of academic freedom, independence and internal governance, they will of course be greatly weakened”.

Hong Kong university heads maintain that more mainland students will be beneficial for the city’s universities and students, however. Stephen Cheung, who recently stepped down from the presidency of the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), takes the pragmatic stance: “Ideally, we’d send our undergraduates abroad for international experience, but we can’t always do that, so we need to internationalise our campuses.” But he is keen that the new non-local places should not be entirely dominated by mainlanders.

“We separate the non-local students into mainland and overseas students in our statistics,” Cheung says. “All along, we are encouraged to attract more overseas students…Internationalisation has always been an important strategic development for Hong Kong universities and one of the KPIs [key performance indicators] for us.”

Still, institutions are not punished for failing to diversify non-local intakes, and Cheung acknowledges that “some of us are more successful than others” at internationalising, with EdUHK at a disadvantage, particularly at undergraduate level, because of its specialisation in local teacher training.

Ka Ho Mok, vice-president of Lingnan University, has similar aims to diversify student intakes. He says Lingnan is committed to ensuring geographical diversity among its students, and while 60 per cent of its non-local postgraduates come from mainland China, more students from South-east Asia and Africa are expressing an interest in his institution.

“Universities in Hong Kong are trying hard to diversify [the] student body, recruiting students from different parts of the world at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Internationalisation is crucial for Hong Kong as a regional higher education hub. Of course, we’re very successful in recruiting students from [the] mainland, but I think the diversification of our student body and staff would put Hong Kong in a better position,” he says, adding that research strength is reliant on diversity.

But recent international media reports depicting Hong Kong as weakened after Covid and the 2019 protests haven’t helped efforts to lure Western students and staff. And while Mok disagrees with such portrayals, “We have to acknowledge this [perception] is a reality,” he says. “It’s very difficult to change people’s perception.”

Others, though, are more sanguine. Laurie Pearcey, associate vice-president for external engagement and outreach at CUHK, is among them.

“The value proposition of a Hong Kong education relative to [other] major international education destinations is huge,” he says. “We already see strong demand for our offerings in places like Kazakhstan, and we see real potential in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Pakistan.”

Pearcey rattles off the obvious upsides of a Hong Kong education for students: it offers greater Chinese cultural experience but without the constraints of China (Google Scholar, which is firewalled on the mainland, is still accessible in Hong Kong, for instance) and with study conducted in English at top global institutions – for “a fraction” of what it would cost in the US, the UK or Oceania.

He also disputes that academic freedom is an issue. In a statement agreed with Tuan, he says: “Academic freedom is guaranteed under Article 137 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and this is something which is recognised and appreciated by staff across the university.”

But even Pearcey agrees that Hong Kong institutions have a way to go to becoming truly international, conceding that generous government funding for education may have undermotivated them to pursue it in the past. While Hong Kong universities have plenty of exchange partners and short-term mobility programmes, they don’t put as much emphasis on international recruitment as other top global student destinations, he concedes. And that needs to change: “I think there’s a recognition that unless Hong Kong looks beyond its borders, its university system will be in trouble," he says. "There’s no way you can sustain the system with the demographic realities we are facing unless we do something different.”

For instance, Hong Kong universities will need to speed up their admissions processes. In Australia, some institutions turn around applications in just days, but in Hong Kong, “this can take weeks”, Pearcey says.

Applicants to Hong Kong universities also need to be able to see clear pathways to internship experience and work on the island, Pearcey says. This is something CUHK is working on with its cooperative education programme, which offers students eight-month placements in local businesses.

However hard Hong Kong universities work to lure students and staff from around the world, though, it is clear that most roads will still lead to China.

“The sheer size of the mainland Chinese market, coupled with the historic tendency of Chinese families to invest real cultural capital in an international education means that mainland China will be the largest source market for Hong Kong, and this makes us no different to just about every system which admits international students around the world,” says Pearcey.

But he also argues that Hong Kong recognises the need for wider international diversity – and for purer motives than Western universities do: “A diverse student population isn’t about hedging against the risks of commercial dependency on a single market, but rather about boosting the quality of the student experience,” he says. “Hong Kong thinks about diversity in terms of its broader strategy as a global hub connecting the world with the rest of China. This means when we go looking for students, we think about the national development agenda and how our student recruitment can boost initiatives such as the Belt and Road, or the nation’s Asean strategy.”

But there is a “level of pragmatism” about this approach, too, he concedes. “We know that the geopolitical sands are shifting, and we are more likely to get an A380 load of students from Astana or Karachi than we are to get a 737 full of students from San Francisco or Sydney.”

Hong Kong’s academic links with China seem likely to flourish as the city develops its northern territories just over the border from China, with plans in place for thousands of square feet of laboratories, teaching space and university housing. So might there come a day when Hong Kong and China become so integrated that mainland students cease to count as “non-local” and the Hong Kong sector starts to look – both statistically and on the ground – a lot less international?

“It’s the right question to ask,” says Lingnan’s Mok. “But as far as I understand from senior officials in the Ministry of Education, they don’t want that. I remember mainland officials encouraging Hong Kong university presidents to strengthen Hong Kong’s international-ness.”

And he believes that local officials share his view about what lies at the heart of the island’s academic success to date. “What will make Hong Kong attractive”, he says, “is our international education.”