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14.1 Introduction

Like in many other countries, especially since the 1990s, the academy (terms such as academics and academic profession are also used in this chapter) in the three major countries in East Asia – China, Japan and South Korea – has made various efforts to internationalize its activities so as to respond positively to challenges from economic globalization, marketization of higher education and increasing worldwide competition in higher education. Over the last decades, much research has been done on the internationalization of the academy from different perspectives focusing on different aspects, countries and regions (Welch 1997; Hoffman 2008; Huang 2009, 2011). However, except for very few works (Huang 2006, 2007), there has been little research on the internationalization of the academy in East Asia—in which China, Japan and Korea can be considered as typical examples— from the comparative and empirical perspectives, and there are even fewer accounts of the academic activities engaged by the academy in China, Japan and Korea from an international dimension based on national surveys with a common questionnaire.

  • This chapter will address the following three research issues:

  • What are the distinct characteristics of the internationalization of the academy in China, Japan and Korea?

  • Is the internationalization of the academy in one country higher than another country?

  • What are the implication (s) for policy and institutions from the study of the internationalization of the academy in the three countries?

In order to deal with these questions, the chapter will firstly start with a brief introduction to the formation and key characteristics of the academic profession as well as national policies and strategies on the internationalization of higher education, including the internationalization of the academic profession, in the three countries, secondly it will analyze issues concerning the international mobility of the academic profession, language problems, and the international dimension of their teaching and research activities. The chapter concludes by highlighting the similarities and differences in the relevant aspects of the internationalization of the academy among the three countries, common issues facing the academics, and implications for policy and institutions.

14.2 The Formation of and Changes in the Academy of the Three Countries

As discussed in the existing research, in Asia, the contemporary university is basically a Western institution, tracing its roots to the medieval European universities, and has been shaped by a particular Western power (Altbach and Selvaratnam 1989). The same is true of the academy in China, Japan and Korea, though there were significant differences in the formation of and changes in the academy in the three countries since the late nineteenth century. Historically speaking, before 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was founded, the emergence and formation of Chinese academy had been essentially affected by both Western and Japanese models. Since the early 1950s, the changes in the Chinese academy were fundamentally influenced by the former Soviet model which continued to dominate the development of the Chinese academy until the end of 1970s before China began to adopt the open-door policy. In recent years, the growing impact of the U.S. upon the Chinese academy is considerable and evident

Differing from China, since the late nineteenth century the formation of modern academy in Japan was achieved by looking up to the University of Berlin as a model. After the Second World War, during the Occupation period, the Japanese higher education system, influenced by American models, was fundamentally reorganized. Over the past 60 years, while the pre-war German origins are still maintained, considerable American influences have stimulated tremendous changes in the roles and characteristics of the academic profession in Japanese higher education institutions. One of the biggest changes was the widespread growth of interest in research and establishment of various academic societies: in particular, the academic faculty became more research-oriented, engaging in both pure- and applied research (Cummings and Amano 1977).

Compared to China and Japan, which do not have a colonial heritage, the formation of the academy in Korea was basically influenced by the Japanese pattern after it became a colony of Japan in 1910. However, since the 1950s, with military, economic and financial support from the US, the Korean educational system was restructured. Though some vestiges of the older Japanese pattern can still be found in contemporary Korean culture and education, the impact of the U.S. on the development of Korean academy has become increasingly significant. For example, a vast majority of Korean academics have been educated in U.S. universities. Instead of Japanese, English has become the major academic language and the most important medium of instruction among lectures offered in foreign languages (Huang 2011).

From the perspective of the internationalization of the academy in the three countries considered here, the formation of the modern academy is typically concerned with learning from foreign models and dispatching both domestic students and young academics to other advanced countries for further study, with a purpose of producing the future academy. While seeking for Western models, Japan also exerted a considerable influence on forming modern academics in both China and Korea especially over the period of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In a major sense, if the internationalization of the academy in both China and Korea can be considered as a mere one-way process of internationalization by learning from foreign models, in the meantime when Japan introduced Western academic standards, its internationalization of the academy by the end of the Second World War was also characterized with the exportation of Japanese values and academic norms to other Asian countries, this is particularly evident in Korea while it became the colony of Japan.

Since the 1990s, the impact of economic globalization and internationalization of higher education has further facilitated the internationalization of the academy in the three countries. In addition to the traditional patterns of internationalization of higher education, such as mobility of students and faculty, as well as researchers across borders, new trends in the internationalization of higher education are widely seen in the three countries. They include an introduction of English-language products into local campuses and provision of joint or transnational programs in partnership with foreign institutions. Another important strategy for promoting internationalization of higher education in the three countries is to support several selected universities or disciplines with enlarged budgets with the aim of becoming world-class universities, or world-renowned centers of excellence. To illustrate, in November 1995, 2 years after the issue of the Outline, the former SEC (State Education Commission) in China implemented Project 211 to finance Peking University and Tsinghua University intensively with the purpose of enabling the two universities to achieve a higher international ranking and become world-class institutions. In December 1998, the MOE implemented Project 985. The idea of the Project was first mentioned by the former Chairman Jiang Zemin in May 1998. The importance of the two national projects in affecting the internationalization of China’s academy cannot be underestimated for they have not only diversified the Chinese higher education system giving rise to several research-intensive universities, but also encouraged Chinese academics to be more involved with research activities, which prior to the 1980s were carried out only in research institutes outside universities.

As noted before, though the Japanese academics have a much stronger preference for research activities over teaching, ever since they adopted the German model in the nineteenth century, in 2001, Japan launched a national university reform known as the “Doyama Plan” (named after the then Minister of Education in Japan) in an effort to raise the global competitiveness of national universities. One of the national strategies in the plan is fostering the “Top 30” (Japanese) Universities towards attaining the highest global standards. Based on this ambitious plan, the Japanese government established several “Centers of Excellence” at a national level with the intent of enhancing the international presence and impact of Japanese research productivity by allocating intensive public funding in selected disciples. Through these efforts, it is hoped that the quality of research activity in Japanese higher education can be considerably improved and increased international dimensions can be integrated into campus research activities.

Clear evidences can also be found in Korea. In 1999, the Korean government started The Brain Korea 21 project (BK 21) for the purpose of building world-class graduate schools and nurturing the development of research personnel. Based on the “choice and concentration” principle, the government has allocated a special budget to the project. By 2006, the second stage of BK 21 was implemented and more efforts were to be made from 2012 onwards to establish the research focused university system and to foster expert personnel. As mentioned by Park (Park 2005), the Korean Education Ministry sets its higher education internalization policy in the following five core directions:

  • First, in order to raise the quality of Korean universities to a global level, the higher education administration system will be substantially improved by modifying the president election method and the faculty recruitment process, and by innovating the academic structure of higher education such as the curriculum.

  • Second, an HRD system will be built to effectively meet the demands of the industry. With this system, universities will be able to cope with the drastically changing global environment and also lead global developments.

  • Third, universities will be specialized so that they may play a crucial role in regional innovation.

  • Fourth, by supporting the establishment of professional graduate schools, the Education Ministry seeks to foster genuine academic competition in place of the current competition for college entrance. And

  • Lastly, specialized universities will be supported with funding based on the principles of “selection and concentration”.

Following the above policies, several specific measures have been carried out at both national and institutional levels, including enhancing the international mobility of Korean young academics, increasing English-medium instruction (EMI) and so on. EMI, in particular, has now become a prerequisite for universities wishing to receive government financial support and is an important consideration when individual universities are externally evaluated. As a result, a growing number of Korean universities currently offer/will offer more EMI courses. In an effort to expand EMI at their institutions, universities have implemented a range of policies, such as placing greater emphasis on English proficiency when recruiting new professors and mandating that professors conduct classes in English (Byun et al. 2011).

14.3 Research Framework and Methodology

There are numerous interpretations of the term “internationalization of the academy”. However, in the international survey of the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) project – carried out from 2007 to 2009 in 22 countries with a similar questionnaire – the term merely includes the following aspects:

  • international mobility of academics,

  • international teaching,

  • research activities, and

  • utilization of foreign languages.

Therefore, though internationalization of the academy can be researched from various perspectives, data concerning the internationalization of the academy in the CAP survey is limited. Therefore, the author of this chapter developed the following framework based on previous research in the internationalization of higher education (Altbach and Knight 2007)

As shown in Fig. 14.1, the entire international activities which are undertaken by the academy in the CAP survey can be practically divided into two different dimensions. The first relates to the international activities at home. They include immigrant academics, foreign language use in teaching and research, international perspectives and content in teaching, accepting international students, teaching and publishing in another language, collaborating with international colleagues, co-authoring with international colleagues. The second dimension is concerned with the international activities abroad, which may refer to publishing in a foreign country and teaching abroad. However, due to the fact that mobile academy or academics are difficult to be clearly identified at either dimension, it might be better to view them as one of the examples of international activities which occurred at both dimensions.

Fig. 14.1
figure 1

Research framework (Source: Huang (2012))

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In terms of the research methodology, the data used in this research is from the data base created at Kassel University, Germany, in September 2011. Major characteristics of the national surveys in the three countries are as follows (RIHE 2009):

In China, the survey was done with the help of paper-based questionnaires from early 2007 to October 2007. The total sample size is 4,200 with academics being selected from 10 national and 60 regional institutions. They are stratified by region, discipline, and control, but the academics from colleges with short-cycle programs and private institutions are not included. The academics’ response rate is 86 % with 3,618 valid samples and the institution response rate is as high as 97 % with answers from 68 higher education institutions. In Japan, a similar paper-based survey was carried out in August 2007. The number of valid samples from the academics is 6,200, selected from 18 4-year institutions, according to institutional types and scale, also including private sector. The academics’ response rate is 23 %, with 1,408 respondents. In Korea, two on-line surveys were carried out between February and April 2008, using random sampling method. The characteristics of the Korean data are revealed in Table 14.1.

Table 14.1 Characteristics of the Korean survey
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14.4 Data Analysis

According to earlier research (OECD-SOPEMI 2007; Teichler 2011; Rostan and Höhle 2014), even the international mobility of academics includes at least two dimensions. The first dimension pertains to immigrant academics who were born abroad and crossed the borders of the country where they are currently employed at different stages of their life and for different purposes. The second are mobile academics who work where they were born but have experienced border crossing either for study or professional purposes. In the CAP survey, the two overarching types of the international mobility of academics can be further categorized into the following sub-groups.

  • Early immigrants: Foreign at birth, study in the country of current work (irrespective of location of PhD)

  • PhD immigrants: Foreign at birth, study abroad, PhD in country of current work

  • Professional migrants: Foreign at birth, study and PhD abroad, work in the country of current work

  • Study mobile academics: Citizenship both at birth and currently of the country of current work, degree abroad, PhD in the country of current work

  • PhD mobile academics: Citizenship both at birth and currently of the country of current work, degree abroad or at home, PhD abroad

  • Non-mobile academics: Citizenship both at birth and currently, degree, PhD all of/in the country of current work.

As indicated in Table 14.2, over 90 % of the academics in Japan and China, and 54 % of academics in Korea belong to the non-mobile academics sub-group. However, compared to China and Japan, in which there is a small percentage of either study mobile academics or PhD mobile academics, 18 % of Korean academics and as high as 28 % of Korean academics expressed that they belonged to study mobile academics and PhD mobile academics. As a result, 46 % of the Korean academic can be categorized as mobile academics. This is far higher than either of the two countries in East Asia. Furthermore, Table 14.2 also reveals that the international mobility of the academy in the three countries was primarily concerned with study and PhD mobile or circulating; there are no academic immigrants coming to any of the three countries. In a major sense, the international mobility of the academy in the three countries is characterized with a one-way movement from their home countries to other countries outside of Asia.

Table 14.2 International mobility and migration in China, Japan and Korea (percentage)
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Table 14.3 suggests that there existed remarkable differences in the international mobility of the academy within Asia and outside of Asia. For example, the international mobility of Chinese academics basically occurred within Asia. In Japan, there is less percent of the study mobile academics moving outside of Asia, but more percent of PhD mobile academics going outside of Asia. In Korea, the percentages of both study mobile academics and PhD mobile academics moving outside of Asia are much higher than those within Asia.

Table 14.3 International mobility and migration within Asian countries and outside Asia (percentage)
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Table 14.4 shows that the highest percentage of academics who integrated international perspectives in their teaching is Korean (74 %), followed by Chinese academics (67 %). Though 51 % of Japanese academics also believed that they integrated international perspectives in their teaching, they are the least active in this regard among the three countries. With respect to one aspect of transnational educational activities, Korean academics form the largest percentage (9 %) who expressed that they taught abroad among the three countries, while China had the largest percentage (10 %) academics stating that “currently, most of their graduate students are international”.

Table 14.4 Internationalization of teaching activities and students in China, Japan and Korea (percentage)
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Table 14.5 reveals that the percentage of academics who emphasized international scope of research is the highest from China (67 %). However, the percentage of their activities in all other international research is the lowest among the three countries. In contrast, the largest percentage of academics who answered that they collaborated with international colleagues and published in a foreign country is from Korea. While the largest percentage of respondents who believed that they co-authored with colleagues located in other countries is from Japan.

Table 14.5 Internationalization of research activities in China, Japan and Korea (percentage)
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Table 14.6 provides the information about foreign language employed by the academy in their teaching and research activities in the three countries. The percentage of academics among the three countries who taught in another language is the highest (30 %) from Korea. In most cases, it can be understood that the largest numbers of academics who did English-medium teaching are also from Korea. In contrast, in publishing in another language, the percentage of Japanese academics is the highest (42 %). Again, the percentage of academics who did not primarily employ their first/mother tongue in either teaching or research is the highest from Korea. The second largest group is Chinese academics. Noticeably, the data indicates that no Japanese academic primarily employed foreign languages in their teaching.

Table 14.6 Foreign language use in China, Japan and Korea (percentage)
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14.5 Concluding Remarks

The purpose of this chapter was to examine distinct characteristics of the internationalization of the academy in China, Japan and Korea, whether the internationalization of the academy in one country is higher over the other, and what policy implications can result from the study of the internationalization of the academy in the three countries. The introduction depicted that the formation of the modern academic profession in these three countries was significantly affected by Western models. Historically speaking, the internationalization of the academy in China, Japan and Korea already started as early as late nineteenth century, including sending domestic scholars abroad for further studies and advanced research, inviting foreign academics to teach in local universities, introducing Western academic norms and standards, using foreign languages (e.g. The German language was used as a major teaching and research language in the so-called Imperial universities of Japan; the English language was widely employed as a dominant language in Chinese universities till the end of 1940s while in most cases, academics in Korean universities were asked to use the Japanese language in their teaching and research during the colonial time. The chapter also attempted to show that huge efforts have been made by central governments in the three countries to internationalize their higher education, including the internationalization of their academic profession in recent years. Despite differences in the policies and strategies concerning the internationalization of their academic profession, the three countries share much in common, in that they eventually agree with the important role of the internationalization of the academy in enhancing the quality of their higher education systems and building up top universities based on global standards or world-class universities. More importantly, the results of the data analysis indicate that the internationalization of the academy in the three countries is typically characterized by the academics’ utmost emphasis on the introduction of international orientations or contents into their lectures, followed by the incorporation of an international scope in their research, but much less attainments in teaching abroad, publishing in a foreign country, and attracting academic immigrants to their home universities. Hence, in terms of international dimensions, the internationalization of the academy mainly occurred at home in sharp contrast to activities made abroad. To illustrate, it was basically concerned with the one-way movement of the large percentage of academics from their home countries to other countries, mostly foreign countries outside of Asia, undertaking international teaching and research activities, and the employment of foreign languages in both teaching and research at their belonging institutions.

However, with regard to the overall degree of the internationalization of the academics among the three countries, there is not much evidence to show that any one country is higher than the other in the entire international dimension of activities based on relevant findings from the CAP survey. It is interesting that each country has its own distinct characteristics when its academics engage in various international activities. For example, the largest percentage of academics who asserted that they published in another language was from Japan; while Korean academics formed the largest percentage who could be classified into the category of mobile academics, and who expressed that they used another language in their teaching, whereas the largest percentage of academics who believed that they incorporated an international dimension to their research was from China. In a major sense, the three completely different types of internationalization can be summarized as: (a) China: primarily receptive, (b) Japan: little mobility but clearly more cooperation, and (c) Korea: high outward mobility during study and doctoral period that leads to many international activities.

From the historical and comparative perspectives, explanations could be made about the differences which were found in the characteristics of the internationalization of the academy in each country. As mentioned earlier, Japanese academics have a long tradition of doing research because they had been significantly affected by the German research university prior to the Second World War and then heavily influenced by the US pattern. Though they have been asked to spend more time on teaching, especially at undergraduate studies since the early 1990s, they still have a stronger preference for research. The key reason why Korea has the highest percentage of mobile academics is that, compared with both China and Japan, Korea has a much smaller academic or higher education system and more importantly the quality of domestic higher education is frequently criticized by students, their parents and other stakeholders. This might have led to the vast majority of them going to other countries. With respect to the adoption of foreign language in teaching, it can be assumed that it is strongly encouraged by the Korean governments to expand English-taught programs or courses and also its importance as a factor when universities are externally evaluated. While in China, the impact of the transformation of the university function from teaching-centered to that of teaching and research balanced and research-oriented, especially in leading universities, on the international scope of Chinese academics in their research activities is dramatic and apparent.

These findings have several implications for policy and institutions. Since the international mobility in the three East Asian countries was mainly concerned with the one-way movement of academics across borders with far fewer numbers of mobile or immigrant academics coming from other countries—the percentage of non-mobile academics was very high especially in Japan and China—the issue of how to encourage more international mobility of academics, especially their movement within Asian countries to form an Asian community or identity, and how to attract more foreign academics to move to these countries should be considered at both policy and institutional levels.