Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia: Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-27855-7, 978-3-030-27856-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Emotional Geographies of International Students: Beginning an East Asian Conversation (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 1-29
Assembling East Asian Knowledge Spaces (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 31-55
Emotional Geographies of University Officialdom (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 57-83
The Cultural Politics of Emplacement (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 85-114
‘Feeling Regional’ (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 115-136
Situating Critique and Care: What Kind of Asia? (Ravinder K. Sidhu, Ho Kong Chong, Brenda S. A. Yeoh)....Pages 137-160
Back Matter ....Pages 161-163

Citation preview

MOBILITY & POLITICS SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER · PARVATI RAGHURAM · WILLIAM WALTERS

Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces Ravinder K. Sidhu · Ho Kong Chong · Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Canada Parvati Raghuram Open University Milton Keynes, UK William Walters Carleton University Ottawa, Canada

Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Global Advisory Board Michael Collyer, University of Sussex Susan B. Coutin, University of California Raúl Delgado Wise, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas Nicholas De Genova, King’s College London Eleonore Kofman, Middlesex University Rey Koslowski, University at Albany Loren B. Landau, University of the Witwatersrand Sandro Mezzadra, Università di Bologna Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney Antoine Pécoud, Université Paris 13 Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Research Group Calcutta Nandita Sharma, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Tesfaye Tafesse, Addis Ababa University Thanh-Dam Truong, Erasmus University Rotterdam Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14800

Ravinder K. Sidhu · Ho Kong Chong · Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces

Ravinder K. Sidhu School of Education University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Ho Kong Chong Department of Sociology National University of Singapore Kent Ridge, Singapore

Brenda S. A. Yeoh Department of Geography National University of Singapore Kent Ridge, Singapore

Mobility & Politics ISBN 978-3-030-27855-7 ISBN 978-3-030-27856-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We thank the series editors, Parvati Raghuram, William Walters and Martin Geiger for commissioning this book. We would also like to thank our fellow researchers who worked on the research project which informed this book, ‘Globalising Universities and International Student Mobilities’, Francis Collins, Mayumi Ishikawa, Nick Lewis, Ai-Hsuan Sandra Ma, Eugene Liow, Ge Yun and Michelle Foong. Professors Li Liguo, Mayumi Ishikawa, Park Gilsung and Ai-Hsuan Sandra Ma played critical roles in facilitating university access in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, respectively. Dr. Charles Lagree contributed to our thinking on student mobilities through research workshops. We thank the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore for financial and institutional support. Achala Gupta provided much-needed research help in the last stretch and Pat Kelly read and edited the final draft. Two anonymous referees offered helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript and we thank them. Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg, from Palgrave Macmillan—thank you for your patience and for prodding us along. This research was generously funded by a Ministry of Education (Singapore) Tier 2 Grant (R-111-000-093-112). Finally, we thank our families and friends who sustained us through the ups and downs of writing this book.

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Contents

1 Emotional Geographies of International Students: Beginning an East Asian Conversation

1

2 Assembling East Asian Knowledge Spaces

31

3 Emotional Geographies of University Officialdom

57

4 The Cultural Politics of Emplacement

85

5 ‘Feeling Regional’ 115 6 Situating Critique and Care: What Kind of Asia?

137

Index 161

vii

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4

Distribution of leadership roles of interviewed officials 19 Research and Development expenditure (% of GDP), 1996–2015 37 Researchers per 1000 employed, 1996–2014 40 Share and distribution of tertiary international and foreign students in STEM-based disciplines, 2016 43 STEM vs. HSS doctoral students in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) 45

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CHAPTER 1

Emotional Geographies of International Students: Beginning an East Asian Conversation

Abstract This chapter establishes the rationale for studying the emotional geographies of international students in East Asia, a topic which has received less attention compared to European and North American student mobilities. We introduce the theoretical approaches that have inspired our research—studies of governmentality and postcolonial feminism—as a basis for complicating long-held understandings of the rational, calculating, utility-maximising East Asian student. We describe the manifold ways in which student-emotional encounters open up possibilities for an affective regionalism that lends itself to an East Asian governmentality of goodwill. The chapter ends with a brief biographical account of our education-driven migrations, and our investments in a politics of critique and care. Keywords International education · East Asian governmentality · Affective economies · Emotional geographies

We attribute this term to David Scott’s magisterial work, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. © The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_1

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Reimagining Asia? Europe is no longer the centre of gravity of the world. Whether such a revelation is an occasion for joy or cause for surprise or worry, one thing remains certain: the demotion of Europe opens up possibilities—and presents dangers—for critical thought. (Mbembe in Goldberg 2018, 1)

Writing in May 2016, the former editor of Le Monde and columnist of the Guardian newspaper, Natalie Nougayrède, observed that ‘Asia may be thriving, [but] it is haunted by the ghosts of its past—nationalist passions are high’. She went on to argue that while Europe has built its unity on overcoming old hatreds and antagonism, Asia’s tensions have their roots not just in rivalries between countries but in a battle over memory. The traumas of the 20th century were never overcome in this region. (Nougayrède 2016)

Nougayrède cajoled her audience, assumed largely to be Europeans, to compare the continent’s ‘dazzling accomplishments over the past six decades with Asia’s reality’ which she went on to describe as ‘…a tangled web of unresolved historical disputes and rising tensions’. In this and other debates, the long-standing circular movements of people, ideas, goods and popular culture, cross-border marriages, transnational education flows, trade and infrastructural projects within Asia remained on the peripheries of an informed imagination (Lin and Yeoh 2016). The sentiment of Nougayrède’s piece is captured in its title, Asia has yet to confront its past —be grateful Europe did. It is a title that invites further questions and elicits all kinds of emotions. Who are the parties that should be grateful? What have they received that requires them to feel the social emotion of gratitude? From whom? Which pasts have Europeans confronted—their colonial as well as their nationalist pasts? What can be read into the reproachful tenor that Asia ‘has yet to confront its past’? Is it laziness, or worse, cowardice, a lack of moral rectitude? As it stands, the events that subsequently unfolded make it increasingly clear that Nougayrède’s triumphalist celebration of the European political project was premature. Scarcely a month after penning her column, a referendum sealed the UK’s fate to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’). Other events—the movements into Europe of refugees and asylum seekers and migrants—pitched nationalist emotions to amplitudes and frequencies

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that re-enacted ‘the traumas of the 20th century’ which Nougayrède had attributed to Asia. The traumas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also seemed to preoccupy the martial artist, actor and international celebrity, Jackie Chan. When a large number of Hong Kong’s citizens took to the streets in 2019 to protest against a proposed extradition treaty with mainland China and police brutality, Chan professed to feeling ‘sad’ and ‘depressed’. China’s rapid development had, he shared, produced for him intense emotions of personal pride in being Chinese. He then went on to admonish protesters for desecrating ‘the most basic principles of patriotism: safety, security and peace’ (Atkin 2019). In offering a more complex and variegated account of Asia, this book confronts the polemical and Eurocentric otherings of Asia as part of a broader critical focus on unsettling the premises of much nationalist discourse. We question Nougayrede’s triumphalist beliefs in Europe and her gloomy dismissal of a fragmented, fractious Asia, while taking heed of Mbembe’s warning with which we opened our chapter—that Europe’s demotion from the ‘centre of gravity of the world’ brings possibilities along with dangers for critical thought. Nougayrède’s journalistic piece is one iteration of a long-standing set of discourses in which a united ‘West’, or Europe in this instance, governed by reason is positioned against a fragmented Asia driven by unreason and passion. There are many expressions of this binary, too many to map in detail. They extend from controversies relating to freedom of speech, to debates about the learning styles of international students (‘Asian learners’) and their alleged inabilities to demonstrate ‘critical thinking’ (see Song and McCarthy 2018). In all these discussions, a socially enlightened European sensibility, acutely sensitive to the rights of the individual and the predations of hegemonic thinking, is pitted against a non-Western sensibility blindly obedient to theological and political authority, perhaps struggling to ‘become modern’ (see Allen 2016). At the same time, as we show through our analysis of student narratives, critical thought of the kind advocated by Mbembe requires being alert to the promises and failures of nationalist modes of organisation. Like western liberal democracies, Asian nationalisms, too, have staked their legitimacies on excluding many constitutive Other(s). Collectively, these exclusions manifest in a distinctly modernist metapolitics of violence, not only against minority populations and dissenting citizens, but also to the many non-human life forms that sustain the planet (see Goldberg 2018; Mbembe 2013).

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This book offers an alternative, non-Eurocentric account to those that focus on a conflict-ridden and fragmented Asia, a space colonised by the juggernaut of ‘neoliberal globalisation’. We present education mobilities as sites of possibility for regional goodwill and cosmopolitan solidarities. Our intention in taking this approach is not to deny the existence of fissures and fragmentations, including the parochial pull of self-interested nationalisms within Asia (and elsewhere). Rather we acknowledge that these are but a part of a complex and intricate tapestry. In this, we take inspiration from researchers who have positioned ‘domains of commonality’ and ‘sociabilities’ in order to extend the focus of research beyond its current preoccupation with ‘difference’. Such fixations are bereft of analytical hope; they lend themselves to confirming separatist sentiments that differences are too hard to mediate, insurmountable even. Yet, as Nina Glick-Schiller and Ayse Ça˘glar (2016, 30) counsel, ‘It is through an emphasis on social relationships rather than cultural differences that we can acknowledge the possibilities and circumstances within which commonalities emerge’. Beginning with a decidedly postcolonial tenor to ‘decentre’ Europe’s modernist claims, this book has three aims. Our first aim is to use emotions as an analytical lens from which to examine international student mobility within East Asia, an under-researched topic compared to mobilities in and out of Europe and North America. A focus on emotions provides richer understandings of student mobilities than those that position students simply as unfinished human capital and placeholders in global knowledge economies. Turning our gaze to the emotional registers within university laboratories, residential halls and clubs, cities and nation-states, we discuss the cross-cultural encounter in all of its complexity, giving shape to the plurality of spaces that define international education in East Asia. Acutely conscious of Europe’s ongoing struggles with its imperial and colonial legacies, we consider how these legacies, which are also present in Asia, shape international student encounters. We examine the kinds of emotions that might support (or prevent) expressions of political subjectivity that are simultaneously regional and cosmopolitan. Our second aim is to build on understandings of emotions to bring a politics of critique and care not only into research debates but also into the manifold practices of international education. In this, we are sensitised by our own experiences as university educators situated geographically, politically and/or affectively in ‘Asia’. After decades of teaching, we find ourselves questioning what else could be done to draw out the unrealised potential of transnational educational encounters. Here we are inspired by the very

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meaning of education’s as drawn from its etymological roots—the Latin educere or educare,—‘to bring out’, ‘to lead out’ (Kenway and Youdell 2011, 132). This book brings out the emotional textures of transnational education so that we can begin to imagine generous, ethical and responsible futures beyond those celebrating ‘high value’ human capital. This brings us to the final aim, that is to explore the role of emotions in the governmentalities of a region described as ‘Rising Asia’. ‘Rising Asia’ references a group of Asian countries which have enjoyed rapid industrial development in the past, and are now intent on creating new knowledge spaces of research and development. Located within this emergent project of innovation-driven development are East Asia’s universities. They are both hosts and hostages to mobile networks of people and ideas. We take these institutions as sites from which to explore the challenges confronting ‘Rising Asia’. Provoked by Mbembe’s quote which opened our chapter, we explore what Europe’s potential demotion means for critical thought on and from Asia.

Why Study Emotions? The ‘world-wide transit of people, objects/images, ideas and practices’ demands an engagement with emotions (Svašek and Skrbiš 2007). We cannot understand this interplay of circulation and containment—‘to make move and let stop’—without delving into emotions (Salter 2013). Yet, in the scholarly world where binaries persist between North and South, East and West, masculine and feminine, emotions, until relatively recently, were positioned as the ‘other’ of serious research. The othering and silencing of emotions by the disciplines is attributed to masculine bias in scholarly work (Anderson and Smith 2001, 2; Kraftl 2016, 153). A corresponding set of arguments locates the suppression of emotions in the quest to build scientific and ‘modern’ identities for the disciplines. Psychology is said to have cast off philosophical influences acquired over centuries as it styled itself to study emotions under experimental conditions. Emotions were subsequently distilled into measurable variables, an emphasis that inevitably pulled away from complexities, ambiguities and nuances (Frevert 2011). What if emotions were part of the calculus not only of research but also policy reforms, ask Anderson and Smith (2001)? They argue that a turn to emotions opens up many new possibilities to organise our economic, cultural and social lives in more ethical and effective ways. This point bears on a host of policy areas including immigration, housing and

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transnational education where policies may fail to achieve what they set out to do, often producing, if not retrograde, unanticipated effects. Policy failures are important, they create disenchantment, leaving electorates increasingly susceptible to xenophobic and populist sentiments. Anderson and Smith (2001) represent an expanding school that calls for a feminist politics of emotion. This is a position that recognises the relations of power that frame how we currently understand, experience and intervene in the human and non-human worlds (Boler and Zembylas 2016; Bondi 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006, 2017). Emotions accordingly, are not simply reflections or mirrors of lives, rather they are a constitutive force in how the social is imagined, assembled and subjected. Like every research endeavour, studying emotions is not straightforward; conceptual approaches used differ and these are not ‘readily commensurable’ (Kenway and Youdell 2011, 132). We are interested in researching emotions in politically and ethically productive ways, and we take our cue from decades of feminist-inspired research. We cannot know and intervene in the world without bringing emotions into the broader calculus of research, teaching and policy making (Raghuram et al. 2009; Anderson and Smith 2001). Theoretically dense, the field of emotions research is filled with tensions and contradictions. Our intention is not to explore in great detail the conceptual, analytic and political tensions of approaches used to study emotions, a task beyond the scope of this book. Instead we highlight the main themes which have preoccupied researchers in this field of ‘emotions/affect/feeling’ and explain our approach in this study of student mobilities and emotions. The divergent ways in which emotions are understood in the social sciences have been summarised by Lupton (1998) as falling into one of two categories: emotions as innate and emotions as socially constructed. Although convenient, this neat division falls short as it does not acknowledge the relations between the personal, sociopolitical and cultural spheres of existence. It also fails to capture the entanglements between conscious and unconscious aspects of emotions. These have been the subject of debates about the merits of studying emotions as opposed to affect, a point we return to later. For Gammerl et al. (2017), discursive struggles over terminologies (emotions or affect) might best be side-stepped by using ‘feelings’ as a heuristic term in place of both emotion and affect. Feelings embrace emotions and tactility, moving beyond the binaries of mind/body, reason/emotions. Feelings, they argue, have less discursive baggage than either affect or emotions.

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Emotions as Affective Economies In a highly influential piece of writing, Sara Ahmed (2004) proposed a framework that she labelled affective economies. Inspired by Marx’s theory of commodity value, she argued that affect or emotion should not be seen as residing in a person (subject), or an object. The subject, she observed ‘…is only one nodal point in the affective economy’ (121). Everyday understandings on the other hand would locate the subject as the origin and destination of emotions. Drawing on psychoanalytic influences, Ahmed acknowledged the role of the unconscious in influencing affect; in her words, ‘… an affective impulse is perceived but misconstrued, and which becomes attached to another idea’ (19–20). Affect, she noted, ‘…does not reside in signs or commodities, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation’ (19–20). In other words, emotions work as a form of capital only through circulations. Emotions stick to objects and subjects, drawing them together to constitute feelings, of fear, love or hate and so forth. Ahmed proposed that studies of emotions pay attention to these ‘sticky’ objects. Researchers are encouraged to inquire into which emotions stick to which objects and which subjects. Through readings of select public texts, Ahmed revealed that while some foreign bodies attract emotions of fear and disgust, the same emotions can slide over other foreign bodies. Thus, fear and disquiet may stick differently to African heritage student bodies compared to white foreign students in China (Bunnell et al. 2018). The potency of these circulating emotions is enabled by distinctive lexical items—the fear of being ‘swamped’ or ‘over-run’ by foreign bodies. Here, language helps to initiate a ‘futurity of fear’, a perception that the object of fear, although not present spatially, will nonetheless envelop and engulf. Emotions delineate the ‘surfaces and boundaries’ between the individual and the social. Calling on Marx’s work on commodity fetishism, Ahmed argued that emotions appear in objects ‘only through concealment of how they are shaped by histories’, including histories of production and exchange. Ahmed’s work is particularly powerful in understanding how emotions are mobilised to persuade and/or dissuade us from identifying with each other. The circulation and stickiness of particular emotions draws together certain bodies, allowing for the formation of social collectives, while at the same time excluding and rejecting other bodies. As a framework, affective economies is a powerful analytical tool which can be put to use to understand the mobilisation of emotions by political movements seeking to galvanise popular support for particular causes.

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Geographies of Emotion The contributions of feminist geographers has seen the consolidation of a sub-field, geographies of emotions. By attending to the materialities of practice and embodiment in a variety of spatial settings, feminist geographers have opened up alternative sources of knowledge. Through their textured studies of public, institutional and domestic geographies, feminist researchers have studied the manner in which emotions are mobilised to establish the conditions for social exclusion and marginalisation (Davidson and Milligan 2004; Davidson et al. 2005; Pile 2010). Some research has focused on the formative powers of discourses, that is, the ‘rules’ and norms that shape feelings, including the instructive scripts that influence how emotions ought to be expressed. Researchers have also embedded themselves in spaces to capture the use of dissonant emotions to bring people together and/or to prise them apart. This corpus of work has been influential in shaping our understandings of how emotions such as humour, anger, empathy and so forth when shared, can draw people together to create social ties and communities of solidarity. Conversely, feeling differently about an event, a place, a body or a subject, can signal social exclusion. Feeling differently can become an act of dissidence (Gammerl et al. 2017). By studying the shared and dissonant grammars of emotional meanings, feminist researchers have made significant inroads in understanding how and why people maintain or alternatively break away from gendered, raced and classed norms.

Emotions or Affects? An area of debate and tension concerns the methodologies involved in identifying the non-representational (affective) from the representational dimensions of emotions. We discuss these debates briefly. Affect-focused research assumed popularity in the 1990s and took two main trajectories: a psychoanalytic strand pioneered by Silvan Tomkins and a philosophical approached inspired by Spinoza and extended further by Deleuze (1988) and Massumi (1995) (see Boler and Zembylas 2016). Massumi argues for a differentiation between affect and emotion, describing emotion as ‘sociolinguistic fixing’ which bears the marks of a personal experience captured and contained by semiotics and semantics. Affect, on the other hand, is ‘not ownable’, it is a non-conscious experience of intensity (7). Affect-driven

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researchers are concerned with virtuality and ‘becoming ’ in contradistinction to what actually is (Gammerl et al. 2017). Affect, put simply, is portrayed as a ‘mysterious force’ that bypasses cognition, discourse and sensemaking. For its supporters, affect affords autonomy by its unknowability and unpredictability. They contrast this with discursively driven research which is seen as having a ‘taming’ effect (Wetherell 2015). The openness of affect is said to hold out political potential for radical changes. At its simplest, the controversies about emotions/affects/feelings have pivoted around the extent of their engagements with relations of power to initiate changes that ‘make a difference’. Those who identify with a feminist politics have questioned the uncritical acceptance of Massumi’s idea about the autonomy of affect and its promise of delivering radical change. Affective responses, they argue, are within normative power relations. The ‘pre-cultural’, ‘acultural’, ‘pre-cognitive, ‘gut response’ may well be shot through with dominant values that maintain hegemony (Boler and Zembylas 2016). Affect and emotion operate in different political landscapes. Studies of emotion, the argument goes, are acutely sensitive to power geometries and historical memories. Bodies are recognised to be profoundly different and their racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed differences mean that they are not only perceived differently, but also signal differential access to social power. They also have differential affective capacities, as (Tolia-Kelly 2006, 215) elaborates, ‘A body that is signified as a source of fear through its markedness cannot be free to affect and be affected to one that is not’ (215). But affect-related research has its defenders who, in dismissing criticisms of its depoliticising effects, point to studies with critical and emancipatory intent. Researchers of affect also point to the limits of representational economies of voice and political agency, arguing that these approaches often fail to capture ‘what matters’ to actors/subjects (Kraftl 2016).

Emotions and Governmentality Emotions are integral to shaping the networks of force and strategy (‘institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations’), described by the French historian, Michel Foucault as governmentality (‘the conduct of conduct’) (Foucault 2007, Chapter 4). Although governmentality devotes much space to discussing practical rationalities (‘mentalities’) in the ‘conduct of conduct’, Foucault’s broader corpus of work on the body clearly illustrates his engagement with rationalities and emotions. For Foucault

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(2007), the body functions as an object of knowledge and is a moving target for power/knowledge regimes. It is susceptible to processes of subjection by ‘technologies of power’ but also amenable to subjectification. The body is implicated in ‘technologies of the self’—the operations through which individuals act on their emotions, their being and their souls. Through richly textured accounts of bodies in a variety of settings, governmentality research highlights chance and contingency in subject-making. Emotions are acknowledged for subjecting and (re)subjectifying, often in unanticipated ways (D’Aoust 2014). Circulating emotions help to sort and administer bodies and places according to regimes of value. Study destinations, for example, are marketed by appealing to the emotions of students and families. Certain places come to be seen as sticky with hope. Similarly, student bodies might carry or repudiate the attributes and stereotypes assigned to their countries and cultures, evoking admiration, trepidation, hostility. The explosion of research on borders has captured the manner in which emotions are enlisted in governing migratory regimes, marking out certain bodies as being out-of-place, alien and dangerous (Puwar 2004). Emotions of fear stick to certain bodies that are themselves spatially and temporally differentiated, fixed ideologically as ‘left’ or ‘right’ wing, ‘white’, ‘Asian’ or ‘Other’. Emotions, when mobilised, galvanise support among citizens for particular nation-building and nationalist projects (‘affective nationalism’). Deployed in citizenship-forming technologies, emotions may be harnessed by individuals to produce self-regulation and optimisation, conduct that increasingly defines what it is to be a good citizen in response to the specificities of ‘going global’. Everyday emotional encounters reveal the different ways in which international students interact with the discursive structures of host and home nation-states, troubling certain norms while translating others in (un)anticipated ways. Sojourning students might be invited through emotional discourses to demonstrate loyalty and retain their ‘roots’, even as they move away from the spatial unit of the nationstate.

Emotions and East Asian Governmentalities The mobilisation of emotions in contemporary East Asian governance is now a well-researched area. This work, from which we take inspiration, has moved scholarly debates beyond simple and uniform accounts of docile Asian subjects enacting the plans of neoliberal biopolitical regimes, whether by ‘authoritarian’ states or ‘calculating’ capital-seeking families. Instead,

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more complex and variegated accounts have emerged revealing struggles over projects seeking to re-engineer the moralities of ‘ideal’ citizens. Thus, Jie Yang (2014) has examined state-sanctioned programmes aimed at managing the ‘negative’ emotions of unemployed Chinese citizens by inducing self-reflexivity for personal fulfilment and contentment. In assembling these ‘positive’, non-adversarial psychological states, a host of seemingly traditional techniques are conscripted to interpellate former workers into a socialist project of political stability through social harmony. ‘Crippling economic restructuring and intensified social stratifications’ are managed by steering people to consider ‘difficult’ experiences as openings for fulfilment, growth and personal happiness. Suffice to say, such programmes are subject to popular criticism and rejection, especially through Chinese social media. Yang and her colleagues (2014) mount a persuasive case for using popular culture as a means to contest the pernicious biopolitics of hypercapitalism.1 Citizens thrown into circuits of adversity by large-scale economic changes are encouraged by stories of people like themselves and invited to reject emotions such as shame and anxiety. The locus of emotions such as shame is discursively relocated instead in those who govern in the name of socialism. Ayaka Yoshimizu (2014) also examines emotions but from a different socio-spatial angle, by studying the affective labour of female, Indonesian aged care workers in Japan. Seen as a cheap option to maintain Japan’s biopolitical economy, care workers are constructed in media discourses as cheerful and kind. They are favourably positioned against a disappearing ideal subject—the (unpaid) caring Japanese daughter and daughter-in-law. Notwithstanding the affection that circulates around their caring labour, this and other research on domestic workers in Southeast Asia reveals that their caring bodies are potential sites for the reproduction of neocolonial relations through which countries and nationals are stratified according to the standards set by hierarchies of ‘development’ (Kofman and Raghuram 2009, 18). An important domain for understanding governmentality concerns education’s enlistment in the administration of populations and individuals by modern biopolitical states (Peters et al. 2009). Studies of East Asian governmentalities are starting to reveal the uses of emotional technologies in 1 Hypercapitalism (sometimes conflated with ‘late capitalism’) is a term used in scholarship inspired by Marxist sociology to critique contemporary forms of political economy that feature extensive, intensive and rapid flows of material and immaterial goods, people and information.

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nation-building, often undertaken in the name of ‘meritocracy’ and social mobility under contemporary conditions of globalisation. In China, a statesponsored discourse around education for ‘quality’, or suzhi jiaoyu, seeks to explicitly link China’s strength as a nation with the moral qualities of its citizens including students. Teresa Kuan offers this snippet from a 2000 speech by Jiang Zemin, then Premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC): [we] must not confine our youth in rooms and in books all day. We must let them participate in some social practice, open their field of vision and enlarge their social experience. (Jiang cited by Kuan 2014, 67)

This call ‘to set energies in motion’ and move away from rote-learning and test-taking approaches—likened to yingshi jiaoyu or ‘stuffing children like ducks’ (Kuan 2014)—appears well-received. However, closer analyses of suzhi jiaoyu as an emancipatory pedagogy continues to reveal a pattern of differential enactments by schools, municipalities, families, children and teachers. While some educators and authorities have foregrounded the need for creativity and self-expression in children as an end goal of suzhi jiaoyu, in other quarters, suzhi is understood as a means towards an embodied resilience and self-denial resonant with the age-old ‘virtue’ of chiku (‘eating bitterness’) (Woronov 2009). Discipline and hardship ride on emotions of stoicism and patience. Once relayed and received, these emotions can disarm other initiatives aimed at producing the creative, affectively engaged young person. China’s universities, by way of example, tend to reinforce yingshi jiaoyu by relying on the annual gaokao entry examination as a screening and selection device. More than a discourse produced by global neoliberalism, suzhi jiaoyu is better understood as a hybridised discourse framed by a cultural nationalism, its legitimacy riding on Confucian humanism and a socialist desire to uplift the nation. Official calls to ‘unharden’ China’s education system by offering children rich sensory experiences thus unfolds unevenly. A similar ambivalence is discernible in Japan’s endeavours to use educational institutions to ‘produce’ global human resources (guro¯ baru jinzai) to further the ‘global engagements’ of Japanese corporations. Young Japanese are expected to develop an internationalised, Anglophone habitus, to be supplemented through an enthusiastic embrace of English medium instruction and interest in study abroad programmes. The ambivalence of

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young people towards these initiatives have presided over their subjectification as uchimuki wakamono, (insular youth), exemplified as disinterest in learning English and travelling overseas (Tsuneyoshi 2018; Burgess et al. 2010; Yonezawa 2014). Such simplistic positionings have been rejected by young Japanese who point to social and economic risks in embracing ‘global’ labour market practices. Many choose the securities afforded by labour market participation in Japan, where shared cultural and linguistic knowledge offer a degree of protection. Rather than underdeveloped political actors, the subject position of uchimuki wakamono demonstrates signs of an engaged political subjectivity marked by a refusal to be subjected to the hegemonies of global capitalism. These brief examples, some reinforced by our research findings, point to the importance of broadening understandings of East Asian desires for education, beyond commonly held views of seeking cultural capital for positional advantage. Using empirical data from our decade long study of transnational education, we argue that the notion of personhood represented in the rational, utility-seeking international student is partial and can obscure other possibilities and potentialities. The book thus complicates established assumptions that frame ‘Asian’ students as subjected to familial projects that are concerned largely with acquiring ‘flexible citizenship’ through the accumulation of repositories of cultural and symbolic capital (Ong 1999; Waters 2005; Brooks and Waters 2011; Mitchell 2003). While the family is an important influence, students, we found, were also influenced by their peers, teachers, friends and romantic partners in choosing study destinations. Some reported inspiring encounters with visiting academics that steered them to consider selecting an East Asian study destination. Others described themselves as simply being ‘too lazy’ to navigate the myriad processes to get to a reputable ‘Western’ university. And for others, influenced by the hardship narratives of friends and family members, as well as social media postings, studying in a ‘white majority’ setting was an unattractive proposition. Western countries were associated with risks such as racial hostility and isolation (Gao 2017). We explore these and other themes in detail in Chapter 4. Also in the vein of unsettling assumptions, this book interrogates the imaginaries held by officialdom in countries in East Asia. We examine the circulations of tropes such as ‘foreign talent’ and/or ‘global human resources’ enlisted by policymakers in their endeavours to consolidate

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knowledge and innovation-driven economies. As ‘global talent-in-themaking’, students are expected on graduation to address ‘national problems’ which include curtailing the regressive economics of ageing populations and providing a pool of readily deployable global human resources for multinationals. However, these anticipated positions can only be partially filled, as international students occupied multiple subject positions beyond that of skilled human capital. International students are also partners, (grand)daughters, (grand)sons, aunts and uncles who yearned to be reunited with their family (see Raghuram 2013). As aspiring professionals and entrepreneurs, some see opportunities in the host country or elsewhere—moving to another Asian destination or considering further study and employment in the ‘West’. Others struggle with their portrayals as language-deficit subjects lacking the appropriate repositories of host ‘national’ capital; they plan to return to their home countries on graduation. Our intention in unsettling assumptions about the role of international students in ‘Rising Asia’ is not to reinforce a narrative which reproduces an ‘epistemology of deficit’ or hopelessness in a region that is both diverse and complex. Nor do we wish to provide a triumphalist account of international student mobilities as an expression of a now superior East Asia. Rather, we respond to Raghuram et al.’s (2014) invitation to complicate understandings of Rising Asia. Drawing on postcolonial frameworks, they point to the need to pay attention to the disciplinary fields that seek to capture and make visible the idea of Asia’s ascent, including the indicators and benchmarks that are assembled to make the case for its pre-eminence. They emphasise the importance of attending to the different collectivities involved in making Asia visible, from research and transnational activism to developmentinspired projects that foreground trade and economic growth. Importantly, they call for researchers to attend to Asia’s spatialised history. That is, to consider the histories of multiple spaces within ‘Asia’—those enjoying esteem and success, those rendered insignificant as well as those occupying ‘middling’ in-between spaces. Taking the concept of spatialised history seriously means acknowledging East Asia as an imagined polysemic entity. Singapore’s inclusion in East Asia is a case in point. The city-state’s physical geography locates the city-state in Southeast Asia. However, the city-state’s numerically dominant Chinese heritage population has provided the basis for an emergent political rationality that seeks to mobilise this ethnocultural profile for ‘convenient’ strategic ends. A spatialised history of the present, thus renders visible the shifting politico-economic rationalities which Singapore

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has deployed strategically in response to changing geopolitical influences. Its official insertion into the ‘Confucian heritage’ cultural sphere occupied by Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan, is contested, a point we take up in Chapters 3 and 4 when we discuss the cultural politics that underwrite the recruitment of international students by globalising universities. For now, what we can say is that Singapore has mobilised a particular set of political rationalities to constitute an East Asian identity, however, the manner in which this official rationality is enacted in everyday life by Singaporeans is variegated and complex, not least in their interactions with international students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). East Asia, like Asia, is polysemous.

Situating Our Study: On Methodology and Reflexivity ….if much of reality is ephemeral and elusive, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we’re going to have to give up on simplicities. But one thing is sure: if we want to think about the messes of reality at all then we’re going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate, and to know in new ways. (Law 2004, 2)

As social science researchers, we are routinely confronted with questions concerning the validity and reliability of our findings. These questions, positivist in their origins, have been taken to task by researchers like Law (2004) who point to the need to consider the ‘messes of reality’ including the relations of power and knowledge through which researchers, the researched and the research process are entangled. Such discussions have extended to include better alignments between methods that are used and theories that inform these methods. In research inspired by poststructural thought, for example, the imaginary of the ‘real’ as something ‘out there’ has long been called into question. But other complexities also exist and these can be difficult to administer and make sense of. Intruding into the research encounter are the politics of representation. Interviewees are not pre-discursive subjects; their accounts of lived experiences are shaped by all kinds of discourses and mechanisms of power. They may or may not have a heightened awareness of the reach of these discourses into their thinking, their emotions and conduct, and

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their identities. Their viewpoints, captured at one point in time during the research interview, cannot be seen as capturing their ontological being with all of its ambiguity. The standard practice of the researcher offering an account of their positioning and ‘standpoint’ as a nod to reflexivity, methodological rigour and validity has also been questioned. Writing more than a quarter of century earlier, Donna Haraway introduced the term ‘diffraction’ to interrupt a subject-centred mode of reflexivity. For her, ‘connection, ‘embodiment’ and a ‘sense of responsibility’ were paramount (Haraway 1991). Today these concerns remain, amidst calls for ‘critical reflexivity’, ‘complex reflexivity’ and ‘radical reflexivity’. Feminist researchers have turned their gaze to institutional research processes, in which they are themselves embedded, while questioning matters of epistemology, ideology and politics. How does something come to be known, to be considered as having the status of truth? Which projects are more likely to be supported through the political economy of grant funding? As a truth-generating process, research raises questions about the extent to which interviewees are alert to the very contours of power and knowledge which shape their experiences. These questions confronted us throughout the research process from which we generated ‘data’—some 4000-odd survey responses and 373 interviews2 —completed as part of a project entitled ‘Globalizing Universities and International Student Mobilities’ (GUISM).3 Finally, there is the question of how to capture those feelings and affects of researchers and research participants that escape the cognitive register. We raise these methodological issues at the outset to explain the approach we have taken in writing this book. We wanted to produce a different, richer, account of student mobilities and their relation to East Asian governmentalities. While we acknowledge our privileged locations within existing regimes of power and knowledge, we have also tried to

2 We have used pseudonyms to present student and alumni interview data. However, senior university officials have been identified by their position. 3 The study, funded by Singapore’s Ministry of Education Tier 2 research grant R-111-000-

093-112, was conducted between 2009 and 2012 in nine universities across five countries: China (Renmin University and Sun Yat Sen University), Japan (Tokyo University, Osaka University and Asia Pacific University), Singapore (National University of Singapore) South Korea (Korea University and Seoul National) and Taiwan (National Taiwan University). Authors of this book are from the project team.

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write against them while being aware of the limits of a reflexivity that is little more than ‘self-effacing forms of privileged angst’ (Pillow 2015, 439). In Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012, 591) words, …reflexivity is not about plumbing the subjective depths and reconstructing intimate life experiences but of engaging in rigorous institutional analyses of the social and historical structures that condition one’s thinking and inner experiences.

In this, we follow in the steps of other researchers who have called for ‘responsibility’ and ‘connection’ with people and places ‘over there’, staking our reflexivity around ‘analytical hope’ (Clough cited by Pillow 2015, 439).

Researching Emotions The difficulty of capturing emotions rests on the fact that “…[emotions] do not float free from material realities” (Kenway and Fahey 2011, 188–189). For those from the ‘hard(er)’ social sciences, a step-by-step approach of Discourse Analysis or Conversation Analysis is the minimum requirement to ‘correctly’ identify the emotional tenor within talk, in order to ward off criticisms of impressionistic and subjective analysis. Here too is a practical difficulty as “…complicated empirical techniques that can be ‘verified’ in a ‘scientific sense’ run the risk of being so emotionally detached that they lack a deep sensitivity to emotional life” (Kenway and Fahey 2011, 189). Additionally, there is the issue of how we might know and represent the many unknowable elements within ‘entanglements’, and the ‘emergent’ in meaning, i.e. how to capture the ‘synchronous’—the manifold elements of meaning-making happening at the same time as the smooth delivery of interview talk (Pillow 2015). Other aspects of research interviews augment these complications of capturing emotions. For example, the gender and nationalities of researchers and interviewees, and the manner in which nonnative speakers engage with English to express their thoughts and feelings. East Asian universities, like their counterparts in the majority world, are not immune to global discourses that seek to instal English as the pre-eminent language of science, commerce and diplomacy. The cross-national character of our research team meant that interviews often began in English, even if they then proceeded into Chinese or Japanese to clarify meaning. We cannot discount the ‘languaging’ of our interviewees, and the potential

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impact on what they shared in the course of interviews. All we can say is that all interview accounts are exercises in meaning-making that involve the creative, ambiguous and the biographical (Weatherall 2015). Surveying International Students One component of our study (arguably positivist) involved a survey of international students. We developed and administered questionnaires which were framed around three temporalities: initial decisions to choose study destinations and universities, the collective experiences of being an international student, and post-study plans and trajectories. A quota sampling method with four variables was adopted: gender, type of education degree (postgraduate versus undergraduate), type of programme or major (science versus non-science programmes) and country of origin (top three source countries and the rest of the world).4 This method was intended to capture the characteristics of the international student body of each university. Survey data was positioned and read as complementing the qualitative methods, namely interviews with officials, student biographical interviews and interviews with university alumni. Interviewing Institutional Leaders The research team conducted some 82 interviews with university officials positioned at senior levels of leadership in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and China (details are listed in Table 1.1).5 A disproportionately male composition of university leaders in higher education leadership, both in the region and elsewhere, meant that most of our participants were male. As such we cannot discount the possibility that their perspectives on internationalisation were gendered. An additional and related matter concerns the use of English in some interviews raising the possibility that Englishspeaking university officials held more positive emotions towards globalising spatial strategies (Chen 2012). Because institutional leaders play a significant role of making the ‘global’ intelligible to national and institutional fields; they may interact with ‘global’ cultural and economic flows in

4 These aggregate statistics were obtained from websites and by request from the university. 5 Unless stated, the gender of university leaders can be assumed to be male.

Total

Singapore

Korea Taiwan

Korea

Japan Japan Japan

China

SYSU (Sun Yat Sun University) Renmin University Osaka University Tokyo University APU (Asia Pacific University) SNU (Seoul National University) Korea University NTU (National Taiwan University) NUS (National University of Singapore) 82

7

8 10

10

9 6 12

8

12

21

3

1 4

1

4 4 3

1

–

2

–

– –

–

1 – –

1

–

B Research Institute Directors

China

A Senior Management (Presidents, VPs, Provost, Senior Managers)

Institution

Country

No

Distribution of leadership roles of interviewed officials

Table 1.1

21

2

5 2

5

– 1 4

–

2

C Deans and Associate Deans of Schools and Faculties

21

–

2 1

2

2 1 3

2

8

D Student Affairs Managers, Dean of Students

17

2

– 3

2

2 – 2

4

2

E Student Leaders

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radically different ways from other academic staff (and presumably sections of the citizenry) by virtue of this positioning. Student Biographical Interviews The student narratives we report on in this book were drawn from 199 biographical interviews conducted with undergraduate and postgraduate international students enrolled in our sample universities in the cities of Taipei, Singapore, Beijing, Guangzhou, Osaka, Seoul and Tokyo. We canvassed students’ pre-university educational socialisation, including the places where they had studied, parental educational and occupational backgrounds, and earlier trajectories of mobilities. We also examined, how they went about choosing a study destination and ‘settling’ into life as an international student in a variety of spatial settings—universities, student residences, and the neighbourhoods of destination cities. We followed Valentine and Sadgrove’s (2014, 1982) methodology which foregrounds biographical interviews as a tool that recognises respondents as both agents and subjects. Biographical interviews provide the context for identifying ‘…what it is that individuals carry from their past into the moment of the encounter, [and] their reflective judgement of the meaning of encounters’. Student narrative accounts thus throw light on how they make sense of their social worlds including their (un)awareness of their positioning as raced, classed and gendered subjects. As with every method, biographical interviews have attracted their share of criticisms. Erasures, the inevitable slippages and contradictions, the possibility of narratives of embellishment and potential chasms between what is said and what people actually do are cited as methodological concerns (Valentine and Sadgrove 2014, 1182–1183). Furthermore, as we pointed out earlier in this chapter, interviews tend to be premised on the coherent, integrated, knowing subject. Stacey (2014, 35) takes this further arguing that ‘the idea that an openness to difference posits a self that is transparent, accessible and fully intelligible to ourselves and others’ and further, that ‘the world is graspable as a totality with which we can straightforwardly identify’. Notwithstanding these difficulties, there is a sufficiently strong argument for supporting biographical interviews for investigating the emotional dimensions of student lives as they grapple with social normativities of different kinds.

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Alumni Interviews In recognition of research that calls for engagement with multiple temporalities in the study of mobilities (see Raghuram 2013), our research extended to university alumni to capture their retrospective insights about international study. However, this endeavour presented challenges not least because our sample universities had not maintained alumni records, an understandably difficult task given the geographic mobility of graduates. Privacy concerns posed an additional barrier. The survey data revealed that some 80.4% of respondents identified as Asian and indicated an intention to work in an Asian country. Of the non-Asian students, 46.5% signalled an intention to work in Asia. We used this survey evidence to identify the following Asian cities as sites of interest: Bangkok, Delhi, Hanoi, Singapore, Shanghai and Taipei. Using both snowballing and institutional data-sets, a total of 92 alumni were subsequently interviewed.

Structure of the Book In this introductory first chapter, we have set the context, outlining our rationale for writing this book and the theoretical and methodological approaches that we will be taking in studying emotional encounters of mobile students. We have also described the empirical basis of the book. We highlighted our investment in a ‘politics of critique and care’ in approaching the topic of student mobilities, taking inspiration from several decades of postcolonial feminist research and governmentality studies. We end the chapter with a brief biographical account of our individual education-driven migrations and the emotional geographies of belonging we have navigated. Chapter 2 begins with a description of an emotion-driven discursive event, the 1997 ‘Asian’ Financial Crisis, and the region-wide policy of ‘knowledge-based’ economic development it inspired. We examine the materialities that give form and substance to the task of knowledge based development with a focus on the ‘world-class’ university in East Asia. Although represented in rational terms as ‘international best practices’, Chapter 2 reveals the ‘technologies of anxiety’ which have influenced the development of East Asian knowledge and innovation spaces. Chapter 3 continues with our examination of the emotional geographies of East Asian ‘knowledge spatialities’. We show that policies introduced to assemble globalising universities are framed by feelings within the body politic (emotional archive). Long before a policy materialises as text on

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an institutional website, various configurations of power and knowledge— discourses—are at work behind the scenes assembling meanings that will come to influence a policy’s implementation. The chapter then moves on to examine the accounts of university officials about what it takes to make East Asian universities ‘sticky places’ for mobile ideas, and mobile students and scholars. We highlight the connections between the different elements of university policy assemblages in each of the national settings as officials strive to lead their institutions towards ‘world-class’ reputations. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to international students, key agents in forming and sustaining East Asia’s knowledge spatialities. We examine their experiences of space and place as a basis to uncover sociabilities of emplacement and cosmopolitan sociabilities. Students’ emotions represent an important nodal point in the affective economies of emotions, when captured in dynamic encounters in settings such as laboratories, tutorials, lectures spaces, student residences and student associations. The chapter offers an analysis of the politics of belonging seen through the interplay of communication, friendship and learning encounters. Drawing on face-to-face and technology-mediated encounters, we show how emotions are mobilised to produce, and alternatively resist, cosmopolitan sociabilities, including those reconstructing ‘home’. Chapter 5 moves the scale upward to explore the productive tensions as students seek to articulate their personal projects of regionalism. The different ways in which Asia is articulated by transnational students confirms our thesis about the partiality of the rational, utility-seeking Asian student and the importance of unsettling this dominant subjectivity. Asia is imagined by students as an economic space, with employment and professional opportunities, and as an affective space. Drawing on genealogical insights, the chapter ends with an exploration of other expressions of region-making: precolonial and imperial regionalisms, and the antiracialism of pan-Asianism. We end with a critique of the competitive nationalisms fostered by Cold War geopolitics. Chapter 6, the concluding chapter, introduces critique and care as foundational principles for reimagining transnational education. It presents an ethical framework inspired by postcolonial and feminist concerns about an ethics of care to analyse prospects for regional sociabilities and solidarities. The chapter delves into the particularities of students’ everyday encounters to identify ‘critical attitudes’ in a context where states use a variety of emotionalisation strategies to govern mobile populations. Intended to stretch out a state’s capacity to govern from a distance, emotionalisation strategies

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have a mixed record, as we show through our empirical material where we examine the mediating conditions for affective nationalisms. Countries seek to enlist the emotions of students to service their geopolitical projects, calling on emotions of righteousness, anger and disappointment but their objectives are at best aspirational. Many students distance themselves from the ambitions of states by either claiming an apolitical subjectivity or by displaying a kind of ‘voluntary insubordination’, although some do seek to reproduce affective nationalisms by acting on themselves and/or on their peers. We conclude with an exploration of the possibilities of imagining Asia differently.

Conscripts into an Anglophone World An ethics of care demands a reflection on the self and a recognition of personal vulnerabilities (Askins and Blazek 2017; Blazek and WindramGeddes 2013; Chakraborty and Thambiah 2018). If ‘vulnerabilities, mean not only fragility and/or weakness but also openness, susceptibility, and receptiveness’ (Wiles cited by Hanrahan 2018, 3), then it is this openness that we seek to convey as we end with a biographical note. Although there are many differences between us, one set of experiences that binds us to the participants of our research is that we have all travelled for a ‘higher’ education. Unlike many of our participants in Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan, we have spent all, or most, of our educational and professional lives immersed in an Anglophone world into which we were ‘conscripted’ as children. A combination of forces, some too complex to untangle, contributed to this ‘subjectification’. Our Anglophone socialisations were shaped by a policy turn in a newly decolonising world to maintain English as an official language. This was a radical initiative in a region keen to establish distance—emotional—if not economic and political—from the departing colonial powers. English was also a family project. Our parents, whose childhoods corresponded with the privations of the war in Southeast Asia, were driven to aspire for an improved life. Their aspirations reflected the many educational losses and compromises imposed on their generation by the war and its aftermath. Governed by a ‘pragmatism’ that was alert to the ‘realities’ of authority shaped (still) by colonial domination, an English-dominated bilingual education was seen as important for ‘world’ connectivity, offering gains that were anticipated to exceed any losses. Speaking a language is an affective endeavour—it evokes feelings of belonging, if not identity. ‘You are what

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you speak and what you speak in is where you are’ (see Valentine et al. 2008, 385). As speakers of English, where were we heading? How did we identify? It is probably accurate to say that across the newly independent countries of Asia, there was an impatience not to be tangential in the global hierarchies emerging through Cold War animosities. Development, language, education, identity-making, all combined to shape the emotional archives of post-war Asia and its member states. For Brenda and Kong Chong, education migration took them as young adults to some of the most elite universities in the ‘Western’ world. Brenda moved first to Cambridge as a geography undergraduate and later to Oxford for her doctoral education. Funded by government and university scholarships, her move abroad to pursue an education went ‘beyond her wildest dreams’ and those of her working-class parents, imbuing a sense of gratitude and awe at life’s generosities. Kong Chong travelled to the University of Chicago for his doctoral education in urban sociology. A family migration, ostensibly for ‘the children’s education’, took Ravinder at around 13 years of age to Australia, just a few years after the official end of the White Australia policy, into a country struggling to come to terms with ‘difference’, ‘race’, colonial conquest and indigenous dispossession. For all of us, the affective practices associated with finding and establishing a place for ourselves in the socio-spatial settings we found ourselves has been emotionally enriching, but also burdensome. The privileges we have enjoyed bring responsibilities. Looking back, the kinds of socio-spatial relations we were inserted into, before, during and following on from our migration journeys, were strongly shaped by our (class-inflected) Anglophone language proficiencies. Wellpositioned by the couplets of power and knowledge that make the ‘global knowledge economy’, we have benefitted from our privileged positions as Anglophone speakers. New horizons have been made visible. A common language—English—has opened avenues to participate in different geographies, to mingle with other communities of practice. And in a world of ‘global Englishes’, the awkward disconnect between embodiment and language proficiency occasionally recedes, at least in globalising universities. Although we have enjoyed the instrumental benefits of English, these opportunities are not innocent, a point that is not given enough weight by Anglophone internationalisation as it marches on, oblivious to other aesthetic and social imaginations.

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Concluding Comments Emotions cannot be understood as private, individualised reactions to events. Emotions are constituted and embodied through socially located regimes of power and knowledge. They are shaped by historical legacies. Emotional regimes unfold in and through various institutional discourses such as regulations and legal norms, social conventions and religious injunctions as well as through familial practices. It is through their emotional encounters that international students feel in or out of place. Emotions direct us towards greater understandings of the conditions that enable the circulation and containment, of ideas, people and imaginaries (Sidhu et al. 2016). We started this chapter with a discussion of a polemical positioning of Asia vis-à-vis Europe, setting the context to question the discursive binaries responsible for perpetuating the superiority of ‘reason’ over feelings. The spatialisation of emotions to Asia portrays the region as a space for ‘negative’ emotional energies—stubbornly held animosities and hostilities and violent political agency. Taking our cue from the argument that nowhere is politics ‘…a down to earth business, governed by dry procedures and conducted by unemotional, rational, target-oriented personnel, following a rational logic’ (Frevert 2011, 6), we offer a different account of Asia, seen from the emotional encounters of international students. In this, we pay heed to Raghuram et al.’s (2009) timely invitation to draw together the conjoint themes of responsibility and care to address the complex and enduring relationalities of this postcolonial world we all inhabit.

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CHAPTER 2

Assembling East Asian Knowledge Spaces

Abstract This chapter outlines the investments in large-scale science and technology projects intended to drive economic growth and secure (geo)political legitimacy for East Asian states. We discuss the materialities that give form and substance to the idea of knowledge spaces including the institutional practices that are embraced in the name of building a knowledge-based economy. Although represented in rational terms as ‘international best practices’, we reveal the emotional dimensions of these policies and practices by reference to media reports and official commentary. In short, we show that ‘technologies of anxiety’ play an important role in the establishment of East Asian knowledge and innovation spaces. Keywords Research and Development · ‘Rising Asia’ · Knowledge spaces · ‘Region-making’ · ‘Technologies of anxiety’

Assembling Knowledge Spaces In this chapter, we describe the interventionist East Asian state’s attempts to assemble and govern ‘new knowledge spaces’ in and through the institution of the ‘world-class’ university. The first part of the chapter sketches the regional policy milieu in the aftermath of the so-called Asian Financial Crisis. We read the Crisis as a discursive-emotional ensemble, a © The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_2

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wrecking ball which prompted East Asian states to introduce measures to ‘future-proof’ their economies. Across the region, policies were embraced with the declared aim of facilitating high-end knowledge-driven innovation. Education institutions, particularly universities, were drawn into these ‘new’ developmental blueprints, encouraged, steered and disciplined towards remaking their institutional identities ‘global’ and ‘world class’. The remainder of the chapter examines four sets of materialities assembled to give form and impact to Asian knowledge spaces—Research & Development (R&D) expenditure, scholarships, patents and citations. We situate the discursive fashioning of these materialities in alignments of objects, artefacts and actions—‘technologies’—of both pride and anxiety—which steer various subjects towards the creation of a Rising Asia of knowledge economies and globalising ‘world class’ universities.

The Asian Financial Crisis and Regional Policy Atmospherics The Asian developmental state—its competitiveness and success in forging economic growth via export-oriented industrialisation—is the quintessential modernist success story. Hailed as manufacturing miracles, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore demonstrate strongly interventionist approaches to economic planning. In all these settings the state has, with varying capacities, intervened to ensure conditions for development. By expanding access to state-sponsored education and training, the developmental state broadened the entitlements and capabilities of their populations to participate in economic and social change (Sen 1999). Their status as ‘development’ exemplars, has propelled some to consider East Asia as a site of educational exemplarity (Komatsu and Rappleye 2019). A series of research-based studies faithfully produced a ‘virtuous cycle’ between an East Asian education and a successful economy. The developmental state, it was argued, had succeeded because educational achievement, enshrined by a culture of Confucianism, was closely articulated with the needs of the economy (Ashton et al. 2002; Gopinathan 2007; Park 2011; Komatsu and Rappleye 2019). These deliberations omitted considerations of vulnerability: impressive rates of economic growth would exempt Asia from the vulnerabilities inherent in global capitalism. Public policies to guarantee protective security (social safety nets) and civil and political freedoms were given little space in political discourse (Sen 1999). The fragility of

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this thesis—the Asian developmental state1 and its purportedly unique culture–education–economy nexus—would later be exposed, ripped asunder by the rash of reportage on the so-called Asian Financial Crisis. Scholarly debates on the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis have called attention to the widespread use by the international media of simplistic and stereotypical tropes of representation about an Asian ‘Other’ in media reportage. Without explicitly engaging with emotions and emotional regimes, Chang (2000), Higgott (1998), and Prakash (2001) have all drawn attention to the mobilisation of emotion discourse by AngloAmerican policy elites and market players to force institutional changes that would produce greater convergence with a neoclassically inclined AngloAmerican model of economic development. Much of the popular reporting of the Crisis blamed deep-rooted institutional deficiencies. Asian national institutions were portrayed as sources of moral hazards. Governments, business and industrial leaders, labour unions and citizens were collectively held responsible for the moral hazard of ‘crony capitalism’. Even though corruption, cronyism and other problematic sociopolitical practices were hardly confined to Asia, Asian values were seen by some critics as creating the conditions for the Crisis. Spatialising the crisis in Asia through descriptors such as ‘contagion’, produced an image of a diseased and highly infectious body that required ‘isolation’ and quarantine (Chang 2000; Higgott 1998). An old discursive reading of Asia re-emerged—the Miracle was over and the region was headed for the scrapheap of history. By locating moral hazards in a ‘culture’ apparently riven with ‘dishonesty and irresponsibility’, the extended histories of ‘manias, panics and crashes’ that animate lightly regulated finanscapes were carefully avoided. Speculative movements of capital continued amidst claims of calculable and manageable risks, producing

1 There is no definitional consensus on what is a developmental state (DS) Most definitions, called on are so broad that they capture the actions and strategies of nearly every modern nation-state at some period of time: “A DS is a state that plans, orchestrates or steers economic, political and societal strategies that are oriented towards catching up with a more advanced reference economy or associated economic growth dynamic” (Jessop 2016, 10). Other theorists have associated the DS with three sets of entangled forces, ‘institutional, relational and ideational’. First, a set of institutions with the capacity to implement a national strategy for economic growth. Second, a seamless web of relations between elites, namely, politicians, bureaucrats and ‘moneyed influences’ works towards the structuring of economic life. Third, ideational commitments to nationalism, to export-orientated trade (neo-mercantilism), to rapid industrialisation and the privileging of competitiveness (Stubbs 2009).

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other institutional failures including those responsible for the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Higgott 1998; Katzenstein and Nelson 2013). The politics of shaming Asia that followed the Crisis fostered a counterpolitics of resentment, which inspired alternative imaginaries and initiatives. There were calls for regional social learning in policy coordination, regional resistance to the institutional, relational and ideational forces characteristic of Anglo-American neoclassical models and regional responsibility (Higgott 1998). The Crisis, in short, raised the prospect of an ‘affective regionalism’, a point that we will return to later. As East Asian governments searched for alternative economic and political strategies to maintain competitiveness in the wake of the Crisis, the knowledge-based economy emerged as a new and globalising economic imaginary (Jessop 2016, 8–9). The attention given to knowledge-driven production was not new. As Hornidge (2011) points out, the Japanese economist Tadao Umesao coined the term joho shakai (information society) in the 1960s to describe Japan’s changing economy. In a similar vein, Nora and Minc wrote about the informatisation of French society in 1979, while Daniel Bell described the United States as a post-industrial society. A decade later, Castells (1996) wrote about the transformation of spatial orders by information and communication technologies, and the start of new forms of informational capitalism. The novelty of the knowledge economy was thus called into question almost immediately, with dispassionate commentators pointing to these and other long-standing debates concerning the manner in which tacit, embedded and codified knowledges shaped production, circulation and consumption of commodities. Every economy, they argued, could be considered a knowledge economy (Jessop 2016, 12). Buying into the rhetoric of the ‘new knowledge economy’ required the enactment of new discourses, refashioned policies and institutional reorganisations. A lexicon of new terms was put to work, giving shape and substance to the knowledgebased economy: Smart cities, knowledge ecosystems, creative economies, education hubs, entrepreneurial universities, learning societies and so on. Many core ideas and concepts that were long present in esoteric academic circles and in business schools, moved into policy circles through a ‘cultural circuit of capital’—a discursive apparatus of business schools, management consultants and celebrity gurus (Thrift and Olds 2005; Sum 2010). The post-Crisis period saw a host of policy platforms emerge to articulate higher education with the forces and imperatives of a globalising knowledge economy. Relatively unscathed by the 1997 Financial Crisis, China focused

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its higher education reforms on a broader plan to prepare all its national institutions for its membership of the international order, in particular, membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China’s internationalisation plans for higher education, found in the country’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform (2010–2020) reflects a ‘teleology of modernization’ with Chinese characteristics (Pieke and Barabantseva 2012). Chinese universities, through internationalisation strategies, were expected to do their bit for ‘a peace-loving, peace-seeking, harmonious China’ (see also, Barabantseva 2009). Singapore and Japan paid particular attention to international student recruitment and R&D in their plans to steer towards knowledge-driven innovation. Korea and Taiwan followed suit. Policy blueprints like Brain Korea and Brain Korea 21 Plus, Japan’s Global 30 and Top Global University and Basic Science and Technology Plans, Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse and its Research, Innovation and Enterprise Plan 2020, along with Taiwan’s numerous initiatives to become an ‘Asian Silicon Valley’ produced soothing emotions, a ‘structure of feeling’2 drawing inspiration and hope from impressive technoscientific sites, institutions and bodies of experts and expertise. Modernisation through Science and Technology had purportedly delivered spectacular gains in the past, and hope was invested once again in the capacity of ‘new’ knowledge economy projects to deliver further growth, with claims of ‘progress’ and stability. The ostentatious financing of knowledge economy projects by single countries prompted the dissemination of similar initiatives by others in the region, keen to avoid ‘missing out’ (Sidhu et al. 2011). The emotional archives of individual East Asian countries seemed to carry anxieties that stemmed from the stickiness of old racialising tropes about an underdeveloped Asian civilisation. Developing a counter-discourse to this powerful trope required institutional leaders to gather historical and contemporary imaginaries to reassure their citizens that Asia and Asians did more than imitate; they were capable innovators; they were leaders not laggards. The radical uncertainty and risk associated with all innovation activity was tempered by the reassuring presence of the East Asian technocratically inclined developmental state, which absorbed most of the financial risk. New ministries and portfolios were devoted to the knowledge economy, 2 We attribute this term to Raymond Williams (1977) who described structure of feeling as a ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time’.

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peopled by bureaucratic expertise and external expert advice, all assembled to generate confidence. Endorsements by powerful stakeholders—the World Bank, OECD, European Union, UNCTAD, and the Asian Development Bank, helped to consolidate this seemingly new truth regime— high quality internationally competitive research and higher education are prerequisites for long-term success and stability in a world of globalised knowledge economies. Bolstering this ensemble were other discourses about knowledgevaluing Confucian cultures (see Marginson 2011). Knowledge-based development was subsequently framed in an ‘unthreatening’ and ‘difficult to critique national narrative’ (Thrift and Olds 2005, 98). Other existential threats—climate change, widening inequality, food, air and water security—were either side-stepped, to be kept out of national priorities, or folded quietly into knowledge economy projects. Labour market reforms including policies promoting ‘flexible’ labour, workforce upgrading and the recruitment of ‘global talent’ were rationalised as necessary (Jessop 2016). The political currency enjoyed by narratives of East Asian developmentalism and Confucianism, once celebrated uncritically could have done with some interrogation. This did not occur, leaving Kim (2016, 1) to warn about the dangers of reproducing ‘[the] trap of a self-orientalising discourse’ which endorsed ethno-nationalist sentiments. In summary, global assemblages consisting of new economic imaginaries and calculative rationalities, management tropes, expertise and experts, were aligned to produce an appealing set of future visions. These generated particular emotions—pride in the possibilities of new kinds of development to maintain Asia’s stunning record of achievements; simultaneous anxiety about the possibilities of decline; resentment towards an implied inferiority about Asian values and ways and indignation at the manner in which decades of achievement were summarily dismissed by global policy and financial elites following the Financial Crisis.

Rising Asia: What Kind of Assemblage? With varying capacities, East Asian states have used policy instruments to actively intervene to ensure conditions for development, including recent moves to facilitate the transition to more ‘mature’ economies (Wong and Goh 2012; Soofi 2017). Table 2.1 outlines the percentage of a country’s R&D expenditures as a percentage of its gross domestic product. That is,

2

Table 2.1

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

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Research and Development expenditure (% of GDP), 1996–2015

China

Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)

Japan

Korea, Rep.

Singapore

0.563 0.639 0.647 0.749 0.89566 1.44251 1.66249 1.71007 1.77648 1.90711 1.99102 2.02106 2.06558

1.8 1.88 1.97 2.05 2.05 2.68 2.84 2.8 2.9 2.95 3.0 3.0 3.04

2.69 2.77 2.873 2.891 2.90407 3.33536 3.22811 3.1393 3.24747 3.20881 3.31612 3.3994 3.28363

2.243 2.286 2.147 2.063 2.18087 3.13619 3.29813 3.45314 3.75116 4.01812 4.14692 4.27746 4.22816

1.318 1.412 1.743 1.819 1.82395 2.62062 2.15815 2.01523 2.15275 2.00685 2.01219 2.19754 …

Source From database of World Development Indicators: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB. XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?end=2015&start=1996&view=chart For Taiwan (Chinese Taipei): https://www.statista.com/statistics/324700/taiwan-randd-spending-asgdp-share/ (for years 2008–2015); Taiwan Statistical Yearbook 2004 (for years 1996–2000)

the gross domestic expenditure carried out by domestic business enterprises, government, higher education institutes, private non-profit organisations, as well as R&D funds from abroad spent in that country (OECD Fact Book 2013). The Gross Domestic R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP indicator, provides a measure of the commitment of R&D spending in proportion to the size of a country’s economy. While East Asian economies have diversified to include the growth of service sectors, there continues to be a reliance on manufacturing, albeit higher-value manufacturing where R&D funding is seen as driving continued innovation and output. Industry looks to the state for support for proof of concept research, as company laboratories increasingly turn to shorter term applied research (Tassey 2014). East Asia today mirrors and exceeds the commitments to science, technology and medical research spending found in many ‘post-industrial’ Global North countries. Through budgets and policies, Asian states and universities have largely acquiesced to a truth regime which equates research investment with improved economic competitiveness (Ranga and Etzkowitz 2013; Gornig and Schiersch 2016). This is not surprising given the political, economic and emotional investments made in the name of

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‘catch up modernisation’. Contemporary investments of hope in the knowledge economy are enacted in and through this version of temporality. Examining patents and citations, Wong (2013) observed that the policy field in Japan had invested hope in the ‘next’ technology wave of biomedicine, organic and inorganic chemistry, biotechnology and nanotechnology. Public research institutes and universities continue to be steered to partner with industry actors. A 1-1 ratio of patents to papers in both Japan and Taiwan is offered as evidence that scientific production in both countries results in augmented industrial activity (Wong and Goh 2012). Singapore, on the other hand, stymied by its political history and size, continues to rely on multinational companies (MNCs) to drive knowledge-driven innovation, although the last two decades has seen its universities and public research institutes take up more R&D responsibilities (Wong and Goh 2012). China’s investments in R&D spending over the last decade match its geopolitical and economic aspirations to become a global leader vis-à-vis the United States (South China Morning Post, 6 November 2018). In the wake of a spate of trade-related crises, these R&D efforts are likely to intensify. Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based economic analyst, notes that: ‘Beijing is attaching much importance to science and technology, particularly given the ongoing trade disputes between the US and China and [America’s] restrictions [on] China’s [ hi-tech ] development’ (South China Morning Post, 9 August, 2018). Rising labour costs, which are regarded as part of production cost, have also been touted as a reason for the Chinese government’s emphasis on boosting innovation and productivity (Morrison 2013). Table 2.1 shows China’s threefold increase in terms of its R&D share of the GDP for the 20-year period from 1996 to 2015. South Korea is another big R&D spender, spurred by the prospect of being left behind economically in the wake of investments by its neighbours. Political speeches captured this unease. Invoking a metaphor of a nutcracker to capture the turbulence ahead, the then president of Korea, Park Geun-hye observed, ‘…Korea has achieved an astonishing growth, but [it] now finds itself in a nutcracker position, trapped between developed and developing nations. We now face a new risk, pressed by Japan’s rebounding competitiveness backed by its weak yen and China’s technological advancement’ (Korean Herald, 13 May 2016). A suite of Science and Technology policies were introduced to steer the country’s research universities to partner with Korean industry and contribute towards improved industrial outputs and new employment options (Eom and Lee 2010; Korean

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Times, 12 December 2017). Korean industries are sizeable contributors to R&D projects, often partnering with research universities. In 2014, 75% of all Korean R&D spending came from industry, which also explains why more of R&D spending goes to applied rather than basic research (Nature, 1 June 2016). Science and Technology academics in South Korea are in an enviable position, receiving some US$97,900 per scholar in 20133 from industry sources (Times Higher Education ‘World Academic Innovation Index’). South Korea’s leading conglomerates or chaebol, which rely on new technologies to capture and retain global market, are motivated to seek and consolidate partnerships with the country’s high performing research universities to support research in new and emerging fields such as autonomous driving, imaging and sensor technologies and the application of Artificial Intelligence for ‘smart’ manufacturing. A domestic network, featuring industrial conglomerates, money, university personnel, ambitions and reputations, has been assembled to further what are anticipated to be boundary-stretching practices. Foreign research institutions and universities including foreign MNCs, also participate in what are expected to be mutually beneficial alliances. South Korea thus crafts a representation and reality of ‘triple helix’ alliances between state-industry-university partners, driving the (ostensible) goal of strengthening national economic power, while consolidating the positions of its industrial giants. The nature of R&D funding ensures that a significant proportion of South Korean trained researchers will head to the country’s industrial sector. If they remain in academia they are likely to continue applied research. In contrast to China and South Korea, austerity measures in Japan have seen reduced R&D support by the state, with consequences for the research budgets and types of research universities conduct. Japan’s R&D share has been frozen at 3.2–3.3% since 2008 (see Table 2.1). The severity of the reductions in research funding to Japan’s national universities has been masked by policies of competitive funding (Japan Times, 5 June 2016). In this climate, a preference for ‘picking winners’ has emerged, seen in the funding of topical areas rather than more diverse, lesser known projects. Large applied grants have replaced basic research; timelines for projects have been shortened and fixed-term research positions have replaced more

3 Information retrieved from a 2013 Times Higher Education article entitled “East Asia leads the world in business funding” on 1 January 2018: https://www.timeshighereducation. com/news/east-asia-leads-the-world-in-business-funding/2006387.article.

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stable positions. Between 2007 and 2013, the employment of researchers under 40 years of age, doubled (Japan Times, 10 January 2018). Table 2.2 compares the R&D labour force in South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. In Asia, Japan has historically ranked at the top in terms of researchers per 1000 employed, climbing slightly from 9.2 in 1996 to 9.9–10 researchers in 2001, but stalling in the following years. By contrast, South Korea moved from 4.7 researchers per 1000 employed in 1996, overtaking Japan in 2003 and reaching a high of 13.8 in 2016. Growing worries over China and North Korea have since refocused Japanese priorities towards defence research (ANN Asia News Network, 1 December 2015). R&D spending by Taiwan mirrors the strategic approach taken by South Korea. Both the R&D share of GDP (Table 2.1) and researchers per 1000 employed (Table 2.2) have risen significantly, buoyed partly by state-funded Table 2.2

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Researchers per 1000 employed, 1996–2014

China (People’s Republic of)

Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)

Japan

Korea

Singapore

0.795 0.843 0.687 0.744 0.964 1.02 1.106 1.169 1.247 1.499 1.632 1.89 2.107 1.52 1.591 1.725 1.83 1.928 1.973 2.090 2.181

5.048 5.185 5.759 5.844 5.843 6.358 7.392 7.846 8.298 8.938 9.413 10.082 10.618 11.634 12.232 12.584 12.901 12.871 12.906 12.983 13.110

9.176 9.23 9.746 9.97 9.87 9.99 9.643 10.092 10.056 10.386 10.379 10.289 9.888 9.988 10.017 10.032 9.917 10.076 10.358 9.998 9.956

4.772 4.842 4.646 4.943 5.127 6.324 6.407 6.839 6.926 7.867 8.639 9.471 10.015 10.384 11.084 11.916 12.787 12.84 13.495 13.743 13.771

4.729 4.743 5.634 6.108 7.661 7.711 8.435 9.378 9.68 10.254 10.03 9.998 9.43 10.211 10.313 10.444 10.168 10.311 10.118 Missing Missing

Source OECD Science, Technology and R&D Statistics: Main Science and Technology Indicators

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technology programmes aimed at encouraging collaborations between universities and firms that ultimately deliver industry-relevant outputs. Newsfeeds from individual universities and scientific societies like the American Association for the Promotion of Science’ EurekAlert! detail collaborations between research universities such as National Tsing Hua and National Chiao Tung Universities and industry actors, with financial support provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). Korea leads in R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP (see Table 2.1). The examples of South Korean and Taiwanese firms suggest that domestic companies tend to fulfil a greater obligation to the nation. Longaccustomed to state financial support, national companies are all too aware of the reciprocal obligations and responsibilities that tie their destinies to that of the nation (Lee and Lee 2015). Emotional discourses are called on to drive and consolidate such alliances between industry and state institutions. Patriotic pride mingles with anxieties about the future, to foster economic nationalism. Any disadvantages arising from China’s newcomer status in R&D are rapidly contracting and its commitments, discussed earlier, may soon see it eclipse its East Asian neighbours. While Singapore’s growth in R&D is modest compared to China, South Korea and Taiwan,4 the political will of its technocratically inclined leadership will ensure continued funding of Science and Technology research (The Nation, 24 October 2018). Singapore has managed to maintain a viable manufacturing sector (unlike Hong Kong) because of continued innovations and technology transfers, despite the lure of low-cost labour elsewhere (Ho 2009; The Nation, 24 October 2018). However, industry contribution of R&D funds remains miniscule. The weak profiles of large Singapore firms reduce the scope and durability of research alliances between academia and industry. Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB), the main state body charged with securing foreign investment, has attempted to nurture research alliances between foreign companies and local research institutions to make up for the weak R&D profiles of Singapore firms. However, this strategy has risks, yielding mixed outcomes. Foreign partners can be flighty, as they respond to changing economic conditions and the promise of other seductions. A case in point is Novartis, a Swedish pharmaceutical multinational company which was invited by the Singapore state to start 4 Note that the two indicators, R&D expenditure share of GDP and researchers per 1000 employed are scaled to the size of the economy and the size of the labour market, enabling a ready comparison to countries of different sizes.

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an Institute for Tropical Disease in the city-state, enabled by contributions of S$200 million by both partners. After over a decade of operating in Singapore, Novartis moved to California. In an opinion piece in Singapore’s leading newspaper, Arnoud de Meyer, former President of the Singapore Management University, reflected on the impact of this departure on Singapore’s ambition to be an innovation hub. The moral of the story, according to de Meyer is that states like Singapore must choose niche areas and carefully craft their innovation ecosystems, building on what already exists. De Meyer also wrote about encouraging and harnessing the libidinal passions of its citizens to fuel innovation (Straits Times, 26 November 2016), declaring ‘It’s not simply about ticking the boxes’. Following the loss of a series of failed relationships with its partners, the state moved to foreground applied research over basic research. Singapore’s daily newspaper, the Straits Times reported that A*STAR, the city-state pre-eminent public research institute would henceforth support industry-relevant research. At the launch of Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise plan 2020, Singapore’s Prime Minister confirmed this shift to ‘capitalise on technology the country has a competitive advantage in, as well as build up capabilities in areas that are deemed to have a greater national need’.5 Among researchers, this dramatic policy shift signalled an end to the halcyon days when Singapore was a sticky place, a beacon for ‘world class’ blue sky science. Disappointment and anxiety flowed on from these policies, engulfing scientists, ‘If every five to ten years, things (funding regimes) change dramatically, then how can we do our work? We must not move from doing world-class science to merely servicing industry’ (Straits Times, 4 March 2018).

The Asian University and the Creation of Knowledge Spaces East Asian knowledge spatialities are resolutely focused on the STEM fields, with investments framed by a singular agenda of global competitiveness. National prosperity, the argument goes, hinges on producing STEM capabilities in the workforce to enable new market products. STEM dominates policy and institutional discourse and international students are an important ingredient in assembling these STEM knowledge spaces. 5 Quote retrieved from the website of Channel News Asia on 1 January 2018: https:// www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/govt-commits-s-19b-to-new-5-year-plan-for-ramp-d-initiatives-ri-8214052.

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As talent-in-the-making, international students are regarded by policymakers both in East Asia and the Global North as repositories of human capital, willing and able to steer STEM endeavours towards profitable market outcomes. Table 2.3 captures the comparative distribution of international students in Science and Engineering fields among the main host countries. The worldwide share of international students entering into science fields for East Asia remains miniscule compared to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, all hosting ten percent or more of globally mobile Science and Engineering students. In contrast, Japan has less than 5% world share while South Korea has a 1% share of international students of students studying in the fields of Science and Engineering.6 Thus, while Asia’s universities are responding to global higher education pressures of building reputation, strengthening research and increasing international student enrolment, they still lag behind when compared to major higher education markets in North America, Europe and Australia. Table 2.3 Share and distribution of tertiary international and foreign students in STEM-based disciplines, 2016 Countries

Australia Canada Germany Sweden United Kingdom United States Japan Korea

Natural science, math and statistics

Engineering, manufacturing and construction

Share of international and foreign students by field of education

Distribution of international and foreign students by field of education

Share of international and foreign students by field of education

Distribution of international and foreign students by field of education

17 15 7 17 13

5 12 8 14 11

26 19 11 9 29

13 20 29 26 15

10 2 1

13 2 4

12 4 1

17 19 16

Source http://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/ (Table B6.2) Report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2018_eag-2018-en#page231

6 The only exception is the Social Sciences where Japan has a 12% share.

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Proportionally, a greater number of international students in East Asia are in the STEM disciplines, a trend that could be read as implying growing confidence in East Asian Science and Technology expertise. Australia, for example, attracts science students, but recruits many more students into other fields of study. 51% of its international students are enrolled in the fields of business, administration and law, compared to 13% in engineering. In contrast Japan and South Korea have 19 and 16% of their international students concentrated in engineering, manufacturing and construction, respectively. The viability of knowledge spatialities rests on the specific and local circumstances that students encounter in their chosen study destinations, as we detail in subsequent chapters. For now, we point to the relatively higher satisfaction levels of STEM doctoral students, compared to those in the Humanities and Social Sciences from a combined survey sample for Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore (see Table 2.4).7 Better financing, better facilities for training and service learning and stronger networks were cited (Table 2.4). Some 83.2% of our sample STEM students reported having their expenses supported by a host or home country scholarship, compared to only 67.4% of HASS students, a sign of the priority these countries give to Science and Technology. Sam, a Korean postgraduate student at Osaka University highlighted how important scholarship funding was for his progress. …in my case, I deal with micro-organisms. So I have to check some my samples every 2 hours [over] 40 hours. I have to do all-night experiments. [The scholarship is] very good for me. If I didn’t get a scholarship, maybe I have to [get] a part-time job. [If] I did that, maybe I cannot concentrate [on] study.

Differences in satisfaction were also evident in the sphere of workintegrated learning experiences (Table 2.4). Henry, a Masters in Environmental Engineering graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS), exemplifies the opportunities afforded to STEM students like himself. He was involved in a process treatment project led by his supervisor

7 The sub-set of the study’s survey sample yielded 647 doctoral students, of which 415 were STEM students and 232 were HSS students. STEM disciplines include Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine, while HSS disciplines include, Social Sciences, Business, including Law and Architecture (reproduced from Ge and Ho 2018a).

1. University has cooperation with my home country (e.g. the exchange programme and/or dual-degree programme) 2. Scholarship (university, home country, host country) 3. University campus is large with good facilities 4. Learning resources (e.g. library, labs) 5. Opportunities for further learning (internships, exchange programmes, research experience, etc.)

Have stronger networks

625

444.40

2.12 3.83

430.38

367.17

462.96

Df

3.66

5.17

2.25

t

.000

.034

.000

.000

.025

p-value

2.75

3.23

2.96

83.21

2.18

STEM n = 415

Mean

2.49

3.11

2.69

67.40

2.01

HSS n = 232

Note Items 1, 3, 4, and 5 in this table are measured by a 4-point Likert scale with 1 as ‘least satisfied’ and 4 as ‘most satisfied’. Item 2 is reported percentage of financial support with 100% as a full mark

Are better placed

Have good facilities for training

Are better financed

Items

STEM vs. HSS doctoral students in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore)

Comparing with HSS students, STEM students: 4 themes

Table 2.4

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in partnership with a Government Linked Company, Sembawang Corporation. He returned to this company on graduating to work as a senior engineer, drawing on the social and institutional capital he had secured from that first workplace learning opportunity. Sembawang later sent him on a secondment to Eastman Chemicals, a US multinational, to extend his expertise. Henry traced his career trajectory to work-integrated learning, enabled by participating in a university-industry project. Industry funding supplemented by institutional grants, allowed students like Henry to extend their research training through international placements in overseas laboratories (see Item 5 in Table 2.4). Scholarships have sustained international mobilities from Asia for much of the twentieth century. At the start of twentieth century, American philanthropists such as Rockefeller, Luce, Ford, Carnegie, Wyatt and others established foundations to finance student mobility from the Global South to the United States. By casting the scholarship as a ‘gift’, for the purposes of nurturing bonds to foster alliances between countries, a complex set of rationales—commercial, political, intellectual, religious and ‘moral’ were brought together (Mauss cited by Heins et al. 2018). Gift-giving, suggest Heins et al. (2018), might be a tactic to ‘attenuate hostility and provide a way out of fear and indifference’. Early forms of gift-giving through educational aid have clearly had a lasting impact on the normative architecture of international education. Today the gift of the scholarship is used by leading East Asian states (and their multinationals) as part of a governmentality of goodwill albeit with uncertain outcomes and effects. As Mauss (1990) cautioned, in deeply asymmetrical contexts, gifts cannot be reciprocated, producing the likelihood of hostility and resentment. As gifts scholarships are expressions of ‘soft power’ and in the context of our study points to the possibilities of enhancing regional sociabilities. Their effects, though, are not always predictable. Gifts may yield the opposite to what was intended. Gift-giving by large technology companies in the form of scholarships is an example of how university–industry partnerships help consolidate the education–economy nexus. At Seoul National University, the Dean of Engineering described the importance of capturing the potential of international students, now reimagined as repositories of STEM-related human capital: Samsung, LG or Hyundai [all] support [international] graduate students… While they study, they get financial support [then] they go to work for the company after graduation….we need very high qualified engineers for our country’s economy and industry as well as in research. We [our industry and

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companies] compete with other world class competitors, so we have to train or educate very creative and competitive researchers and students. That’s very important.

Investments in STEM brought with them a host of positive emotions expressed in the language of satisfaction, whether in perceptions of university facilities and learning resources or access to finances (e.g. libraries, labs). Doung, a male Vietnamese doctoral engineering student studying at National Taiwan University had this to say: I found that… coming to NTU is much better, because here they have a lot, a lot [of] facilities. Even in my lab, and my professor has a lot equipment, very very expensive equipment.

The spatialisation of power, knowledge and privilege in STEM is assembled by and through state capital grants and industry donations, as confirmed by Seoul National University’s Dean of Engineering, ‘We have 13 institutions or research centres in our College of Engineering. Most of the buildings [which house the research centres] are company donated’. These emergent knowledge spaces reflect uneven investments of people, budgets, aspiration and hope. Science and Technology is fetishized to script a ‘new’ Rising Asia of knowledge economies, steering universities ever closer to industry actors, and potentially reshaping research training programmes to service the requirements of industry (Fuhrmann et al. 2011; Gibbs et al. 2015).

Prospects for Asian Regionalism? As the countries of ‘Rising Asia’ direct their attention to R&D as a key strategy to sustain their industrial economies, universities can be expected to sharpen their focus on producing highly skilled research labour, including international students, to assemble the architectures of innovation (Ge and Ho 2018a). Four region-making drivers can be identified in this political project to make a knowledge and innovation driven Asia. The first relates to the growing cross-national ties around foreign aid or ‘development assistance’ from the countries of ‘Rising Asia’ to the rest of the region. As STEM disciplines are often seen in terms of their contribution to economic development and progress, intergovernmental foreign aid often comes in the form of

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advanced graduate training. For example, as China develops into an economic and political power, its development aid to the rest of the world has become increasingly significant. Wu (2018, 88) points out that the education aid provided by China includes technical and vocational training to reduce poverty and improve livelihoods. As one of the earliest ‘developed’ nations in Asia, Japan has been one of the first countries to shift from being a recipient to a donor of education aid. Japanese research universities are enlisted to support efforts by the state to provide advanced training to recipient countries. The value of internationalisation of Japanese universities is seen by some academic staff as important for maintaining the country’s science and technology leadership regionally and globally (Yonezawa et al. 2009). China similarly offers scholarships to international students, who are expected to become ambassadors—‘bridges connecting China to the rest of the world’ (Wu 2018, 90). Intergovernmental education aid is thus an important expression of Asian region-making. As seen in Table 2.4, STEM doctoral students clearly benefit from such scholarships. A second type of region-making is facilitated by companies whose activities within the region open up regional imaginations in their employees. Dev, a former Indian employee of Samsung who subsequently enrolled in the Samsung Graduate Program at Seoul National University offers this explanation: I worked for Samsung (Electronics India) for three years before coming to Samsung Graduate Program at SNU… I looked at the ranking of SNU, it was [a]top, engineering school Moreover, there were other factors like, I had worked with Samsung, I knew a little [about] Korean culture. I had come to Korea before coming to the university itself… I had 2 business trips here for 3 months. So, I knew about the country, a little, and, I felt it was a good country to be in. And so it was an easy decision.

International student mobilities are thus enabled through joined-up networks between regionally dispersed industries and national universities. To the extent that the economic ties within the region continue to grow, companies with regional networks (as is the case with Samsung) will continue to require a workforce with the requisite education and training and cultural knowledges to fit their missions to operate effectively in the region. The third type of region-making is driven largely by universities. Kong (1995, 1525) points out that as universities position themselves

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as esteemed institutions they will also want to keep ‘good company, collaborating/networking with other institutions of quality’. This point is echoed by Sirat’s (2017, 77) observation that the flagship universities of ASEAN have tended to look beyond ASEAN to establish collaborations that enhance reputation. More specifically, in analysing the distribution of inter-university collaborations by region, Sirat (2017) shows that the 13 ASEAN flagship universities have more inter-university collaborative arrangements with East Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) than within ASEAN. A number of ASEAN universities have close to or more than 40% of their inter-university ties with East Asia: University of Malaya (46%), Chulalongkorn University (38.5%), Universitas Indonesia (44.5%), Hanoi University (44%), Royal University of Phnom Penh (42%), University of Philippines (40.9%) and Universiti Brunei Darussalam (42.7%). While Sirat (2017) does not mention specific reasons for this pattern, we suggest that a significant reason for these collaborations is support for ASEAN universities in terms of education and training aid by East Asian states. With a rising China, we expect China-ASEAN inter-university engagements to be strengthened further. Strong inter-university linkages between ASEAN and East Asian universities show a region that is stitched together by these networks and sponsored by political and economic rationales. However, ambiguities continue to prevail in these projects of regionmaking. Consider NUS’ inter-university alliances. Compared to its ASEAN peer, NUS has one of the lowest distribution of ties within ASEAN (7%), the lowest distribution of ties within East Asia (19%) but the highest in Europe (40.7%) and the United States (21.8%). We return to Kong’s (1995) and Sirat’s (2017) observation that the drive for reputational status, to ‘keep good company’ steers leading universities away from the region. The final expression of region-making activity is that formed by mobile students. In 2012/2013, Asian students made up 62.9% of all international students in China, 93.5% in Japan, and 93.3% for South Korea (Ge and Ho (2018b, 76 [Table 5.1]). These trends are sedimented by the ways students obtain information about study destinations and their regional employment prospects, post-graduation. Ho (2014, 173) using survey data from this study, found that 31% of NUS’ Southeast Asian students received information about NUS from their seniors/alumni compared to only 23% of non-Southeast Asian NUS students. Ho (2014, 175) found that 47.1% of NUS Southeast Asian students cited ‘good job prospects’ for choosing NUS, compared to only 27.5% among non-Southeast Asian NUS students. Enhanced career prospects and credential recognition interact in ways that

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to seek to construct East Asian degrees as portable and attractive, a finding that resonates with Liu-Farrer’s (2009, 198) and Ge and Ho’s (2018b, 83) research into East Asian education mobilities.

Conclusion Across ‘Rising Asia’ we see the connecting thread of a political-economic rationality which holds that future development can only proceed through knowledge-driven innovation. Elite East Asian research universities have been drawn into these discourses and funded to pursue the aspirations of entire nation-states. Despite the seeming coherence and determination with which countries have pursued their goal of knowledge-driven innovation, we are cautious about claiming the emergence of an Asian technoscientific supremacy. Innovation assemblages are necessarily precarious arrangements. Innovation is a volatile field with complex spatial and temporal dimensions. Innovation activities rest on multi-scalar interactions between discipline-specific communities of researchers in the public and corporate R&D sectors, between national governments and municipal authorities and between enterprises backed by venture capital and end users. Such social processes are inevitably gendered and rely on complex collaborations and practices of networking across multiple scales (Amin and Cohendet 2004; Osborne 2015; Walby 2011). Innovation needs time to establish the spatially stretched out social networks linking communities of scientists to mediators and end users of research products. Collectively, these complexities can pull against bureaucratic notions of productivity, efficiency and accountability deployed in governing research institutes and universities. These norms reduce the capacities of universities to build sustainable R&D networks. Missing from policy and institutional deliberations too, is the enduring colonial imaginary which limits East Asia’s emergent knowledge spaces to spaces of STEM expertise and innovation, with minimal engagement with the humanities and social sciences, a theme we pick up later in the book. In concluding, we draw attention to the shadowy presence of ‘technologies of anxiety’ in the formulations of knowledge economies, a theme we will revisit in the next chapter. Anxious emotions are mobilised by states and their industrial elites to deflect the generalised threat at being left behind by competitive regional neighbours. Worries about their declining economic power and geopolitical struggles infuse the ‘rational’ policy fields of science and technology. Hope is invested in new platforms and new projects

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of scientific modernisation; embodied in flows of international students and galaxies of research ‘stars’ recruited by some East Asian universities to fulfil these aspirations. When expectations are not fully realised, disappointment and despondency emerge. These contrasting emotions—hope and disappointment—tether to the bodies and minds of researchers as policies and budgets fluctuate between discovery-driven goals (basic science) and value-added projects (applied science). Chapter 3 complicates the hopeful invocations of a globalising discourse, positioning East Asian universities as a force of production in a ‘new’ knowledge economy. We explore how university officials ‘think, feel and enact’ the practices that are intended to make their institutions ‘sticky places’ for mobile ideas and mobile students.

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CHAPTER 3

Emotional Geographies of University Officialdom

Abstract This chapter offers an examination of East Asian ‘knowledge spatialities’, situating the policies of individuals countries in the region in the context of their emotional landscapes. We show that policies introduced to assemble globalising universities are framed by constellations of feelings stored in the body politic (emotional archive). Long before a policy materialises as text on an institutional website, various configurations of power and knowledge—discourses—are at work behind the scenes assembling meanings that will come to influence a policy’s implementation. We proceed to examine the 1997 Financial Crisis as an emotion-driven discursive event that set off a region-wide discourse of ‘knowledge-based’ economic development. The chapter then moves on to examine the accounts of university officials in ‘thinking, feeling and enacting’ the practices that make up globalising universities—what it takes to make East Asian universities ‘sticky places’ for mobile ideas, and mobile students and scholars. We highlight the constantly shifting connections between the different elements of university policy assemblages in each of the national settings as university officials strive to lead their institutions towards ‘world-class’ reputations. Keywords International education · World-class universities · Emotional archives · Asian Financial Crisis · Knowledge-based economies

© The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_3

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Emotions and the University The remaining chapters of the book focus on the affective textures of international education encounters in East Asian knowledge spaces. This chapter explores the emotional-discursive aspects of leading a university to become ‘global’, that is acquiring the spatial stretch of knowledge, reputation and influence. We examine the narrative accounts of university officials, key actors in building and consolidating the East Asian knowledge spatialities on which globalising universities are predicated. University strategic and operational plans are generally couched in unemotional terms. Our approach in this chapter breaks from this tradition. All policies, observe Webb and Gulson (2015), are ‘sensed, embodied and enacted’. More than vehicles of ideas, best practices, exemplars, and blueprints, policies are ‘affective ensembles’ through which ‘value’ is engineered, legitimated, and reproduced by appealing to feelings, some consciously residing in cognition and others concealed. Positioned at the interstices of policy elites and policy practitioners, institutional leaders must steer their institutions towards ‘reference societies’—sites of inspiration and emulation—from which they borrow and modify in their bid to make their universities global and globalising. University leaders are also responsible for engaging with neighbouring universities in the region. More often than not, these engagements are shaped by a powerful cultural politics, historically mediated, and articulated with contemporary economic realities. Read closely, university leaders’ accounts reveal the ontological insecurities of individual nation-states; these anxieties are captured conceptually as the ‘emotional archives’ of countries (Kenway and Fahey 2011). Put another way, aspirations to be ‘world class’ are governmental projects through which various artefacts and people—policies, budgets, techniques, received knowledges and emotions—are called on to achieve the ontological endpoint of the global university. University leaders play important roles in creating the conditions for students and scholars to be folded into emerging East Asian knowledge spaces. Their emotional labour makes possible the spatial strategies definitive of globalising universities. Emotions of desire, hope and optimism, shame, anger, fear, disappointment and resignation must be carefully shepherded to build cooperation if not acquiescence. Steering people to accept particular forms of thought, to develop affinities with certain knowledges, to enact institutional practices and self-fashion

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(‘technologies of the self’) to make up a ‘world class’ university identity is fraught. As discussed in Chapter 1, global knowledge spaces demand the careful alignment of a complex array of human and non-human agents, an endeavour underwritten by emotional regimes and registers (see Svašek and Skrbiš 2007; Appadurai 1996). Emotions fuel the movement of students and researchers, for example, to places they perceive to be knowledgerich and/or developmentally advanced, places that thus become sticky with hope. Similarly, marketing narratives can only be effective if they engage the emotions of students, researchers, their families and potential employers. Emotions play an important role in organising and administering the energies and resources of universities, enabling or limiting the ‘re-form’ of university policies and practices, whether through imposition and coercion, or through ‘borrowing’ and translation of ‘best practices’. Emotional discourses are a deciding force in determining which ideas stay local and peripheral and which circulate to acquire ‘global’ currency (ideoscapes). Playing on the shifting and perspectival qualities of ‘emotional landscapes’ and their entwinements with other forces, Kenway and Fahey (2011, 69) propose a new term, ‘emoscapes’. Emotions are bequeathed spatial and temporal qualities, they move across space and time, enveloping bodies, families, governments and entire nations. People are moved to feel about objects, materialities, selves and others, not only in the present but in the past and the future. Certain kinds of emotional discourses must be mobilised to enable universities that have traditionally framed their activities around the national scale make the case as to why they should globalise or internationalise. Citizens can hold complex emotions about their national institutions. In postcolonial contexts, the university may be a symbol of a hard-won political sovereignty. Alternatively, it may be regarded as the nation’s hope to attain the status becoming modern. ‘Having a national university [is] considered as much a hallmark of independence as having a flag, an anthem, a central bank and a currency’ (Mamdani 2018). An important task for university leaders is to generate the ‘right’ affective atmospheres such that their envisioned plans and strategies will be able to unfold from moment-to-moment, cutting through the myriad encounters within the micro-capillaries of their institutions. They must manage community emotions and perceptions and thus circumvent ‘social criticism’ that universities might be deserting their national responsibilities—whether in educating their own citizens or training up their nationals in research as they embark on internationalising.

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The textured practices that enable a university to lay claim to a national identity are entangled with emotions which operate at multiple scales. Some researchers highlight the need to delve into what they refer to as the ‘emotional archives’ of individual nation-states. These are described as, ‘ … the collection of feelings and susceptibilities stored over time in both the body politic and the national culture’ (Kenway and Fahey 2011, 190). The archive, they argue is a crucible for feelings which are associated with asymmetries of power, found both within and external to particular countries. The next few sections of the chapter examine the emotional discourses mobilised by the institutional leadership of East Asian universities as they embarked on the endeavour to construct their institutions as global.

Institutional Atmospherics Feeling Anxious In a prescient description of education and the geographies of anxieties it foster, Tsuneyoshi (2018, 19) observed: Education lies at the heart of what a society wants from its next generation of citizens. Education reform efforts often reflect the deep-seated fears and hopes of a society under change.

One of the most striking features of our encounters with senior university staff was the extent to which ‘globalisation’ was perceived in exogenous and epochal terms (‘the age of globalisation’). ‘Globalisation’ was felt as anxiety and a threat to the positioning of individual institutions in an emergent global order of universities and countries. Globalising missions and strategies were thus seen as necessary responses to a set of forces, ‘out there’. ‘Being open’, recruiting ‘global talent’, admitting international students, formulating global positioning strategies to be ‘world class’, a threefold increase in English medium programmes—these were the main initiatives called on in responding to ‘globalisation’. The emotional burdens of ‘globalisation’ were expressed largely in fear around the potential loss of language, and the unknown effects of cultural diversity on societies imagined as culturally and ethnically homogenous. These ontological insecurities presented most strongly among Japanese interviewees, but were also present in the accounts of university leadership in the Korean and Taiwanese institutions.

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Heightened Japanese anxiety is unsurprising given that public discourses in Japan have framed Japan’s position as a vanguard of a uniquely Asian modernity as under threat. A discourse of galapagosuka (literally translated to mean ‘becoming like the Galapagos Islands’) is used to both celebrate and castigate Japanese educational institutions, including its educators and students. Best understood as a polysemic construct, galapagosuka, carries a thread of exceptionalism, by celebrating Japan’s supposedly unique capabilities in innovation at the same time as it frames Japan’s cultural exceptionalism (nihonjinron), as a threatened object. The argument is that a collective insularity and a failure to ‘internationalise’ has rendered Japan and the Japanese powerless to take their multiple innovations forward and achieve global recognition (Breaden 2018; Tsuneyoshi 2018). In response, a slew of policies introduced over the past two decades attempted to steer universities towards the ‘wide and deep’ connectivities which were anticipated to accompany their (aspiring) status as global and world-class institutions. These were captured in policy platforms such as the Global 30 (2009–2014) Plan for 300,000 students by 2020, and Top Global University (2014–2023). Under the banner of kokusaika (internationalisation), policies, programmes and institutional spatial strategies were brought in to enable a ‘cosmopolitan opening up’ of Japan, its people and its institutions, as well as a ‘closing in’ to protect the country’s unique culture. Kokusaika was also proposed as a means of addressing Japan’s shrinking and ageing population by bringing in international students, seen as global human resources in the making. Japanese universities were also obliged to respond to the evolving geographies of production and investment by Japanese multinational corporations. This steady movement offshore of manufacturing operations produced associated desires for ‘global jinzai’, flows of talented foreigners to enable further innovation. At the same time, the utility of global jinzai rested on appropriate scaffolds of Japanese linguistic and cultural capital (Burgess et al. 2010; Breaden 2018; Hayashi and Negishi 2013; Ishikawa 2009; Yonezawa 2010). Embodying the right blend of ‘national’ cultural capital and generic global attributes would prove to be challenging for both domestic and international graduates. A further set of contradictions arose with the introduction of English medium programmes. These were anticipated to cosmopolitanise Japanese students, the target of arguably unfair criticism in the media and by politicians for alleged insularity (uchimuki shiko), while making Japanese universities more attractive to international students from the West/Global North. Being exposed to English medium instruction, however, meant

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that international students who aspired to work in a professional capacity in Japan stood to complete their degrees without the requisite Japanese language proficiency to overcome occupational barriers. The spatial strategies embraced by Japan’s leading universities including the two universities in our study—Tokyo University and Osaka University —show the extent to which they are entangled in these broader public and policy discourses. At stake was their domestic and international legitimacy (see Hatakenaka 2015; Ishikawa 2009; Yonezawa 2010). They were propelled to engage publicly with the kokusaika policy ensemble to retain their legitimacy: Osaka University must be internationalized because our university is one of the eminent [research] universities in Japan. So, we have to be at [forefront] of research. (VP, International Affairs Board, Osaka University)

‘World class’ rankings were used strategically to consolidate and embellish institutional reputations as required; they were not invested with belief or deep emotion. Close communication was maintained by the university with the organisations that run both the QS and Times Higher Education rankings, to ensure that all parties had the requisite data. It seemed that everyone knew what part to play. In the words of one official, ‘My basic policy is if [the rankings] put our university below 100, I wouldn’t use it …’ In these reputational games, international students and scholars played a part, seen as potential resources to improve university research performance and international profile. Paradoxically then, scaling up by globalising was seen as a means of retaining national visibility and commandeering respect, affirmation and support from the bureaucracies of the State, including Japan’s powerful Ministry of International Trade and the Ministry of Education. The policy context in Japan was one of serious underfunding and successive governments were intent on reining in Japan’s sizeable public debt. In the face of successive cuts to their operational budgets—1% each year—university leaders expressed a dual set of emotions, compliance as responsible leaders and powerlessness to stem austerity measures. Corporatisation of public universities across East Asia had been promoted to ‘free’ university staff from the strictures of being part of the civil service, allowing academics to craft dispositions that would steer them towards new roles as knowledge entrepreneurs. However, the texture of talk by leaders suggested that this

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ambitious reform was mired in material, discursive and relational struggles involving the interests of the state, the institution and broader society: [We] get [limited] competitive research funds [and] donations. Our tuition [fees] are virtually controlled by the government and by international standards are much higher. Technically, the government says we can increase our tuition but if we increase [fee revenue] they will reduce the operational budget. [This] could [also] damage our students’ families. We try very hard to persuade our alumni and society in general to give generous contributions [but that is] still limited. So we continue to depend on the government. (VP International Affairs, Tokyo University)

Framed by a social discourse that privileges responsible collective behaviour, this response—a wistful recognition of ‘dependency’ on the state—brings with it an emotion of vulnerability. University Presidents and their leadership team face the unattractive possibility of leading a university that could slip down the international hierarchy. Attempts to centralise and unify policies and approaches were challenged, with departments and academic staff seen exercising agency in translating internationalisation agendas. Institutional leaders worried about the unevenness of internationalisation policies. Given their vulnerability, how might these two research universities embrace the ambitious policy platforms devised in the name of internationalisation (kokusaika) in response to ‘globalisation’ (gurobaruka) and galapagosuka? Aligning the multiple objectives with the requisite material, discursive and emotional resources would have been challenging for any national sector, let alone one facing austerity. Staff were galvanised towards action in the name of national and institutional good through a discourse of ‘crisis’. This used strategic mobilisation of emotions of anxiety and insecurity, along with patriotic love of country. They were required to accept the state’s investment in foreign bodies as an important nation-building measure. But the policy platform in a recession-affected Japan elicited arguably ‘negative’ emotions of resentment at this wholesale investment in foreign students and foreign researchers ahead of national citizens (Breaden and Goodman 2014; Ishikawa 2011). At Seoul National University (SNU), anxiety was also present but in fainter traces than the two Japanese universities: ‘How can we get ourselves globalised without losing our national ethnic identity?’, mused the Vice President of International Affairs. As in Japan, tensions existed between

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addressing the needs of broader Korean society and the contemporary pull of getting a foothold in the world-class rankings. Seoul had embarked on refashioning itself as a ‘world class’ institutions, through ‘pragmatic’ strategies such as teaching and publishing in English, publishing in the ‘right’ journals, maintaining research data management architectures and communicating with the publishers of various university rankings. Here too, was a domestic imperative, to stay ahead of the ‘local’ competition—Korea and Yonsei Universities (Collins and Park 2016). Anxiety also pivoted around ‘catching up’ with other world-class universities. Senior staff spoke openly of the challenges their country had overcome, including war, colonialism, authoritarian rule and the 1997 Financial Crisis. [We] have 60 years of history, but given the Korean War and other [influences] this university functioned like a real university, [for] only 15, 20 years. We’re weak [according] to Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings. We prefer the Times ranking.

Tenacity and a stubborn determinism were called on to erase the disadvantages arising from the seismic cumulative effects of colonisation, Cold War tensions, dictatorships, coups and widespread national poverty. A cautious optimism percolated through the upper ranks of officialdom: the university and Korean society had the capabilities to direct competitive anxiety into becoming world-class. International students and scholars were seen as important elements in achieving this. But doubts were also shared that the commitment and calibre of international students choosing Seoul, paled in significance compared to the work ethic Korean students demonstrated. The eminent Korean-born economist and SNU alumnus Chang HaJoon (2012) offers an alternative set of observations of Korean higher education. The extreme diligence of Korean students, he argued, could be attributed to a ‘fear factor’, shaped by an unforgiving labour market and poor social safety nets. ‘Educational zeal’ was expressed in long study hours and enormous mental stress, all of which compromised productivity. Korean university students were also being driven away from contemplating careers concerned with innovation because of labour market insecurity. Chang concluded, ‘If this trend continues, the country’s ability to innovate will be damaged’. Anxiety and an underlying ontological insecurity were also palpable in the accounts of Taiwanese university leaders, although different from those of Japan and Korea. Before providing discussing this insecurity, we offer a

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brief overview of Taiwan’s internationalisation project, its roots in a nascent affective regionalism and its future prospects. Taiwan has two categories of international students: Those of Chinese ancestry, born and raised overseas, are known as ‘Overseas Chinese Students’ and are managed differently from the second category, ‘foreign students’. The reasons why a different policy architecture is used to administer both groups of students are historical and are shaped by Taiwan’s transterritorial political culture. Beginning in 1909 with the Nationality Law in the dying days of the Imperial Chinese government, the principle of jus sanguinis (‘right of blood’) has been used to steer the overseas Chinese towards a primordial ethnic identity, for convenient political ends (Lien and Chen 2013). Education plays an important role in the governance of the spatially dispersed Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora (Ma 2014). Known variously as qiaoshen (chiaosheng ) or hua-chiao, the Overseas Chinese (excluding those from Macau, Hong Kong and mainland China) were given political representation in the legislature and favoured status for university admissions by successive governments, led by the Kuomintang party. With Taiwan’s democratisation and subsequent policies of ‘Taiwanization’, the political appeal and influence of the qiaoshen/huaqiao decreased briefly. Two iterations of a policy, known as Southbound (nanxiang ) and New Southbound1 are anticipated to further consolidate this group’s importance. At the time of our study, close to 50% of enrolled international students at National Taiwan University (NTU) were qiaoshen, and were recognised as important players in Taiwan’s geopolitical aspirations. Describing the Overseas Chinese as a community of fate, the Vice President of NTU invoked patriotism, care and responsibility towards this group: We now have a lot huaqiao (overseas Chinese), we have to take special care of [them]. Their economic situation not good [so] we have to give them part time work and study opportunities. We have [a shared] fate. This is what is powerful about the Chinese people and the overseas Chinese association. 1 The New Southbound platform has specified a number of educational initiatives, anticipated to increase people-to-people contact between Taiwan and its new allies. Included are initiatives to increase by 20% the recruitment into higher and vocational education of international students from Southeast and South Asia. Special attention is also being given to supporting the educational needs of the children of migrants who choose to move to Taiwan. Bilateral agreements to enable reciprocal investment rights and employment rights between Taiwan and target countries have also been underway.

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Overall, NTU’s international student recruitment policy was driven by a duty to minimise Taiwan’s political and intellectual marginalisation in the face of multiple attempts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to delegitimise its position as a sovereign state. Internationalisation was a defensive strategy, as made clear by the Vice President of the National Taiwan University: ‘If we are more internationalized, Taiwan will become a stronger power and [will be able to] protect itself. We [will] have more international friends to say good things for us’. A discourse of mutuality with others, especially with developing countries in the Global South, became both an important foreign policy and institutional goal to be folded into Taiwanese university strategy. NTU had the responsibility to contribute towards addressing ‘humanity’s development problems’. This was part of its role in supporting Taiwan’s place as a responsible member in the international system of nation-states. Like their Japanese and Korean counterparts, NTU leaders were confronted with managing the delicate balancing act of supporting policies and initiatives that served the citizenry as well as international students, as this senior female administrator at NTU noted: Internationalisation, [should involve] train[ing] our own kids, not only train[ing] international students with a very vague hope that these students will become the prime minister of their very poor, small countries and be very friendly with Taiwan.

This diplomatic policy, which rested on a ‘very vague hope’ of building political capital with small states, elicited a disparaging dismissal. More important was the task of consolidating Taiwan’s role in globalising knowledge networks through interactions with leading universities in the Global North. But these relations were also proving difficult to sustain, despite decades of engagement in the wake of growing pressure from the PRC government. Anxiety was also palpable at Renmin [The People’s] University in the PRC. Like all of China’s universities, the university had endured political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution and it was closed from 1966 to 1978. Most universities reopened in 1970 but Renmin remained closed for a further eight years (Chang 1974). This history was etched in the memories of academic staff at Renmin, who went to great pains to describe the risks associated with being on the wrong side of politics. Renmin’s exceptionally long exile, we were told, was attributed to its associations with Liu Shaoqi,

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a senior official once named as a successor to Mao Zedong who, along with Deng Xiao-Peng, was accused of being a ‘capitalist roader’. Senior staff pointed out that Mao had been a frequent visitor to Renmin until the Cultural Revolution. Beneath the surface of their arguably optimistic and forward-thinking vision, was the worry that the hyper-adversarial and violent power struggles of the past might once again erupt and as a Social Sciences and Humanities university they would once again be vulnerable to a change in the political climate. At Renmin too, aspirations to become a globalising university were portrayed as a defensive strategy, seen as crucial for securing and retaining the university’s domestic standing and legitimacy: ‘if we do not internationalise, we will fall behind’. Goals of national and international visibility were linked and Renmin was keen to retain its elite-making role in China, ‘[developing] national leaders for the [Communist] Party’ as acknowledged by the Deputy Director of Academic Affairs: Under the environment of globalization we have a lot of challenges. Our top high school students may be recruited by other universities in the USA or UK. If we do not improve ourselves, [we] may be left behind.

Again, there was palpable anxiety about achieving a balance between internationalisation agendas and their responsibility to care for and educate ‘locals’. University staff faced criticisms from students and parents about the relaxed admissions criteria for international students in relation to their Chinese language and mathematical literacies. Similar to Rhoads et al. (2014), we found that the issue of recruiting foreign academic staff on higher wages and conditions was a point of contention. The reasons offered hinted at emotional dissonances: First, there were concerns that given the importance of situated knowledge in the Social Sciences, Chinese academics were better placed to conduct research and maintaining the research–teaching nexus. There was also the matter of Chinese language proficiency and communicative competence for teaching. Scholarly and intellectual binaries emerged between ‘locals’ with situated dispositions and knowledges and the perceived value of foreign cosmopolitans. Whether these and other tensions would be productive, depended on how senior university staff navigated the University’s and China’s desire to recruit and retain floating cosmopolitan talent while investing and nurturing local talent.

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Feelings of Excitement and Optimism The last decade has witnessed the celebration of Asian universities, seen now as driving the global reconstitution of global knowledge networks. Titles such as ‘Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower’ by Bhandari and Lefébure (2015) speak to this optimism: …the heritage of colonialism has not prevented Asian governments and institutions from experimenting with alternative and perhaps more authentic approaches to higher education development. Hence it is possible that we are seeing the emergence of a unique Asian model of higher education that selectively borrows from the West yet freely draws upon its solid academic traditions. (ix)

Can infrastructure exert power on our emotions such that we are propelled to sense certain projects favourably? Michael Mann (1984) and others have argued that infrastructural power is important if understudied variable in governance, sustaining both liberal democratic and authoritarian political cultures. Infrastructures interact with people, communities and natural environments, fostering hope and conviction (Cross 2015; Brooks and Waters 2018). University laboratories, libraries, residential halls and leisure and entertainment precincts, can produce emotions such as awe and admiration, desire, hope and optimism. These agents of infrastructural power capture and territorialise the circulating flows of people and ideas required to make a ‘global’ university. At NUS, the built environment plays an important role in conveying the weight of seriousness with which the state has gone about remaking Singapore into an innovative, knowledge and education hub—‘Intelligent Island’ and ‘Smart City’. The University is an impressive user and producer of symbols and imageries to stir the senses and draw out feelings of the immanence of Rising Asia, an Asia going somewhere and fast. The many youthful bodies that cluster in its campus spaces—at bus stops and cafeterias and in the quiet reflective spaces of libraries—point to a global future that cannot be contemplated without Asia. Buses ferrying students and staff from point to point within the campus precincts carry advertisements, announcing the university’s arrival as a ‘Global Knowledge Enterprise’. At the newly constructed University Town, Wifi zones, screens and clocks depicting time zones across the world are a reminder of this tiny island’s investment in fostering connectivity. Other materialities,

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arguably more banal but equally important speak to the university’s international connections. Food outlets are purposefully selected to cater to the dietary needs of people of different cultures and religious persuasions (Grove 2018). Complementing the artefacts that speak to stretched-out connections, are place-anchoring reminders of the tropical environment. Water dispensing units, placed in corridors and passageways, a reminder to out-of place foreign bodies to keep hydrated to ward off the risk of ‘sun stroke’. Among the senior ranks of NUS’s leadership, there was a persistent and driving emotion of excitement and optimism as the university set about the task of (re)making itself into a global university. Relationships with the state were felt to be very positive: the ruling government was described as ‘far sighted’ and ‘strategic’. Policymaking was understood to be ‘rational’ and ‘pragmatic’. Rendering boundaries and borders permeable—an important dimension of the university’s transformation—was enabled by its unique history of ‘openness’. Thus, the university’s vision of ‘bringing the world to NUS and bringing NUS to the world’ was eased by access to funds and state support. Tense relations between the university and state bureaucracies and Ministers, a feature of other national contexts, were notably absent. Instead the President of NUS expressed gratitude for the state’s vision in driving transformation, observing, that ‘we are very fortunate’; ‘we’re in a sense, executors but also the beneficiaries of [policies]’. This support enabled his leadership team to build an institution that they perceived as ‘really global, not just in rhetoric but in actual substance’. But going global also meant respecting the national needs as defined by the state. A policy compact and accompanying performance agreement between NUS and the Ministry of Education set out parameters and indices for domestic versus international student recruitment. Recruitment targets were articulated with other policy aspirations relating to labour force planning (‘manpower planning’) and population renewal: We’re very, very substantially funded from the government. Still. So basically the government is saying, ‘these are the boundaries, and there you go’. For example, NUS cannot just say ‘hey, you can get much better students if you could go foreign all the way, and by the way you can also make money out of it’.

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There was confidence in the vision of the government and in using various audit techniques such as benchmarking and performance management towards ends that would suit the institution and the country. For the university’s President, the alignment of interests between the state and the institution was paramount: ‘Universities had to create value for their funders’. The President conceded that institutional salaries, the university’s positioning on university rankings and the resources that he had at his disposal were the envy of his peers in other regional universities, but argued persuasively that these were not in themselves sufficient to build a global university. University strategy was framed in a seemingly ‘neutral’ corporate terminology. A global university strategy demanded attention to the ‘category generics’ of ‘talent, governance and finance’. But a powerful alchemy of something else was also required, namely ‘Differentiation’, ‘Value-propositions’, ‘Partnerships’, ‘Networking’ and ‘Branding’. In a speech titled, ‘Developing a Stellar University’ in London to a collection of higher education leaders, President Tan (2016) observed, ‘We are a national university and we are a global university centred in Asia’. Graduates were expected to develop ‘a deep understanding of Asia and the world’. His global imaginary was one ‘where Asia and the West will be equally dominant’. Here is an erasure of other spatialities outside ‘Asia and the West’, silently instructive of the geographical coordinates used to map ‘globalisation’. To successfully assemble a global university, new ideas, policies and strategies must ‘stick’ onto the many different kinds of people that work in the university. Certain emotions must be mobilised, including desire and trust, curiosity and a sense of adventure to forge something new. The globalising university was also framed by anxiety, evident in relentless attempts to keep up, to find new value-propositions, to innovate. Trust was an important emotion, including trust that the state’s and the university’s best interests are aligned. Other enlisted emotions included gratitude at the unlimited opportunities to reinvent themselves into globally engaged researchers with unlimited potentialities. To this mix was added the management of trepidation, particularly trepidation at being benchmarked against ‘global’ standards drawn from radically different higher education models. Pride was also palpable, as NUS had in the space of a little more than a decade managed to reinvent itself so successfully that it now moved in the company of older, ‘prestigious’ universities. Significant too was a feeling of thankfulness that Singapore’s political landscape conferred major advantages to

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NUS in the stakes to become a ‘global university’. Compared to its regional peers, NUS, like the city-state, was unencumbered by messy emotions of nostalgia: …, [countries with] deep history, civilisation, culture, and a certain homogeneity of their people and practices, [China, Korea and Japan] have much greater weight of tradition, which you have to shed [compared to NUS]

Confidence and trust in the government was present among other senior staff: They (the government) allow us the freedom and the autonomy to venture and to explore. They condone or forgive some of the mistakes that we make. That by itself will propel us [onto] the global stage. The Business School is ranked by the Financial Times as a top 30 Business School in the world. (Senior management, Business School)

Our interviewees were keen to learn from the exemplary and the antithetical. Bemoaning his Australian alma mater’s declining reputation, this participant noted: Australian universities have become a revenue generating source. We should never go down that road because, once we go down that road, [the] reputation that you built over the years, get[s] washed away. Some of the best universities in Australia are right now basically marginalised because of the composition of their students.

Less salient but co-present with the buoyant, bold and exciting and optimistic emotions were other feelings. There were hints of exhaustion: ‘We are running as fast as we can. We are already running very very fast’. Enormous changes squeezed into a compressed time frame saw NUS go from a national teaching-focused institution into a ‘world class’, researchintensive, global university. This exacted a toll on the bodies and emotions of its staff. As agents in facilitating the spatial stretch required to make their universities simultaneously ‘global’ and ‘regional’, they travelled extensively to present at key conferences, lead ambitious research projects and promote Singapore as a destination for students and scholars. Busy lives demanded compromises in relation to responsibilities that confront all multiply positioned subjects. Caring responsibilities for children or the elderly had to be carefully navigated.

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Singapore evoked a mixture of contradictory feelings in the region, ranging from dismissal, to envy, to admiration. Here, a senior member of the leadership team at Taiwan’s NTU ruefully observes the challenges and contradictions he is expected to mediate in comparison to his counterparts in Singapore: [Singapore] is like an entrepreneur[ial] company. They say university [has to] change then [it] changes! Taiwan is special and strange [because] the government emphasize[s] social justice/fairness [but] they [also] want competition but then don’t give freedom [to compete].

This arguably positive impression of NUS extends legitimacy to the policies it has adopted to become a global university. Legitimacy is rationalised through practices and world-class indicators, but legitimacy is also produced affectively. NUS is a generous host, sponsoring large groups of regional visitors and those from further afar. Scholars, administrators and students as well as politicians feel the university’s hospitality. These experiences, resonant with pleasure and admiration, mingle with more ambiguous feelings—anxiety and perhaps envy and resentment at the sight of handsome, well-appointed buildings, well-resourced libraries, war chests of research funds and state-of-the-art science labs. By hosting these visits, NUS plays a diplomatic role, aligning people, material objects and aspirations through which the city-state makes and remakes its international relations. These encounters are important in that they enable a policy cycle of diffusion, taking the ‘Singapore exemplar’ to other spatial and institutional contexts. A sunny optimism was also present in some divisions of Seoul National University. The Asian Financial Crisis was seen as offering a set of opportunities to loosen the holds of the state and to reconfigure academic identity from that of a civil servant to knowledge entrepreneur. Internationalisation was understood as the spatial stretch of prestige and reputation, gained through its research reputation. This required the university to recruit ‘talent’ from outside Korea and to invest in good educational and support facilities. An important difference from NUS was the emotional distance from the state. As demonstrated in the following quote from the Vice President of International Affairs, corporate strategy was seen as the means to autonomy, away from the stranglehold of the state:

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We try to be corporatised [and] not rely on government. So we want to make money; we have many copyrights and patents to be commercialised. We need to have more autonomy to go forth with more, how can I say, velocity?

For some at Seoul National, the old, university culture that predated large-scale institutional reforms following the Crisis, was controlling and limiting. Academic staff spoke of cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, travel restrictions and complex rules concerning the purchase of any kind of equipment. The recruitment of international students was an important part of the university’s identity, although practices of recruitment were uneven and as a result laced with different emotions. Engineering schools were seen as the stellar performers in all things international, having successfully recruited and trained international students from Southeast Asia as far back as the 1980s. This imperative was both exogenous and endogenous. Under the prime ministership of Mahathir Mohammad, a ‘Look East’ policy instituted in 1981 saw Malaysian government-sponsored students enrol to study in Korean and Japanese universities. Both countries were promoted as development exemplars, their values, work ethics and technological know-how seen as worthy of emulation. These policy initiatives redirected desire and hope from the West to Asia. Malaysia’s Look East policy was also framed by anger, following Britain’s 1979 decision to introduce fees for international students enrolling in British universities. Look East was introduced at the same time as a policy narrative ‘Buy British Last’ (Furuoka 2007, 507; Khoo 1995, 55). Links between SNU’s Engineering schools and large Korean engineering multinationals were noted to have played a role in the discipline’s early internationalisation. These firms, like their Japanese counterparts, were undertaking large infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia. Students from developing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka, saw in Korea a study destination that offered a quality higher education in the technosciences. This profile of an export-oriented industrialised country with a very strong manufacturing base drew interest from Asia’s international students. In contrast, students from ‘Western’ countries who were largely participating in exchange programmes, were interested in Korean culture, although interest in studying Business was also growing. The dynamism of Engineering schools as vanguards in international student and scholar recruitment was largely attributed to leadership by individuals with a mobile biography, many having experienced time in the United States and Germany as international students and scholars. In contrast,

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the Humanities were seen as late starters; there was more dissent among Humanities scholars at SNU about teaching in English. Emotions of resentment coexisted with emotions of hopeful pragmatism. The stickiness of English as a global language attracted domestic Korean and international students from countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. English enabled academics to internationalise their student body by teaching Korean language and culture to ‘Western’ international students on exchange semesters. But for staff, especially those who acquired English later in life, teaching in English was an added pressure as they tried to keep up with their colleagues in the technoscience and engineering fields to teach and publish in English. Internationalisation of the domestic student experience was rationalised as a public good and expressed as ‘training students for global competition’. ‘Globalisation’ was imagined and felt as competition. Being globally competitive was a source of (ethno-nationalist) pride. Interviewees spoke of the multiple grievances inflicted on the country and its people, recalling memories of colonial repression, the forced displacement of its people following the Korean War, and the country’s transition from a poor, rural and technologically backward economy to becoming a leading Asian economic power. These nationalist memories and any arguably ‘negative’ and exclusionary emotions were largely kept in the background. What was foregrounded was energy, drive and tenacity to improve, to do better despite the odds. Repressing anger, seen as a national trait (han), enabled the redirection of resentment towards productive ends, making Korea into a dominant East Asian economic player in high tech consumer and industrial markets (Lim 2010; Kim 1997). As the Vice President of International Affairs of Seoul National University asserted, It’s our mentality to be the best. It’s generally the case for Koreans, so Koreans now [are] complaining that Hyundai is only 5th largest motor company in Korea, our share of LG flat screens in the international market is only 54% and SNU is only 20s in the CCI citations. That’s our mentality, self-destructive perfectionism. [Our] character [is to] bounc[e] back [from] challenges. And also, our long history of being an outstanding country, until the 19th century. We have won all the wars against China.

Hints of optimism, albeit of a guarded kind, was also discernible in the Chinese universities we studied. At Renmin University, arguably one of China’s most important Social Sciences and Humanities university, a

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swell of pride and optimism about their long-standing role in preparing generations of Communist Party (CCP) leaders, was mingled with hints of caution and trepidation. Tracing its history to the Shanbei Public School, an institution started in 1937 by the Communist Party of China in Yanan at the height of anti-Japanese resistance, the institution expanded through amalgamations to become the first Chinese university established by the Party in the PRC in 1950 in Beijing. Before launching into an explanation of Renmin’s internationalisation policies, a senior staff member offered a brief history of the institution, beginning with its inception as a national university to ‘build national leaders for the Party and for economic development’. Renmin, he observed, was modelled on Soviet higher education. The Soviet Union, then an ally of China and the vanguard of an alternative higher education, offered education in which Marxist philosophy drove scholarship, both in the Humanities and the Sciences, with the express purpose of furthering socialism. Soviet academics designed entire degree programmes, curricula and teaching materials. Until the souring of relations between the USSR and China, Renmin counted Russians among its academic staff. Having survived unprecedented national political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution, the reopened university was thrown into other largescale policy projects including marketisation, massification, internationalisation and decentralisation. On the whole, senior staff were optimistic about the changes that were positioning the university to contribute to China’s new role in the international world order. The University’s mission is ‘to educate for the People, to conduct scholarship for the country’ (Rhoads et al. 2014, 95). At the time of our study, Renmin had embarked on a bold plan based on a management approach focused on ‘great masters, big buildings and magnanimous spirit’ (Rhoads et al. 2014, 96). Accordingly, the priorities were strengthening the academic body, improving infrastructure and broadening the university’s vision and profile. Renim’s internationalisation strategies were largely focused on producing a new Chinese-citizen subject, one who was informed about the external world, confident and with relevant capabilities to contribute to China’s future development. As this senior administrator observed, ‘China, for now, is not a technology-leader but a follower. So, [as] a technology follower, we need to communicate with others’. In other words, Renmin’s participation in global knowledge networks was seen as crucially important for the country’s transformation from a ‘technology follower’ to a ‘technology-leader’.

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With Beijing University, the other pre-eminent Humanities and Social Sciences institution, Renmin saw itself as preparing the next generation of Chinese political, bureaucratic, professional leaders for a different world order, where ‘China will become more and more important in the world’. For example, Renmin University was invested with a special responsibility by the Chinese Language Council International (Hanban)—to train educators for some of the 480 Confucius Institutes worldwide. We were told that at any one time some 30–40 Renmin professors were overseas visiting various Confucius Institutes. Renmin was trusted by the government with vital diplomatic and economic functions. The country’s international standing depended on the University’s capacity to deliver on this mission. Emotions of trust, loyalty and pride were mobilised to steer academic staff to accept and embrace the manifold and challenging changes to their roles and responsibilities. The University is known to have several academic staff who are regarded as ‘engaged public intellectuals’ although in Rhoads et al.’s (2014, 91) words, this engagement has ‘a Chinese twist’. They appear frequently in both the Chinese and international media to comment on international relations and social and economic issues of national and international significance, such as the growing rural–urban divide and concern about corruption among officialdom. At the time of our study, Renmin had embarked on an ambitious programme to send its students on short exchange programmes, to receive international students for short and longer programmes and to recruit foreign academic staff. Strengthening research capacity and profile were flagged as important strategies to fulfil the drive to become a ‘world class’ university. The institutional aspirations included 10% of its staff were to be international, 10% of all publications to be in international journals, 10% of all its students to go out on exchange and 10% of its student body to be international. Academic staff were also encouraged to travel abroad and to host foreign visitors. Targets set by senior administrators were perceived with a mix of emotions—on the one hand, pride expressed in a desire to establish China’s position as a country with globally prominent research universities, befitting its status as an emerging global power. On the other hand, there was trepidation and anxiety in case the political climate changed, as it had in the past.

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Feelings of Scepticism Even at Singapore’s National University where the tenor of emotions was relatively upbeat and optimistic, less positive, ‘negative’ feelings were expressed about formal state policies intended to ‘globalise’ Singapore’s universities. Trust in the state remained high among its senior management, but a grammar of critique crept into interview talk, suggesting scepticism about specific policy directions. There were concerns that the contributions of university staff on the ground were taken for granted while accolades were showered on the galaxies of ‘world class’ stars brought in from the Global North. Hints of this scepticism surfaced in brief references to the largesse thrust on the foreign world-class universities in the first phase of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse project: Don’t give these folks far more resources than me. If all of us are pulling the wagon of education ahead, then give us the resources to help us pull better and faster. (Dean, School of Design and Built Environment) There’s a lot more that can be done on the government level or at least in terms of the framework for funding purposes, particularly for foreign institutions. I think the government will need to think this through very carefully to consider the technology transfer. This is one of our weak links in Singapore. [We] invited all these great institutions here, but the ability to cultivate the technology transfer is still ….ongoing. The counterargument, you know, the amount of money we give to INSEAD and Chicago, [Graduate School of Business] if you give it to us, can we do a similar job? (Associate Dean, Business)

Scepticism about the state’s wisdom was most sharply present in Japan’s two universities, where disappointment was rife with the bureaucracy, MEXT, for their failure to consult with universities in the formulation of the then Global 30 project: The Global 30 was more or less planned by the Ministry of Education, and we were sort of instructed to follow through…our government is not that strong in policy making. They are talking about general things but it’s not real strategy. (Deputy Director, Undergraduate Admissions Office for Global 30, Osaka University)

Disappointment also surfaced in the discussion about the manner in which postgraduate research students were selected. Institutional strategy

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was trumped by bureaucratic and foreign policy considerations. Japan’s Ministry of Education simply took the advice of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on decisions relating to postgraduate scholarships, an approach that was criticised as ill-suited to the demands of a hypercompetitive global research environment. The space for recruiting high calibre research students—crucial for research endeavours—was thus stymied by foreign policy goals. The Taiwanese university leadership were also forthcoming about their many disappointments. There was, first, a disappointment with broader society for a lack of support of universities: ‘Taiwanese people would rather invest their money in the next life than waste money in this life. Investing in the next life means donating to temples and churches. But not donating to education as a form of investment in this life’ according to a senior official. There was disappointment too at leading partner universities in Europe and North America, who in their haste to capitalise on Chinese international student markets, were compliant with the strictures imposed by the government of China and walked away from long-standing relationships, closing their doors to student exchanges from Taiwan. Taiwan’s threatened status as a geopolitical entity, a peripheral political subject in the international system of nation-states was felt deeply. There was anxiety about what these struggles would mean for NTU’s capacities to maintain its global relations and standing. At Korea’s Seoul National University, government policies around the financing of knowledge economy projects such as Brain Korea 21 were experienced as uneven, hampered by excessive control by the country’s Ministry of Higher Education. The enormous efforts made by academic staff to build international reputations and profiles were not properly recognised, producing emotions of disappointment, and a sense of anger and hurt at being taken for granted. Feelings of Shame Shame is a notoriously uncomfortable emotion. Its minimisation and erasure by, and in, the national apparatus of education is well studied. In the task of creating nationalist subjects, shameful acts are often erased by nationalist histories. ‘Systematic efforts are undertaken in curriculum development and pedagogical practices to implore students to remember the pride brought to a nation-state by the leaders and warriors who defended its lands and values’ (Zembylas 2008, 264). Shame tends to be portrayed as

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a ‘bad’ emotion while pride is foregrounded as a ‘good’ emotion, one that furthers social cohesion, however, both exist in a dichotomous relation. There are, for example, potentially productive and transformative aspects to shame. Managed well, it offers opportunities to resolve epistemological, ethical, social and political problems. Critical scholarly work on national shame and pride, on war memories in nation-building and reconciliation to heal past wounds, although well-established, has remained a peripheral topic in research on international education. The shameful conduct associated with gendered and raced violence of the twentieth century wars in East Asia is seen as the preserve of Japanese imperialism, minimising violations by other actors. Anger and resentment about ‘the past’ fuels nationalist sentiment across East Asia, suggesting that prospects for a broader economic project of regional integration are held in tension by the politics of nationalism. For this scholar at Tokyo University, the region’s multi-hued politics of shame and resentment are productive forces. If effectively harnessed to international education, shame is a generative ethical practice, contributing towards greater understanding among ‘the next generation of leaders’: What the University of Tokyo [along with other Japanese universities] can do is to offer programmes within the context of the unique and difficult history of Japan. For example, if we are going to offer international relations, how are we going to teach the next generation of leaders of the world the kind of international networking collaboration that we need to establish in Asia…What we learn[t] from the terrible mistakes this country has committed in the past…what we should learn. We are learning from collaborations with other universities in Asia and other scholars from Asia and other parts of the world. In other words, it’s not the sort of nationalistic programme I want to see, but it’s a kind of programme that is rooted in Japan’s cultural settings but at the same time open to exchanges with other universities particularly in Asia.

A less charged site of shame is that of global university rankings. In this, university leaders were strategic, with all refusing to allow shame to be taken up, to envelop their institutions and erode their reputations. Comparison, a key strategy of governance, seemed to be mediated, by taking into account contextual factors including the impact of war, revolution and social unrest.

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Concluding Comments This chapter began with establishing a rationale for injecting emotions into how we study the institutional leadership of universities. By attending to emotional regimes, we demonstrated the complex articulations on the ground, as universities move variously to enact, temper, dilute, discard —selectively mediate—the multiple ‘scapes’ constituting international education. The emotional registers of university officialdom revealed the prominence of a defensive internationalisation, deemed necessary to ward off decline and maintain competitive security in a context of perceived change. With the exception of Singapore, where the university enjoyed positive relations with the machinery of the state, state–university relations elsewhere revealed tensions around policy visions and budgets. The task of positioning their institutions securely in global geographies of power and knowledge required university leaders to engage with the emotions of stakeholders ranging from the university community to policymakers and government ministers. Institutional leaders were themselves not immune to the profound feelings of unease and scepticism about policies, institutional strategies and operational plans. The question of what must be assembled and aligned to enable universities to foster a feeling for the region—affective regionalism - through internationalisation, remains a project in the making. It could be argued that the desire to establish ‘world class’ profiles by deploying rankings, shifts universities and their leaders away from the region as they seek out reference societies elsewhere in the global North. Alternatively, region-making through the recruitment of international students from within the region was given a boost by policies designed to build international, world-class profiles. A final point concerns the ethical, the extent to which institutional leaders were able and willing to engage in critique. As subjects and agents of modernist normalisation regimes, they experienced feelings of anxiety, doubt and trepidation, as well as pride and optimism. There were ample examples in our interviews of clear-headed ethical reflection and concern with ethical conduct, ‘a care of the self’. An undercurrent of alternative conduct—quiet steering towards other ends—seemed present, at least in some settings. An intersubjective ethics, supportive of critique and framed by the goal of cultivating an alternative mode of integrity is both possible and imaginable in the spaces of East Asia’s globalising universities. The

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emotional geographies of officialdom bring to life the local possibilities of resistance. For while, ‘…it is true that the larger historical and genealogical picture of normalisation is beyond the control of any individual, the complex and contradictory local relations of power that form our ethical habitus are amenable to political interventions’ (Heyes 2007, 116).

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Tan, Chorh Chuan, 2016. “On Building a Stellar University.” Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, University of California, Berkeley, 26–28 September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkSsrBg3G14. Tsuneyoshi, Ryoko, ed. 2018. Globalization and Japanese “Exceptionalism” in Education: Insiders Views into a Changing System. London: Routledge. Webb, Taylor, and Gulson, Kalervo. 2015. Policy, Geophilosophy and Education. Springer Yonezawa, Akiyoshi. 2010. “Much Ado About Ranking: Why Can’t Japanese Universities Internationalize?” Japan Forum 22 (1–2): 121–137. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2008. The Politics of Trauma in Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

The Cultural Politics of Emplacement

Abstract This chapter shifts the book’s focus to international students, key agents in forming and sustaining East Asia’s knowledge spatialities. We examine their felt experiences of spaces and places as a basis to uncover the sociabilities of emplacement enabled by dynamics encounters in laboratories, tutorials, lectures spaces, student residences and neighbourhoods. The chapter offers an analysis of the politics of belonging seen through the interplay of communication, friendship and learning encounters. Drawing on their face-to-face and technology-mediated encounters, we show how student emotions are mobilised to produce, and alternatively resist, cosmopolitan sociabilities, including those that reconstruct ‘home’. Keywords Emplacement · Emotional geographies · Friendship · Cosmopolitan sociabilities

Emotional Geographies of Student Lives In Chapter 3, we examined the emotional textures of university leadership, showing how emotions of optimism, scepticism and anxiety are managed and mobilised to achieve the spatial stretch of knowledge and influence necessary to becoming a globalising university. To make their institutions ‘sticky’—attractive to international students—institutional leaders © The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_4

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were expected to somehow mediate the ontological insecurities of nationstates. What emerged was a mode of defensive internationalisation, with quite significant national variations. In this chapter, we examine student emotions, in projects of self-making, and as part of a broader technology of government to manage national and institutional anxieties (‘problematizations’). By governmental technologies we mean the combinations of ‘humans, actions and artifacts’ including knowledges, skills, capacities, dispositions and types of judgements, which are aligned to steer international education and international students to further particular ends (D’Aoust 2014, 262). Specifically, we turn our analytical lens in this chapter to the narratives of international students. Simultaneously objects of globalising discourses, subjects, as well as agents in the making of ‘global’ universities, we examine their ‘affective practices’ (Wetherell 2015) as a means to understand emplacement—what it takes to feel and be in place. More specifically, we explore the alignments of feelings, bodies, vocabularies, contexts and actions that facilitate cosmopolitan sociabilities, through face-toface encounters and those mediated by information and communication technologies. Collectively these affective practices allow us to develop an understanding of the socio-spatial relations that characterise East Asia’s globalising universities. We begin this chapter by introducing two framing concepts that we regard as productive of a governmentality of solidarity and care, ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ and ‘cosmopolitan sociabilities’. Both, we argue, are precursors for the emergence of political subjectivities that go beyond normative, state and institutional understandings such as soft power diplomacy. We draw on our empirical material to analyse the micro-geographies of student encounters, starting with the emotions that drive students to choose East Asian study destinations. The remainder of the chapter examines the intense and intimate encounters of lived diversity in residential, teaching and learning spaces.

Cosmopolitan Sociabilities Writing about two decades ago, Pollock et al. (2000, 577) declared, …cosmopolitanism is not some known entity existing in the world with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant that simply awaits more detailed description at the hands of scholarship. We are not exactly certain

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what it is and why this is so and what cosmopolitanism may be[come] raises difficult conceptual issues.

Pollock and his collaborators, Carol Breckinridge, Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty went on to suggest that cosmopolitanism may best be seen as something that is yet to come, something awaiting realisation. Whether aspirational or an actually existing idea, or moral practice, they supported an open-endedness to the study of cosmopolitanism. A lengthy engagement with the now large corpus of research literature on cosmopolitanism exceeds our brief and we will limit our discussion to critical cosmopolitanism—the approach we have taken—vis-à-vis key debates in this cross-disciplinary field. At its simplest, critical cosmopolitanism is alert to asymmetries of power, and responsive to subaltern positionalities. It functions as a corrective to Eurocentric expressions of cosmopolitan thought and practice, by making visible liberal cosmopolitanism’s historical comradeship with conquest, colonialism and capitalism, and thereby using this critique as a basis for proposing radical alternative futures (Calhoun 2002; Gilroy 2014; Prakash 2014; Jazeel 2014; Mbembe 2013). Informed by theoretical and methodological innovations, critical cosmopolitanism aspires to exceed methodological nationalism in studies of globalisation (Stacey 2014). In the spirit of engaging with multiplicity, scholars have examined other historical registers of cosmopolitanism initiated by mobility circuits and networks of commerce, trade and religion that predate European hegemony (Abu-Lughod 1991; Prakash 2014). Whether or not critical cosmopolitanism is succeeding in its brief to unsettle Eurocentric expressions of cosmopolitanism remains keenly debated (Jazeel 2014). For Nina Glick-Schiller (2014), critical cosmopolitanism takes form and meaning in the everyday. Cosmopolitan sociabilities are ‘forms of competence and communication skills based on the human capacity to create social relations of inclusiveness and openness to the world’ (Glick-Schiller et al. 2011, 402). As everyday episodes, cosmopolitan sociabilities highlight ‘the desires and strivings that motivate people to struggle against oppression’. (Glick-Schiller 2014, 33). Glick-Schiller (2014) takes researchers, policymakers and politicians to task for their denial or minimisation of the precious moments and episodes of kindness, civility and humanity, in both public and private spaces. Such research and policy fissures lend themselves to establishing a fertile ground for a governmentality of fear and insecurity

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where insular and violently regressive reifications of race and nation limit possibilities for co-producing generous and ethical futures. Expanding their thesis into the ‘sociabilities of emplacement’, GlickSchiller and Ça˘glar (2016) highlight the signal importance of keeping a hold on ‘domains of commonality’ within the research imagination. Methodologically they make a case for a multi-scalar, relational analysis to capture the conditions of possibility for mutuality and respect, asking ‘How, where, why and within what structural contingencies are people able to build social relations that transcend differences sufficiently to enable their coming together to build mutuality, respect and shared aspirations?’ Responding to this question encourages us to conceive of cosmopolitan sociability not in terms of ‘abstract moral choices’ but in considering ‘cultural repertoires of universalism that are differentially available to individuals across race and national context’ (Lamont and Aksartova 2002, 2). Such a perspective moves beyond ‘the binaries of inclusion vs. exclusion, sameness vs. difference’, creating possible space to examine ‘relationalities of openness across differences’ even in contexts that include ‘racialization, gender hierarchies, ethnicization, [state-imposed] exclusions and the intensified power of borders’ (Glick Schiller et al. 2011, 403–414; see also Valentine and Sadgrove 2014). Cosmopolitan sociability—known also through an earlier variant, ‘friendship’—claims a plural genealogy, seen in the writings of philosophers and sages such as Aristotle, Cicero, Buddha, Confucius and Mo Tsi.1 All wrote about the rescaling of emotions, thought and actions beyond the logic of sameness which characterised their (imagined) communities. Friendship was recognised as an instrument of some importance, deployed in governing the self and others. Ping Wang (2017) describes friendship performed in, and through, the ‘smaller’ solidarities of family and community, as an integral part of Confucian ethics. Friendship’s potential to foster harmony and peace also appears in the philosophical writings of Mencius. He observed that small sociabilities enacted as friendship in the everyday would give rise to bigger solidarities of universal friendship, extended to ‘all under the heaven’ (Wang 2017, 54). Taking her cue from European philosophical traditions to examine anticolonial resistance, Leela Gandhi (2006) analyses friendship’s political possibilities through ‘affective cosmopolitanism’. Philoxenia—a capacity to feel 1 For a cross-cultural philosophical examination of friendship, see edited volumes by Risseeuw and van Raalte (2017) and Leaman (2014).

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a kind of love for those who are different, such as guests, strangers and foreigners she notes, emerged as a corrective in ancient Greece to the racial exclusions found in the polis. Gandhi profiles the friendships formed at the turn of the twentieth century by C. F. Andrews, a British Anglican priest, with key members of the Indian anti-colonial nationalist movement, in particular Mohandas Gandhi. What role, she asks, did this and other similar friendships2 play in the formation of transnational solidarities that eventually led to the defeat of British colonial rule in India? Using an archive of personal correspondence and news reportage, she charts his changing ethico-political subjectivity, tracing a series of anti-Manichean and careful gestures and practices which eventually untethered the ties that bound him to race, nation, class, religion and gender. Andrews’ prescient and vigorous support for the ordination of women, together with his opposition to the racial exclusivity of imperial Christianity, forced his resignation from the Anglican ministry although he retained his faith (17). In Andrews, Gandhi locates the Derridean idea of ‘improvisational politics’—that friendship, by affording openness and hospitality, can function as counter-conduct, leaving in its wake political and/or diplomatic effects (19). Thus, although outside the realm of formal politics, friendship has the potential to achieve political outcomes. Gandhi’s analytical treatment of friendship embraces an individual’s willingness to take risks. She reminds us that friendship towards ‘the other’ carried many risks in the polis where racial exclusivity ran deep. Practicing philoxenia might bring the charge of treason, the risk of banishment if not death. Gandhi concludes that one’s willingness to remain ‘open’ is not sufficient. There must be a preparedness to ‘become strange and guestlike in one’s own domain, whether this be home, race, nation, gender, skin, species’ (31). Affective cosmopolitanism inevitably requires some risk to the self, an ontological undoing of the self. It is here that the hybrid subject of postmodernism and the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ come undone, unable or unwilling to take the risks that make for ‘positive reconstruction’ (21–23). And while class or identity-based groups have taken risks, they have not been able to break out of the ‘tedious logic of the same’ (26). In contrast, it is in friendship that the possibilities exist for ‘the co-belonging of non-identical singularities’ (26). There is much to be critical about in Gandhi’s treatment of friendship, such as its gendered partiality in focusing 2 This is a gendered account of friendship between men privileged in their educated status, and its limitations should be taken into consideration.

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on the friendship of two well-educated men, and its centering of the ‘West’ as the pre-eminent source of critical cosmopolitanism. Notwithstanding these gaps, Gandhi offers some useful material for rethinking how people might sponsor ontological diversities by reimagining otherness.

Feeling Safe: Cultural Safety and Hospitality It is now two decades since the infamous September 11 attacks in New York. Those fateful moments set in motion a governmentality of security that would reinstate the United States and other ‘developmentally advanced’ places as inhospitable spaces. In these ‘advanced’ spaces today, emotions of hostility and anxiety towards the cultural Other are expanded and rationalised through a broader discourse about vulnerability. Citizens feel discarded as their access to social goods such as housing, stable employment, healthcare and affordable education is denied. An identity border between a ‘legitimate’ national Self and the arriving Other has given form to a governmentality of fear and unease (Bigo 2002). Emotions of hostility generated in and through tropes of vulnerability and threats are produced and circulate, adhering onto the racialised bodies of Others (Balibar 2004). Although our study was completed well before the ‘migrant’ crisis in Europe and the United States, concerns about inhospitality at the hands of ‘Western’ countries were discernible and gaining momentum. The emotional stresses involved in crossing borders begin as students navigate the boundaries of Western embassies and consulates. Prospective students can anticipate multiple and invasive security checks, now normalised in international airport travel, including body frisking, long waiting lines and questions that can approximate a criminal interrogation. On the one hand, these processes appear stringent, but on the other hand, they are malleable and permeable if one has access to the right repositories of resources. Prospective students represented by well-connected education and migration agents can expect to be ‘fast-tracked’, and potentially gruelling visa interviews can be rehearsed to perfection to produce appropriate answers. The reputation of ‘Western’ borders as difficult to navigate has persisted, motivating several of our study’s participants to choose an East Asian study destination. Students expressed relief at not having to deal with a prolonged stasis—the long wait to receive clearance to travel they had witnessed among friends, peers and family members who had headed for the west. Emotions of anxiety, trepidation, humiliation, anguish and a sense of feeling subordinate could be avoided simply by choosing an alternative

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study destination, one less culturally complex, less hostile and altogether easier to navigate. Yuyan, a female, Chinese student at Osaka University offered this reflection: … just after 9/11, many students couldn’t get their visa, even though they had the offer. I thought maybe it’s better to come to Japan.

Avid users of social media platforms (Facebook, Xiaonei, WeChat, QQ), students were well-acquainted with stories of hardship in ‘Western’ destinations. Friends and family members gave anxious accounts of encounters that were profoundly unmooring because of language, cultural and academic transitions. Social isolation, being left to one’s own devices to navigate study and settlement, the fear of race-based discrimination—all of these perceptions produced disquiet, along with acknowledgements that hardships were likely to be character-forming. An Asian study destination was perceived to be less traumatic. Batsa, a graduate student from Nepal described why Taiwan appealed as a study destination to him: Here, [Taiwan], I know the Asian context [although] I don’t speak Chinese. But I know, if I ask you for some help, you’ll do this. We’re Asian – even if I don’t speak Chinese. Everybody helps us here, no problem.

For Kanchina, a Sri Lankan student at Seoul National University, a perception of permissiveness held of study destinations in the ‘West’ made them unsafe: ‘My parents didn’t want me to go to a Western [country] like Australia because of the culture…people are going wild… a lot of drinking’. Avanthi, a Sri Lankan student in Singapore observed, ‘Safety, is a huge thing. Here [Singapore], it’s very ok for me walk around at 1 o’clock in the morning alone, which you really cannot…even in Australia’. Rui, a postgraduate student from China at NUS observed: I’m not one who can survive in a white majority society. [Singapore] is a Chinese majority society. I prefer such a society.

Life in ‘a white majority society’ can be perceived as one of fortified racial boundaries, characterised by silent and overt racisms (Fong 2011; Marginson et al. 2010). Without the emollience of fluent language, anxiety washes over student bodies, diluting confidence, limiting the full expressions of

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their imaginations and intellect. What if their fractured English leads university staff to doubt their intelligence? (Yeoh et al. 2014). Further, students caught in geopolitical animosities risk being framed by unflattering stereotypes (Fish 2018; Martin 2017). The combined effects of perceived cultural similarity and access to financial support helped to offset a sense of vulnerability, including gendered insecurities. Qing Shan, an undergraduate from China who was studying at Tokyo University, confessed: I didn’t really want to go to America or European countries [because the] cultural difference is too great. [In Japan] scholarships are more readily available. I’m a girl so I want to feel a more stable, secure life. Here the difference in culture is relatively small.

Elaine, a Malaysian student at Tokyo University studying for a Masters in Engineering chose her words carefully to convey her concerns about safety. While she considered conduct such as freedom of speech (‘outspoken’), a good thing, this also increased the risk of hate speech, bringing with its potential dangers to those perceived to be different: In western countries where people are more outspoken, which is a good thing, maybe they’re not so polite, and maybe it’s a lot more dangerous there.

Students’ mobility decisions were also shaped by more banal reasons, wishing to accompany friends or partners, happenstance, boredom and lassitude. They admitted to lacking the tenacity and determination (‘too lazy’; ‘not organised’) required to self-fashion themselves in the application process through elaborate testimonials, personal statements and character references. The arrival of a seemingly beneficent East Asian state on the scene offering university places and accessible and generous scholarships, alleviated some of the dilemmas confronting international students. Students’ first encounters with representatives of the host state such as embassy and academic staff were overwhelmingly positive. These officials travelled to local schools to encourage applications and to provide information about the scholarships on offer. Also part of a ‘charm offensive’, were education exhibitions and university recruitment events. These also inspired affable emotions which were anticipated to redesignate ‘structures of feeling’, by foregrounding neighbourliness. The durability of these warm emotions

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would later be tested as students navigated vastly different spatio-cultural rules through the hurly-burly of the everyday. A measure of cultural safety is also assured by purposeful networks assembled through relations with co-national student and migrant communities. These putative transnational social spaces, often premised on a logic of cultural and linguistic similarities, enable situated knowledges and emotional ties to be reassembled and used to navigate the dynamics of emplacement. Avanthi, a student from Sri Lanka at NUS chose Singapore ‘…[as] my parents said “ok, Singapore is a safe place for you”’. The family then inquired through their networks on who could assist their daughter in settling in and located, ‘….my grandfather’s cousin’s mate, living in Singapore, they are my parents’ age and their daughter is my age. She used to come to NUS, she introduced me to this friend in geography…’ For Darina, a female Iranian student studying with her husband for a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at NUS co-national networks were crucial in enabling the couple to settle-in: We found two other Iranian friends here (Singapore). One of them, we knew her brother in Iran, so she paid the application fee for us. She introduced every place…she was so friendly!

Spaces of cultural safety and hospitality were assembled not only by family and friends but by an entire cast of actors, inspired by affective and instrumental motives. Market actors such as education agents and the principals of tuition centres took on pastoral roles, mobilising their former student clients to assist in these activities, sometimes even flying individual students home to participate in pre-departure briefings (see also Collins 2012). Links between places near and afar were thus sustained through these familial and commercial networks to provide pastoral, emotional and practical care. All the universities in our study had strategies to instrumentalise student friendship networks to capture, measure and harness a governmentality of goodwill and friendship. University International Education Offices, as a matter of routine, used co-national peer networks drawn from international student associations for ‘meet and greet’ and orientation activities. Embassies and consulates also played important roles in generating spaces of cultural safety, connecting new with ongoing students by hosting receptions and financing student-led events. Gatherings such as Welcome events at the start of the academic year, cultural festivals such as Chinese

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New Year, Tet and Diwali and national events such as Independence, Liberation, and Reunification Days lend themselves to making up co-national support and friendship networks. More than venues for the sharing of practical information about housing, food, leisure and employments options, these events are also instruments through which international student networks are made objects of governance. Seen by political actors through the prisms of risk and opportunity, international student mobilities raise questions about territorial sovereignty, citizenship, rights and welfare. As political actors, states are keen to cultivate students’ goodwill—whether as putative diasporic elites, or as generators of remittance revenues—using informal and institutionalised diaspora strategies (Ho 2011). On the other hand, this floating population of students might also become objects of surveillance to counter the prospects of unfavourable transnational political activism, with embassies and consulates leaning on co-national students for assistance, a point we explore in Chapter 5. Summing up then, a configuration of heterogeneous elements must be present and appropriately ordered to enable the ‘desire to circulate’ (Raghuram 2013). Institutions of the state such as universities and Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs are aligned with market actors such as education agents, tuition centres or cram schools and career guidance coaches, all seeking to enlist and mobilise the desires of individual students and their families. Contained within these desires are hopes held by families for bright futures for their children. Young people, predictably, desired adventure and self-determination, along with independence from the strictures of family life. The reputations of East Asian countries and multinationals in engineering, science and technology were also significant in shaping student choices, producing and reinforcing mental cartographies of Asian modernity. As we showed in Chapter 3, the spatial stretch of engineering schools in the region was attributed to the profiles enjoyed by Korean and Japanese engineering multinationals in large-scale infrastructural development projects within Asia. The rising reputations of the top universities in East Asia—particularly those in the global cities of Singapore and Hong Kong—meant that students could now aspire to ‘global standards’ while remaining anchored in the region. Finally, with regional mobility now a part of the repertoire of urban, middle-class families in Asia, tourist encounters paved the way for regional study circuits. Their emplaced class-based positionings allowed some students to experience Asia as consumers. Indonesian and Malaysian students, for example, reported high

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levels of familiarity with Singapore as a tourist destination: ‘Indonesians like to travel to Singapore, they come here to shop very often’. In what follows, we explore the prospects opened up for new spatial and affective imaginations, with the potential for student cosmopolitan sociabilities. We begin with international student learning encounters as a basis to interrogate how globalising universities, through their interventions, are creating the conditions for critical cosmopolitanisms.

Spatial and Affective Imaginations 1: Learning To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn towards things. To have our ‘likes’ means certain things are gathered around us. Those things we do not like we move away from. (Ahmed 2010, 23–24)

Taking our cue from Sara Ahmad, in this section we discuss how international student bodies move towards, and move away from people and things, movements that lead to or limit cosmopolitan sociabilities. Two decades of research into the curricular dimensions of international education in western universities has shown that the prospects for cosmopolitan sociabilities are greatest if supported through the formal and informal curriculum (Gomes 2017; Kelly 2008; Leask 2009; Rizvi and Walsh 1998; Trahar 2010). Language encounters within globalising universities are instructive of the geographies of international education. What follows is are analyses of emotions, power and knowledge in the microgeographies of East Asia’s globalising universities. As a social and material technology shaped by power and knowledge, language functions as an object of government and an instrument of subjectification (see Benesch 2017). In response to policies to develop knowledge economies, East Asian countries have directed their recruitment efforts towards international students, largely because they are seen as ‘global talent-in-the-making’. However, everyday interactional practices gesture to the possible repostioning of international students as lesser subjects by host country students and educators on account of their language competencies. Their emotional encounters in the micro-geographies of university spaces are instructive of how students engage with and renegotiate these subjectifications. What is notable is that language-driven encounters are a potential fault line; they place unanticipated stresses on projects to make universities

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‘global’. As fragile encounters, they are easily thrown off-balance, unsettling the globalised governmentality desired by the university. Few native speakers can appreciate the tremendous emotional and cognitive challenges assailing international students who are expected, in an impossibly short time frame, to leap-frog into a communicative competence that native speakers have spent decades acquiring. Learning in a new language and finding a home amidst strangeness is a profoundly unmooring process. Learners experience a disparity in exercising power in what are inevitably language-demanding encounters. Educators and other learners are known to misrecognise ability and intelligence in these kinds of encounters (Benesch 2012; Gomes 2017). Without a common language, the cross-cultural encounter might be navigated through (mis)reading bodily demeanours. For border crossing international students everywhere, language learning encounters are replete with emotions of frustration, hope, despondency, shame, relief and exhilaration (Benesch 2012; Kettle 2011). Stumbling language often reduces adults to their earlier selves, dragging them backwards into childhood. Students with linguistic difficulties, in short, can anticipate being called into being as a ‘lesser’ subjectivity. Their emotional encounters within the micro-geographies of university labs and university classes provide rich insights on how language governs their prospects for cosmopolitan sociability. For Abigail, a postgraduate student from Peru, at Osaka University, her visible foreign appearance meant fewer opportunities to improve her language skills through spontaneous encounters. These spilled into and stymied her learning: I studied [Japanese], you know, for 5 months. But I really think it was not enough at all if you really want to feel that you are part of the society. It’s not like the best environment to learn, also, because people [are] not communicative by nature. I don’t know if it’s just that they’re afraid of things from abroad.

Even students who arrived with confidence in their communicative capabilities experienced difficulties in their interactions with host nationals who, in some cases, focused on their embodied differences, pushing them further afield. Here Lan, a female student from Vietnam, described intense emotions arising from her shaming by Asian peers in a tutorial:

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Before coming [to Singapore] I was working [in Vietnam] with an Australian guy [and] there was nothing wrong with me. When I came here, [my] whole world shattered. I started to doubt everything, from my English to my competency, everything! The group [in the history tutorial] didn’t let me participate much in group work. They didn’t trust me [and] gave me all the trivial tasks to do. When we had group discussions, they usually say things like ‘ok does anybody have any idea what she is talking about’? That kind of thing.

For Huong, a female Vietnamese student at China’s Renmin University, establishing the necessary spatial and affective proximities for flourishing friendships and cosmopolitan sociabilities was complicated not only by language competence but also leisure and recreational preferences: Firstly, we do not have many chances to contact with each other [local] students]. Secondly, I think it is the mindset. Some local students welcome foreign students, while some of the local students do not really like to go out with foreign students. The places the local students usually go, maybe we find them boring. And the places we go to, they also do not like them. And some of the foreign students, their language ability may not be that strong.

Understanding university-level curriculum and engaging with the bibliographic oceans of unfamiliar library materials in a language in which they had elementary working knowledge, placed enormous burdens on many students who spoke of exhaustion, pressure and stress: ‘For my whole first year of undergraduate studies, in Osaka University, it was absolutely impossible to get the point of the lecture’, observed Stefan, an undergraduate student from Bulgaria. He went on to praise the empathy of professors who were aware of students’ language difficulties, including the academic demands imposed by their scholarship programmes, often allowing them to submit assessment tasks in English: ‘[Japanese professors] will not give you very bad marks. They are very very understanding. They are also letting many of the students to write in English, if they have to’. In contrast, Pensri, a female student enrolled for an MBA programme at the National Taiwan University (NTU, or Taida) described feelings of sadness, disappointment and embarrassment as her linguistic deficiencies were flagged in class: I came here to learn Chinese. It will be so embarrassing to give up for its difficulties. [The] teacher keeps on telling me that I did not pronounce well,

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did not speak clearly and did not understand well. Every day he tells me in front of all the students.

For those international students who arrived without any background in the host language, the challenges of acquiring high-level competences in Korean, Chinese and Japanese were significant, with some reporting feeling under-confident of their language even after three to four years of international study. Students were concerned about whether they could ever participate fully in the opportunity structures of employment markets in their host countries. The ‘languaging’ of student subjectivities—the manner in which they are called into being by their language competency—thus complicates the aspirations of East Asian states, to recruit ‘talent’ to address national problems, including demographic and economic ones. Most students adjusted to new mediums of instruction and new pedagogical norms, albeit under stressful conditions. Practical strategies were called on including negotiating with academic staff to hand in some of their written work in English in those instances where their English skills were more advanced. Notwithstanding these self-formation strategies, students were aware that they were positioned somewhat less favourably in the hierarchical orderings of ability and commitment, pointing to the high-stakes competition endured by their host country peers to achieve a place in a leading university. Some experienced outright resentment, while others like Jeshua, spoke of a covert condescension producing feelings of inferiority: one of the barriers I have [being] in Taida, is it’s the best university in Taiwan, and the reputation it has. Because it’s so hard for locals to get in the university, so if we try to compare international students with locals, you can see a big gap. Mostly in Maths, the local students are very good.

Mathematics standards were also perceived as being very high in Korea, China and Japan by international students. For Avanthi, although fluent in English, there was the shock of discovering that the curriculum she had been exposed to in her undergraduate education in Sri Lanka was, in her words, ‘outdated’, on account of its strongly nationalist, territorialist imagination. She added, ‘Oh my God, I have, like 30 years of geography to catch up with, so that puts a huge strain on you, and it dampens your confidence’. International students were aware of the deeply contagious effects of emotions like lack and shame; that such emotions placed students at the

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receiving end of unflattering generalisations about foreigners. Many were acutely conscious of subterranean social prejudices that valued nationalities, cultures and ethnicities according to worth and desirability, and they steered their conduct accordingly. Aina from Madagascar, who was studying at Tokyo University, admitted paying particular attention to ‘following the rules’ and ‘being punctual’. Elaine too, engaged in self-fashioning to avoid the possibilities of negative stereotypes, ‘[I’m] very conscious I’m representing Malaysia in my lab. [In] terms of work I try to give my best, during presentations, every little bit, spelling. I try to make it all perfect’. Kanchina reiterated, ‘I don’t want Koreans or anyone else to think bad of Sri Lanka’. In the shadows of these anxious desires to please, were hints of the ‘model minority’ trope, the migrant who must perform gratitude through exemplary conduct for receiving the ‘gift’ of hospitality (see Ahmed 2012). International students were both in awe and disapproving of the singular commitment to academic study demonstrated by their host country peers. This commitment or obsession with academic matters was regarded to be intensely limiting for conviviality. Josue, from Nicaragua had this to say about his Japanese peers at Osaka University: ‘They study 24/7. So, it’s natural that they don’t really spend time on developing their personality [and] social[skills]’. That the hypercompetitive culture of entry into ‘good’ universities interfered with conviviality was reinforced by international students in each of our sample universities in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, China and Japan. Echoing the views of other East Asian university officials, a senior university official at Seoul National University observed: ‘[There] are cultural differences and attitudes. So in Vietnam or in Bangkok, you just cannot do 20 hours of study but here (in Korea), we’re studying all the times’. While acknowledging that conviviality was an unfortunate casualty, Elaine, from Malaysia, found motivation in the ‘pride’ demonstrated by her Japanese peers in their work: In terms of their work ethic, they [Japanese] take a lot of pride in whatever work they do, no matter how small it is. It gives me motivation to work. [Back in Malaysia], a lot of people are slack, like they go to work just for the sake of going to work, making money.

Local specificities—how things are done, routines of work including expectations on the ‘right’ amount of time to be spent in classrooms and laboratories—are shot through with emotions and value judgements. As

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a sticky entity, time and its insertion into governance regimes, attracted all kinds of emotions simultaneously drawing in and pushing out people. Work-life balance concerned several students, particularly those studying in Korea, Japan and Singapore, sometimes enough to dissuade them from pursuing a longer-term future in these host countries. The emotional (micro) geographies of laboratories afford rich insights not only into formal learning through experimentations and discovery, but also into the politics of difference and belonging that are negotiated along national, ethnic and gender lines. Universities are of course aware that postgraduate international students choose study and institutional destinations because of access to research infrastructure. Often crammed with often expensive and sophisticated research equipment, labs come to be seen as sticky spaces filled with sticky objects. Here Yu-Shih, a Masters student from Taiwan speaks about the equipment available at Osaka University’s Frontier Lab: Amazing [lab instruments]! There’s the one instrument in our lab (T.E.M.T), that every student can use. But in Taiwan, a whole department will share just one instrument and you have to sign up for that for a month or something….

The painstaking and occasionally confounding nature of laboratory work means that students might arrive at the crack of dawn or leave in the small hours of the night. Lab mates are an important resource in this context. They embody the knowledge and experience required to master the use of complex instruments and protocols, including solving difficult problems. Careful social interactions in labs can offer comfort from disappointment and camaraderie to stave off emotions of frustration, boredom and isolation that can accompany experimental work. Bataar, from Mongolia, describes how care and generosity circulated in the spaces of his pharmaceutical laboratory at NTU, a hierarchically ordered space known for competitive pressures. The positive emotions he experienced produced through a nurturing family-like relationship connected him to the social order within the laboratory: In my lab, there is one PhD student, she’s really friendly. [Even though] her English is not so good, she always explains everything. [Its] a huge task to explain those machines! It’s pretty hard for her. But she’s like my older sister, she teaches [me] everything. [she] sits with me and teach[es], ‘this is the way’, [step] by step doing all those things.

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Proximities were created through everyday activities of sharing food and practical knowledge; warm and affirming emotions made unstinting care and generosity possible; foreign and local bodies came to be aligned into friendship ties. Labs are governed by norms that are simultaneously universal (scientific) and intensely ‘place-based’. Women postgraduates were more likely to report being caught up in hierarchies that drew boundaries around their gendered bodies. Along with language, the gendered hierarchies in labs left some concerned whether they would achieve their goals to become fully fledged internationally recognised scientists. Women international students spoke openly about their coping strategies. Xiaoling, who was studying for a Ph.D. in nanoengineering at the University of Tokyo received some handy hints from a French Ph.D. female student who herself had weathered isolation in the first two years of her candidature. She also sought out co-nationals: ‘When I meet with problems, including in my research work, I would firstly find Chinese seniors. They will give me great help’. Relations between international and Japanese women students, although constrained by language and gender norms, nonetheless resonated with goodwill. International women fashioned their conduct by observing how local peers conducted themselves, conforming to local gendered norms, usually in their styles of communication. Contact with other international students from Asia was also helpful to learn about the region’s cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. A world of multiplicity opened up in ways that were seemingly banal but nonetheless formative. Xiaoling, accustomed to a large Han-Chinese population with shared cultural festivals, was initially perplexed about the religious diversity in a single country like India: ‘There are two Indians in my lab. The Muslim one just had a major festival two weeks ago. I felt it’s very interesting, one of them celebrates and the other doesn’t!’ At the relatively young, private, Ritsumeiken Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan, formal and informal curricula were purposefully structured to teach intercultural competence to all students. The university’s ‘brand’ rested on producing repositories of ‘mobility capital’ in its graduates. First year students were expected to spend a year in university residences; service learning was included in the curriculum. For Cuifen from China, APU’s outlier status as a young institution in a semi-rural location removed from high-stakes aspirations to become ‘world-class’ and research-intensive, created institutional freedoms for academic staff to experiment with diversifying (‘internationalising’) curricula and pedagogies. On graduating Cuifen

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first worked for a European multinational stationed in Japan, before returning home to China to start her own consultancy. She describes the priorities accorded to embodied intercultural knowledge as horizon-widening: It is a new university and even though it is not too famous, [they] have very effective teaching methods. Also our teachers are very good, and our students are rather outstanding. Although we cannot compare with Tokyo U and Waseda, I find that our school is more special. I quite like it that way. For example, half of our school consists of foreigners so even though I was very young I learnt to talk to different people from different countries. Their language, culture and values were all very different, so learning from them my horizons expanded. Especially since I was an only daughter, I was more selfish and always think ‘I’m right’. But after I got to APU and meeting such different people, I had to accept others and learnt that I wasn’t always right. I think that was very important for my personal development. I became more accepting of others.

At the time of our study, academic staff in public universities throughout East Asia were facing new challenges, ranging from expectations to participate in ‘world-class’ reputation-making projects, to crippling budget cuts (faced largely by Japanese universities) requiring them to do much more with less. In these political and organisational climates, the tensions arising from corporatisation and other globalising practices were felt, with emotions of loss, anxiety, frustration, disillusionment, anger and irritation seeping into the teaching–learning nexus. The burdens of intellectual and emotional labour turned some academics away from international students. For others, encountering international students presented opportunities to refuse alienation, and to reclaim a fundamental part of intellectual labour— thoughtful teaching and mentoring (see also Gomes 2017). In these cases, academic responses were framed by empathy and admiration at the courage of students to consider overseas study. Careful teaching under conditions of rapid change and budgetary constraints is not without challenges, as academics too were conscripted into major structural changes, including university language policies. The introduction of Anglophone language policies in East Asia over the last decade were devised to govern and steer staff and students towards furthering the global profiles of individual universities. At the time of our study, Tokyo and Osaka were planning a threefold increase in English medium courses, while Seoul National University had declared English

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as a medium of instruction for 30–40% of all courses (Sharma 2011). Similar trends were found in Renmin and Sun Yat Sen Universities, which were implementing a 2001 policy directive from the Chinese government requiring 10% of courses to be delivered in English (Huang 2003). In Taiwan, only 6% of all NTU’s courses were then delivered in English but this too was being reconsidered. Singapore is an outlier in regional language politics; English was installed as the official language at independence and is credited by the governing elite for facilitating the country’s successful engagement with global circuits of capital, power and knowledge. On the one hand, these policy initiatives are problematic in that they contribute to the hegemonic status of English and entrench Anglophone dominance in global knowledge networks. On the other hand, official attempts to rescript global power/knowledge relations through language policies appeared to be unfolding in highly uneven ways. Linguistic nationalism appeared firmly in place in some settings, with some students reporting that academic staff in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China continued to teach their classes in the national language, a sign of a possible ambivalence towards Anglophone globalisation (Breaden 2018; Byun et al. 2011; Ishikawa 2011).

Spatial and Affective Imaginations 2: Friendship Housing represents an important space to inquire into the spatial practices of conviviality. In some university settings, co-nationality was used by administrators to allocate housing, a practice not always appreciated by international students who were keen to mingle. On-campus accommodation in Chinese universities was segregated as a matter of institutional policy, with all international students housed in separate facilities from local students. The regulation of visitors and visiting hours to student residences meant that spontaneous interactions were difficult to enact. Visiting students were expected to produce identification and midnight lock-out times were strictly monitored, an issue that caused some consternation as Huong, a social science undergraduate female from Vietnam explains: We are foreigners. Unlike the local students; we are more concerned [with] our freedom. Especially the students from western countries, they thought it was nothing going out and having a party in the night. If the school forces the foreign students to do anything, although it was for our well-being, it is not welcomed by us.

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Huong and the other international students succeeded in convincing the hall administration to agree to a later curfew. Their reasoning rested on a potentially problematic binary between foreign and local. Local students were portrayed as compliant subjects, content with paternalistic management, while foreign students were seen to be entitled to explanations, choices and consideration (‘they never thought about the students’ feeling’). At NUS, student housing was purposefully managed to avoid clustering by nationality and ethnicity, a reflection of the city-state’s governmentality where urban planning seeks to control the political implications potentially arising from the ethno-racialisation of spaces. The university’s residential halls maintained a requirement for cross-curricular activities of all residents, setting a context for closer encounters with difference while adding to the demands of already busy student lives. For Adila, an undergraduate from Malaysia, enduring friendships developed through being a member of a sporting team: …for the entire year, all of us will have the same goal, that’s the national competition. If a bunch of people work together for one year, ‘suffering’, all the sweat, blood, tears, then you’ll be bonded really tightly. [There is a] lot of teamwork and trust and a lot of training time. [This] automatically brings people closer.

Thrown together in the proximities of student residences and university classes, Chinese nationals encountered Taiwanese, while Singhalese students like Avanthi developed close friendships with Tamil students, a group considered ‘other’ during Sri Lanka’s civil war (‘insurgency’). ‘Having [Nirmala] as a roommate really changed my whole experience. Because of her I didn’t feel the need to be so strongly linked to Sri Lanka, because of the whole Pan-Indian thing’. Similarly, diplomatic tensions between the PRC (China) and Taiwan seemed to have little impact on the Chinese students who participated in our study. All spoke positively and often warmly about their encounters and relationships with Taiwanese students. Xiaoling’s observations were fairly typical: … going abroad to study gives you the opportunity to discuss current affairs with people from all over, to see from their perspective, their standpoint. With the Taiwanese it’s [also] another story. I chat a lot with Taiwanese. It’s really good.

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Deeper relations were made possible by shared languages, including for example between Taiwanese and Chinese. Mongolians in Chinese universities like Renmin reported closer relations with Russian-speaking international students from the Central Asian Republics. Taken collectively, some of these student experiences gesture to the potentialities of an emergent cosmopolitan sociability. Importantly, student accounts suggest that affective-discursive orthodoxies assembled by states may fall short of their aspirations to bring their citizens along. A first-hand experience of otherness opened new spaces for solidarity and empathy for some international students. Here Yu-Shih, from Taiwan situates her own experience of ‘otherness’ in the face of a perceived Japanese exceptionalism: People [in Taiwan] admire Japan very much. If there’s a product, they will go for the one made in Japan. I have [had] a really bad experience. I think the Japanese are more like Americans. Japanese think they’re the best in Asia. In Taiwan [there are] lots of workers – from Thailand, Indonesia. People look down on them. And before I got here, I’m one of them. After I got here, I made friends from Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and yeah, from that time on, I will never do that again.

Some institutions like Tokyo University organised friendship programmes to promote community interactions between international students and Japanese citizens. These were well-received and volunteers, mainly Japanese retirees (ojiisan and obaasan),3 were described as ‘very kind’. Community interactions were greatest in those instances where students had formed romantic relationships with host country nationals. Notably, our interviewees did not report encounters that might constitute dangerous hostility. Indifference was the more common experience. As a general observation, students living off-campus either by themselves or in co-national groups, reported fewer interactions with their neighbours, attributing this to a natural reticence associated with neighbourly norms and a lack of confidence in their communication skills, along with the demands of their academic schedules. International student respondents spoke of being conscious of adhering to local rules, perhaps out of anxiety to be perceived as ‘model’ minorities, and also because they were wary of the consequences of breaking foreign laws. In this respect, it would seem 3 Ojiisan is the Japanese for grandfather; Obaasan refers to grandmother.

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that the spatial and social effects of ‘studentification’ in East Asian cities unfolds differently from the United States, Britain and Australia where tensions between students and local communities are well known in relation to public spaces, housing costs and alcohol-related disturbances (Hubbard 2008; Mosey 2017). Students seemed aware that those marked corporeally as ‘other’ might experience more difficulties in forming friendships, although here again there was an ambivalence. Malaysian-Chinese students at Renmin noted that their African peers were more likely to be sought out as friends by local Chinese students because of their Anglophone cultural capital. Here, Thien Long, an undergraduate Malaysian-Chinese student at Renmin University discusses ‘the enigma of arrival’. Exposed to racialised public discourses about the ‘dangerous’ Chinese ‘other’ in Malaysia, he discovered that the markers of ‘race’, appearance and shared language were in themselves insufficient to inspire an invitation to belong to the broader collective: ….in Malaysia, I identified myself as a Chinese. But when I came to China [I] found [myself] completely different from the other Chinese here. You cannot identify yourself by race. You are a Malaysian instead. [People] [treat me] as a foreigner, despite the fact that [we] all speak Chinese.

For most students, the challenges of managing international study were made easier by positive co-national relations. Students used their conational peers as a source of emotional and in some cases, intellectual support in navigating problems relevant to their research. Elaine elaborates on her links with other Malaysian students: …we try to meet regularly. They are an important part of my support group. Any free time we get, for example, Christmas or Chinese New Year, we try to get together and be very ‘Malaysian’ you know. We try to cook Malaysian food, do Malaysian things like play mah-jong in the Malaysian way

On the whole, international students were wary about discussing the politics of their home countries, seeing this as a potentially divisive topic if not a taboo and carefully choosing who they might discuss their views with. Regardless, the experiences of being overseas impinged on their political subjectivities, a topic that we examine in Chapter 6. Socialities established outside of the university were also important. Church was experienced as a hospitable and caring space offering respite

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from loneliness and the stresses of studying. ‘I need to socialize with people, to have a normal life, a balanced life because life is stressful. I go to church where the environment is very international’, observed Aina, from Madagascar. For Elaine, a search for community encouraged her to attend church, an unfamiliar ritual that she did not practise in her home country: ‘On Sundays, I go to church. I didn’t go in Malaysia, I only started going here. I think it’s more of a community sort of thing, I just wanted to get to know more people’. Encounters with faith-based communities, often involving music, singing and communal worship, set the context for students to recalibrate their sensory worlds, disrupting the intellectual worlds of research and education that characterise everyday life and opening new subjective possibilities. Notwithstanding the many transitions they faced, most of our respondents experienced international study as transformative. They encountered different social and cultural normativities and acquired embodied knowledges such as language skills (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean), crosscultural communicative competence (‘ …learned how to deal with people from everywhere’) and resilience (‘open-minded’, ‘ambitious’, ‘…can probably go work anywhere and not feel intimidated’). Kanchina, the Sri Lankan undergraduate student in Korea, observed: In my field, construction, like Korea is constructing Dubai [and] Singapore. So compared to my country, the technology is amazing. Quality of education, of what they’re teaching here, is a really good standard. Language is the only problem. [Everything] that you have to go through, is worth it.

Through creative strategies of self-governance, students negotiated their entry into new communities of emplacement, drawing on emotional networks of co-nationals, other international students, select host country students, neighbours and church congregations. In short, students may have been subjected to logics of containment produce by language, race and nationality, but sought to actively rework power relations and spatial practices to form new connections and ties.

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Spatial and Affective Imaginations 3: Technology-Mediated Relationships with Family and Home Distance and displacement drive home realisations of how important ‘home’ is. It is often the emotional alchemy of familial love that draws people to imagine returning home or staying within the region. Sarah, a Malaysian studying for a Ph.D. in Biomedicine in Tokyo, expressed a quiet wonder at how distance had reshaped family relationships. Bonds, once taken for granted, assumed a clarity once they were stretched over space and time: [The] first thing that changed in my life [after I got here] is the relationship [with] my family. We [my family] now tend to express ourselves better. [My] father, would say “I love you”. We would tell people “I love you”. When I was back in Malaysia, [we were] the typical Asian family, keep[ing] the feelings inside.

Both young men and women reported wanting to either return home or stay closer in the region instead of seeking positions in Australia, Europe or North America. Students spoke of caring for their ageing parents and grandparents, of wanting to see their nieces and nephews growing up: ‘…my sister has two boys. I really miss my nephews. I don’t like this feeling that they don’t really know me’, observed Aina. The contemporary international student is able to maintain physical, emotional and virtual co-presence with family and friends because of sophisticated technologies of communication and affordable transport unexperienced by past generations of students (see also Boccagni and Baldassar 2015; Robertson 2013). Skype, QQ (the Chinese version of Skype), Facebook, Xionei, (the Chinese version of Facebook) and WeChat, were used, sometimes on a daily basis to connect to family and friends, drawing students into the everydayness of places of origin and their networks of friends and family. Sarah managed to maintain her long-distance relationship through reciprocal twice-yearly visits and regular calls to her boyfriend in Malaysia. Huong spoke of daily communication with her family in Vietnam and regular visits home: ‘My mother will be online every day. Our relationship is very close. [I have been] back twice a year’. The domestication of technology in students’ lives and those of their families opens new possibilities for retaining feelings of being ‘in place’

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and ‘at home’ (emotional emplacements). Technology links, nurtures and supports while also capturing and containing. Students counted on the emotional labour of their families from a distance. They rearticulated intimate relations with friends to navigate the pressures of international study, from getting practical help with university assignments, to alleviating social isolation. Closeness or sociality was maintained and amplified, making for a smoother return home for some. Xiaoling described close contact with her friends and senior who had returned home to China, commenting that this source, a ‘mini BBS’,4 would allow her to access emotional and employment support on her return to China. Digital technologies are known to enable countries to exercise surveillance over sojourning students from afar, a point we explore in Chapter 5 when we examine the use of emotionalisation strategies by states to govern their nationals from a distance. Emotions now stand to become digital inscriptions that can be stored, relayed further afield, compared and contrasted and used as a means to measure patriotism. Families also engage in surveillance and control, albeit of a different kind. The affordances of technology-mediated communication allow cultural norms to overcome space. Various injunctions are circulated, adhering to students’ bodies, ostensibly to limit ‘dangers’ of transgressions whether those relate to gender relations or sexual or religious practices (Matsui 1995; Sondhi and King 2017; Walton-Roberts 2015). Rather than representing a phase where women can exercise autonomy over their choice of friends, their bodies, and ultimately, their destinies, the study sojourn may also be subject to digitally mediated surveillance (Martin 2017; Walton-Roberts 2015). In the extended vignette below, Avanthi from Sri Lanka describes how the ‘affective bandwidth’ afforded by Skype allowed situated cultural norms to travel to contain her: … In Sri Lanka, when you go for a wedding they’ll be nagging, [but] my standard reply would be, ‘No man is better than the wrong man, leave me alone’, and then they’d be like ‘Oh my god, she’s got such a bad mouth…!’ [But] my parents feel the pressure. [My] mother’s old teacher actually called her and said, ‘You have to get your daughter married, there’s no excuse for you to sit here like a lazy bum’. My parents were like, ‘do you have anybody?’ I said ‘No, [the university] doesn’t give you time for romance’. That’s my 4 BBS or Bulletin Board System is the preferred term over Forum on Chinese websites.

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grand excuse so that they’ll leave me alone. I got a huge blasting ‘if [the university] doesn’t give you time, you’re going to be 29 when you leave…’. I cried buckets, ‘you’re forcing me’. [This happened] [through Skype] when I was in Australia while doing my fieldwork.

Avanthi was keenly aware of the multi-scalar tensions framing her personal aspirations and those of family and community. She reasoned that communal pressure was leaning in, steering her parents to bring her into line with traditional feminine roles and responsibilities—marriage and reproduction. Her family’s integrity in these circumstances rested on adhering to and legitimising the authority of the heterosexual patriarchal unit. Their ontological security rested on being seen as a ‘good’ family, and this required all their members to uphold the ‘correctness’ of gendered, racialised and generational power relations. Their arguably calculated accommodation (and resistance) to these norms proceeded in fits and starts, intensifying as she approached the end of her 20s. Where geographic distance may once have opened up new spaces for rejecting and/or reworking imposed gendered subjectivities such as the virtuous woman, the dutiful daughter or the gatekeeper of traditions, digital connectivity can now bring emotional discourses to bear on women’s autonomy to self-determine. While widening personal, intellectual and professional horizons, international study also demands a renegotiation of norms associated with the established ‘feminine life course’ such as marriage and children.

Concluding Comments An encounter implies something unexpected, perhaps strange. It also carries connotations of conflict and hence uncertain outcomes. (Walters 2012, 143)

The ambiguity that frames encounters, as Walters observes, is confirmed in our analysis of the visual, imaginative and material spaces fostered by a ‘Rising Asia’ of world-class universities. By paying attention to students’ encounters in the physical and virtual worlds of learning, friendships groups and long-distance family networks, Chapter Four examined the prospects for cosmopolitan sociabilities and endeavours to enlist them into governmental projects.

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Our empirical accounts of their emotional encounters offer a richer portrait of student lives, experiences and subjectivities, beyond the muchcited ‘neoliberal’ trope of utility-maximising, rational subject. Students also exceeded other ascribed positionings, such as dutiful filial subject and loyal nationalist. Our findings suggest that attempts by states and institutions to steer student emotions and intimacies towards particular modes of subjectification defy pre-determination, confirming above all, that governmentalities of goodwill and loyalty are fragile projects. Convivial relations between international and host country students were certainly desired and often successful. At other times and places, their languaging into deficit subjectivities meant that students were hindered from making deep and meaningful friendships. When habituated into punishing study schedules, some host country students were indifferent to gestures made by languagechallenged international students. Other international students though, described experiencing warm and affirming relations with the host country and other international students. We return to the theme of fragile governmentalities of goodwill in the final two chapters where we discuss in more detail the emergent political subjectivities of students.

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CHAPTER 5

‘Feeling Regional’

Abstract This chapter moves the scale upward to explore the productive tensions as students seek to articulate their personal projects of regionalism. In other words, we explore emplacement from a regional scale. The different ways in which Asia is articulated by transnational students confirms our thesis about the partiality of the rational, utility-seeking Asian student and the need to unsettle this dominant subjectivity. Asia is imagined by students differently: as an economic space, with employment and professional opportunities, and as an affective space. Calling on genealogical insights, the chapter ends with an exploration of other expressions of region-making, from precolonial to imperial regionalisms, from the aspirations of anti-racial Pan-Asianism to the competitive nationalisms fostered by Cold War geopolitics. Keywords Region-making · Affective regionalism · Pan-Asianism · Nationalisms

Introduction Chapter 4 concluded with the observation that collective encounters of ‘international education’ can produce the unanticipated in subject-making; that rather than occupying assigned positions such as utility-maximising © The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_5

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human capital or putative global talent, students and moved in and out of a variety of subject positions. Building on this theme of plurality, this chapter explores students’ post-study trajectories. Our intention is to examine the possibilities held out by transnational education for students to acquire a ‘feel’ for the region in the wake of a new, admittedly inchoate order in Pacific Asia. The chapter analyses the emotionalisation strategies that students are caught up in as they navigate their futures in and out of Asia. Through these explorations, we offer a genealogical snapshot of Asian regionalisms, paying attention to the emotional discourses that enabled earlier expressions of region-making including ‘imperial regionalisms’— colonial discourses and practices that took hold and established themselves in the life of postcolonial institutions. This sets the context for the final chapter, which explores what it might take for alternative forms of regionalisms to take hold. We begin the chapter with a short discussion of how we use and interpret regionalism.

Conceptualising Regionalism ‘How, where and why does a region appear?’ In raising this question, Prasenjit Duara (2010) argues for a historical sensibility to understand Rising Asia as one iterative form of region-making. In a similar vein and inspired by governmentality studies, Wendy Larner and William Walters (2002) question the political rationalities used to legitimise regionalism. What, they ask, are the moral, epistemological and discursive aspects of regionalism? Specifically, what ends are being sought in making the moral case for regionalism? Economic competitiveness? Distributive justice? Each of these ends frames qualitatively different emotional geographies, different sets of feelings towards the region. Put another way, the task of research is to inquire into the technologies of power that have made regionalism an object of knowledge and the focus of policy intervention. Allied to this is the broader question about the kinds of emotions called on to give regionalism its coherence and force. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1998b) reminds us that Asia is one of the most durable and ubiquitous tools to understand the human world. It is ‘empirical and conceptual, distinct and vague, tacit and contested’ (MorrisSuzuki in Breaden 2018, 3). By taking Japan as a site from which to examine Asia’s discursive construction, multiple interpretations materialise a space of markets, a geopolitical and cultural identity, a capability or habitus, a set of policies and an epistemological sensibility—‘Asia as method’. The

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latter, an approach attributed to Japanese Sinologist Yoshimi Takeuchi and popularised in the Anglophone academic literature by Taiwanese intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010, 5–6), argues for Asia and not the ‘West’, to be used as a reference point for how non-western societies conceive their identities. We take two points from the literature on regionalism: First, there is a need to unsettle the linear and evolutionary forms of thought that seek to portray contemporary expressions of Asian regionalisation, specifically its spatialisation, as capitalist and as a natural and inevitable part of ‘globalisation’. Second, there is much to be gained by considering the emotional discourses that enable region-making’s epistemological and discursive aspects to take hold. In what follows, we analyse how the region is experienced by and through international study, by discussing post-educational trajectories.

Feeling Regional 1: Families as Affective and Spatial Anchors Family, as we showed in Chapter 4, was an important consideration in selecting an Asian study destination. Family also influenced post-study plans, whether to return home, stay on in the host country, choose a third country in Asia or move further afield. Bao, an alumnus of Renmin University, had this to say about why he returned to Vietnam instead of staying on in China to work: I am the only child in my family. My parents [are] unwilling for me to move to a faraway place.

For Nari, a Korean-Chinese postgraduate student at Korea University, her status as an only child weighed heavily on her mind in formulating future plans. In the extended vignette, she described the conflict she experienced in relation to her post-study plans, torn between future opportunities in the United States and caring for her ageing father, a factory worker whose emotional vulnerability was a matter of some concern for her: I have always wanted to go to Europe or the States. To be honest, I am indeed using Korea as a stepping-stone to go to the States.

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Maybe my father will want me to stay in the States or somewhere else for the benefit of my own career development. But as a daughter, I wouldn’t feel ok if I let my old father live all alone at home. If I ask my father to live with me overseas, maybe he would be ok for a short period of time. But in a long run, he will feel lonely since he can’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t speak English. So, my first choice in the future is going back to China. I need to put my father as my priority factor in terms of where I will live.

Nari’s emotions shone through in this brief vignette. She felt her father’s vulnerability intensely and resolved to ensure that he did not end his days ‘living all alone’. Cultural norms of filial piety seem not to have spared Asia from what has been described in some quarters as a global epidemic of loneliness (see Holt-Lunstad et al. 2015; Smith 2018). Avanthi, also an only child, reported feeling disturbed by her parents’ encouragement not to return to Sri Lanka on completion of her postgraduate education: They [parents] say they have no expectations. I actually believe it’s true. I don’t like it. I don’t like the fact that they say that they don’t want me to be in Sri Lanka. Because they know that career prospects, and life in general, it’s not as good as if I were to be living in somewhere else.

In all three accounts, deep emotions were invoked to suggest a subject concerned with care and compassion, far removed from the cold and instrumental reasoning popularised by research literature on the utilityseeking Asian student. Other students in our study spoke about a lack of faith in their national governments, seen as failing to enact policies that would give citizens opportunities. For their parents, this presented difficult choices. Loving your child(ren) meant letting them go to places where they might flourish in their careers, even if this meant losing their companionship and care in old age. Emotions of love came to be contained to the private spheres, limited to episodic encounters such as holidays and intimate conversations on Skype. That stated, familial love and attachment also figure as governmental projects, as ‘technologies of love’ (see D’Aoust 2013) materialising as tourist revenues, remittance flows and immigration and labour policies deployed to manage the ‘care deficits’ arising from the mobilities of Asia’s young people for greener pastures (Huang et al. 2012). Development policies, as a rule, do not consider these kinds of family coherences and reunifications as the legitimate focus of public policy. The rights of citizens to familial love and intimacy are deemed to fall outside of the calculations of policymakers (see D’Aoust 2013).

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Akari, a graduate from Asia Pacific University at Beppu, Japan, was also influenced by family ties to remain in Asia. Having moved to Japan with her Indonesian mother and Japanese step-father at the age of 10, she was ambivalent about remaining in Japan in the long term, citing different social norms around work (‘It’s a good country but if you are going to work there, [there isn’t] any private life of anything’). The opportunity to return to Southeast Asia, first to Indonesia and then onwards to Singapore was influenced by her Indonesian heritage and ties. My mother said, ‘why don’t you just go to Jakarta, Indonesia? You don’t know anything about it. So, I went back to Jakarta [and] I stayed for 4 years working. I grew my network. Then, after that, Jakarta, [I] chose Singapore. [It’s] a hub in Southeast Asia. [I] am in logistics so there’s a lot of cargo incoming and a lot of cargo [outgoing].

Family and perceived cultural synergies thus motivated students to first choose an Asian study destination and thereafter to consider employment. State policies also weigh in, producing sticky emotions in their wake. Students like Nari who formed part of the Korean diaspora from China, Central Asia, Russia, Japan or the United States, were given preferential immigration and education access to Korean universities and often scholarship support. The presence of siblings and other extended family helped to make Asia sticky. To this, we add growing awareness among students and graduates of the hardening of borders in the ‘west’, especially the United States. This meant that future visits by family could be complicated and filial responsibilities might be more difficult to discharge. Women observed the importance of calling on the practical and emotional resources of their mothers and extended family when starting their own families. These insights indicate an ongoing spatial compression of geographic and professional horizons by students, swaying and steering them to take up employment opportunities in Asia. Summing up, the spatial stretch of East Asian universities through international student recruitment requires further research and policy engagements with the thorny issue of demographic decline. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all registered some of the steepest decline in school leaver populations with flow-on effects for postgraduate education (Sharma 2018). Once a pillar of Asia’s ‘compressed modernization’, state-sponsored anti-natalist policies have presided over sharply declining total fertility rates

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(Ochiai 2011). The economic and social effects of these seismic demographic changes are still unfolding. Chronic labour shortages are envisaged, raising questions about the viability of social security systems. The capacities of families to discharge their generational care responsibilities are also of concern, while policies to recruit migrant labour as stop-gap measures have produced additional challenges, in extreme cases, producing xenophobic sentiments.

Feeling Regional 2: Spatialising Economic and Employment Opportunities For some students, staying in Asia made the most sense as it was seen as a space teeming with opportunities. For Ngoc, Vietnam, her home country presented the greatest opportunities. When asked whether she would return to Vietnam after her studies, she replied: Yes, I will because it will be near to my parents and there are quite a lot of opportunities in Vietnam. You can be rich if you know how to do it. I think if I go back to Vietnam, I will have some advantages compared to other people.

These advantages—place-based, networks of social capital—could be mobilised to further economic ends, as she explained: I grew up in the central district of Hanoi and around me, people are very highly educated. They work for the government; they are very nice and they treat people like family members, I think I’m blessed to be there. [My] grandparents used to work for the government. They have a high position in the government. And my neighbours’ parents and grandparents all worked for the government and they all have high positions. It’s a good location to grow up in.

Ngoc elaborated on why she considered Vietnam as a space of immense opportunities: In Vietnam, people are very proactive. They take the initiative to do business and they take the initiative to get rich and they can adapt to any environment. They are very dynamic. I think if you throw me to any environment, I think I will survive and I can respond quite quickly. In Vietnam, we don’t really complain too much because if we complain, then we have to complain all day…

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Ngoc’s business skills were well-honed, the legacy of working in various part-time jobs during university study both in Vietnam and later in Singapore. She had worked as a teacher’s aide in a private English language kindergarten in Hanoi where she supported foreign early childhood teachers. She later juggled study with a part-time job in an Italian restaurant in Singapore. In comparing her prospects in Singapore with returning to Vietnam, she drew on a set of sharply contrasting spatialities: Singapore was perceived and felt as an over-regulated space; the state’s benevolent paternalism was restrictive. Citizens simply had to follow the state’s script and this robbed them of something—initiative—as well as stoicism and tolerance of disorder: In terms of technology, in terms of the system, in terms of environment and protection; [Singapore is] so very advanced and we feel blessed to be here, in a very good environment. It’s very safe and everything is there for you and your job is just how to utilize it. That’s the thing ! [People] do not take the initiative to contribute … the way has been planned for them and they just go along…

Vietnam, in comparison, embodied chaos. Its pollution and trafficclogged roads, corruption, and disorder meant ‘being active’ and having to ‘deal with different kinds of things’: It’s dirty and not very well-organised. It’s not very systematic and people … how the Chinese says it’s a “hong bao”. It’s buzzing over there in Vietnam, which you don’t find it here. Being at home, I feel active every day. I have to deal with different kinds of things. It’s both good and bad.

Ngoc went on to explain that hong bao (or ‘ang pow’) was a metaphor for corruption, a gift of money ‘under the table’. But this did not perturb her unduly. Prioritising wealth accumulation ahead of public goods, such as clean air and good governance, created few dissonances for Ngoc. She focused on developing her entrepreneurial capabilities using her networks of social capital that were drawn from her political and class-based emplacements. As we discuss later, Ngoc was also building new networks, this time with people encountered through her study sojourn. A fundamental part of

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this network building was the re-subjectification of her ‘communist’ subjectivity. Collectively, these self-steering affective practices were aimed at achieving her end goal of wealth accumulation. A decidedly more complicated perception of Asia as an economic cum affective space was offered by other graduates such as Zhou, a native of Shanghai who spent five and a half years in Osaka where he completed his Masters and Ph.D. in information engineering, specialising in robotics. Zhou’s career trajectory saw him working with Japanese, Chinese and western multinational firms in both Japan and China. While his situated knowledge and networks of social capital were called on by his employers, his career trajectory, with postings all over Japan, suggested a more complex positioning beyond that of a China specialist. When interviewed, he had returned to Shanghai accompanied by his family. His wife, also an alumnus of Osaka University, had just landed an academic position in a Chinese university and the couple’s two children were enrolled in Japanese language primary schools in Shanghai. Having secured Japanese permanent residency, the couple left open the possibility of returning to Japan in the future. Zhou credited his Ph.D. training in Japan for steering him towards a particular mode of professional subjectivity, one that privileged innovativeness, cooperation, diligence and high standards of probity. He had an executive position in a Chinese technology company and had set in motion his plans to develop a robotics company in Shanghai. He expressed emotions of warmth, goodwill and care towards Japan and the Japanese people, sentiments that are usually missed from official news reporting which, in contrast, tends to focus on hostility between Japan and China: ‘I would like to contribute to research and create employment for people in Japan. I also hope to collaborate with Japanese universities’. Li Jie, who had completed a doctorate in Japan in material sciences, traced a different pathway in returning to China. After ten years working in a research institute in Japan, he returned to China, unaccompanied by his family who chose to remain in Japan: ‘I felt strongly about returning to China and making a contribution to my country. My [Chinese] wife disagreed. I wanted my son to further his study in an English-speaking country but respected his own decision [to study at Tokyo University]’. In both these examples, emotions function as spatial practices, drawing together places, institutions, families and individuals into networks that straddle the instrumental and the emotional, dissolving the boundaries between public and private, social and economic, reason and emotion.

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Asia, in short was experienced as a space of economic/career opportunities as well as a space of lasting emotional connections. Boonshree from Thailand completed her a Ph.D. in biotechnology in Japan, choosing to write her thesis in English. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University for a few years, after which she returned home to Thailand. For Boonshree, returning to Thailand meant turning her back on an international research career to take up a teaching-focused academic position. She was inspired by her Japanese professors who advised her to ‘go home and teach my expertise in fermentation technology to Thai students’. Reflecting on the contrasting research cultures of Japan and the United States, she noted: In the US, you have to express your thinking, so you need a brave heart. But what I learned in Japan was more about modesty, kindness and consideration for others. Japanese culture is not very different from Thai culture. People are polite, peaceful.

While this might be a simplistic and idealistic picture, i.e. ‘seeing’ a correspondence between Thai and Japanese ‘culture’, the point of this example concerns the importance of emotions in spatially anchoring subjects including those considered ‘highly skilled’, ‘foreign talent’. Policies are likely to ‘fail’ when misrecognitions are imposed, such as those which assume and seek to perpetuate singular subjectivities. Imaginaries of Asia as an economic space also materialised through the investment regimes of multinational corporations, political actors such as states and the plans and opportunities of individual students. Li Wei, a Sociology graduate of Ritsumeikan University chose to leave Japan and return home to Singapore. When interviewed he was employed by a Japanese company in a sales-related position acquired within a few weeks of returning home. He believed that having access to Japanese language skills improved his employability in a period of economic downturn: I came back to Singapore and [in my first week] I deposited my resume to JAC. It’s a human resource company which helps Japanese speakers find jobs. They test[ed] my Japanese speaking ability, and Chinese and Englishspeaking abilities. After the first week, I went for [a] series of interviews all [with] Japanese companies.

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Japanese companies recruit on the basis that we can speak Japanese. I have a friend who graduated from NUS and she was out of job for 8 months before finding her first job. So, compared to her, I guess I’m very lucky because NUS is a reputable local university and if she had a hard time to find a job, can’t imagine if I graduated from Australia…I might take 6 or 7 months to find my first job.

Li Wei’s mother was employed by a Japanese company and access to this cultural know-how may also have been a factor in his early success in melding his expectations with those of a potential employer, although he did not make any direct references to this potential influence: [W]hen you get recruited by a Japanese company they expect you to work for some time, to mould you to suit their company ideals and philosophy. [They] care about loyalty and on the job training.

Li Wei seemed agreeable to this emotional ‘moulding’, accepting a mode of subjectification that valorised loyalty and respect for ‘company ideals and philosophy’. We note too, that others in our sample arrived at different evaluations of the gendered subjectifications required to become ‘salary men’. As we noted in the previous chapter, students’ interest in Asian study destinations such as Japan and Korea was augmented by the presence of their multinationals throughout Southeast Asia (Breaden 2018; Collins et al. 2017). Moving from home countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand to Japan and Korea was regarded as a ‘vertical movement’—i.e. to a more ‘developed’ or ‘advanced’ space. The growing attractiveness of China as a study destination and acquisition of Chinese language skills can be read along similarly pragmatic lines, although here optimism was generated by the development policies of the Chinese state, such as those associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. Horizontal movements were also discernible, for example, students moving from Hong Kong or Japan to Taiwan (see Rivza and Teichler 2007; Teichler et al. 2011, for a discussion of vertical and horizontal movements). Plans by students and graduates to mobilise acquired repositories of cultural and linguistic capital for employability and career progression, helped to give coherence to the socio-spatial imaginary of Asia as an economic space. Dhin, who graduated from Renmin University and returned home to Vietnam after a stint in Beijing working for a multinational, was positive

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about the employability prospects afforded by linguistic capital, in this case, Chinese: Many [Vietnamese] people are choosing the China market. [People from] China come over [to Vietnam] and [trade here]. [In] China, people…slowly [beginning to] study Vietnamese language.

For Tien, a Vietnamese student at Renmin University in international relations, opportunities in an Asia driven by a reinvigorated China were uppermost in considering her study destination: I did consider [studying in Taiwan] but Vietnam had established diplomatic relations with China. Vietnam had to admit there was only one China. At that time, Taiwan [offered] a good education. Maybe even better than Beijing in some areas. But because of the relationships between Taiwan and mainland China, my mother was more concerned, ‘What would happen if it [the degree from Taiwan] is not recognized by the time you come back?’ So, I came to Beijing.

Akiyoshi, a Japanese national posted by the Mitsubishi Research Institute to Singapore, took advantage of a company-based programme to support employees in further study. He chose to study for an MBA at NUS, with company support: I was working at Mitsubishi Research Institute as a regional economy analyst in 1994. Asian countries were growing so rapidly and many Japanese companies were paying attention to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I had a lot of opportunities to visit [these] Asian countries. I was very very familiar with [them] and my research institute was trying to make me even more specialized into this region.

Akiyoshi made a very different decision from colleagues who chose MBA programmes at Harvard, MIT and Stanford Universities. Choosing a study destination in Asia was a self-formation practice to formalise and extend his situated business knowledge while acknowledging the ‘value’ of being a specialist in Asian regionalism: [If] I am supposed to be a specialist in [the] Asian region, maybe it would be great experience for me to study in Asian countries. [Okay], I’d like to study in Asian country.

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Akiyoshi would later call on the repositories of situated institutional and cultural capital acquired from living, studying and working in Asia to further his career. He subsequently returned to Japan to work for a US multinational management consultancy. Choices like his indicate a possible loosening of the symbolic social and cultural capital associated with elite business school credentials in the future. Region-making through study thus operates on spatial inclusions and exclusions. Asia in the vignette above is enacted as an educational and geopolitical space with one China. This imagining and legitimating of a single China in the international order of nation-states eclipses those voices that seek to stake a claim for Taiwan’s political sovereignty. Asia is also imagined as an uneven space, made up of countries that are ‘rising’ and countries that are ‘stagnant’. Students and alumni spoke of being drawn to dynamic spatialities within Asia, even as reservations were expressed, like this one from Li Wei: ‘Singapore is the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia. So, it tends to be like a magnet and it sucks people from developing countries to Singapore to work’. For other students such as Ngoc, Asia is framed in and through a perception of their home country and its viability as a space of unfettered economic opportunities. This is hardly surprising given that regionalism in Asia is taking place ‘under capitalist liberalisation and state-sponsored restructuring’ (Duara 2010). Unsurprisingly then, the moral basis of region-making continues to be one of economic competitiveness, anchored in ‘neoliberal’ circumstances. As international students in a ‘Rising Asia’, Ngoc and others in our study were captive to a specific and particular spatial imaginary of Asia, featuring the free-flowing mobilities of ‘talent’, those who ‘attend to financial flows, knowledge economies, and corporatisation’. The very same imaginary of Rising Asia ‘contains the poor and privatizes public goods’ (Duara 2010, 983). Li (2014) rightfully cautions against portraying Asia as a space liberated from the ‘periphery’ now taking its (rightful) place as the centre of capitalist futures. For Li, this kind of hyper-optimism increases the possibilities of ‘orientalist’ and ‘anachronistic’ forms of thought continuing apace (see also Raghuram et al. 2014). Such expressions of region-making bear uncanny resemblances to projects initiated by European colonial empires. Duara (2010) presents an argument for imagining and enacting Asia differently, pointing to the possibilities afforded by transnational histories of Asia.

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The scope of this chapter does not permit us to engage at a deep theoretical level with Asia’s transnational histories, an expansive body of interdisciplinary literature. What we appropriate from this magisterial canon are insights unsettle the normative image of Asian societies as static and immobile before European colonisation. Instead the region is read as a crucible for a precocious form of globalisation (Abu-Lughod 1991; Frank 2010; Pomeranz 2000). As an assemblage of cultures, economies, places and people-to-people interactions, precolonial Asia—an interconnected space of long-distance commodity markets extending from the South China to the Red Seas—was animated by intricate cross-cultural exchanges and incipient forms of cosmopolitanisms. People-to-people encounters pivoted around buying and selling commodities—high-grade glass and ceramics from China, organic objects from Southeast Asia, pearls, incense, spices and timber from Africa, used for building sea-worthy Arab shipping vessels (see Abu-Lughod 1991; Stargardt 2014). This was a qualitatively different kind of region-making from imperial region-making projects performed through colonial governmentalities, as we show in the next section.

Genealogical Readings of Another Asia Genealogical insights hold out the promise of uncovering the risks and possibilities arising from contemporary region-making activities. The task of researchers is to turn their gaze onto the different articulations and disarticulations, continuities and discontinuities that have shaped discourses of Asia in the past as well as the present (Duara 2010). Arguing in favour of genealogies that acknowledge the co-evalness of space and time, Mbembe warns against the wholesale adoption of ‘presentism’ in research methodology. Presentism is described as ‘a model of misrecognition which operates on the segmentation of time, excising the past and deferring the future’ (Shipley et al. 2010, 656). It is with this background in mind, that we turn to the governing rationalities and cultural repertoires used to legitimise a dominant socio-spatial imaginary of Asia as a space of capitalist markets, ‘Rising’ Asia. Few would argue that contemporary Asia is a space strongly supportive of capitalist activities, enacted through the policy schemas of nation-states, aimed towards harnessing and commodifying the factors of production such as land and water. These rationalities are given momentum and certainty through the institutionalisation of property rights (Duara 2010; Li

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2014). This is a spatial imaginary first set in motion by European imperial regionalisms and later given institutional grounding by and through the nationalisms that took form in a context of Cold War animosities. The durability of this spatially hegemonic project has rested on its emotional appeal, which we explore next. Emotions also govern the conditions for alternative regionalist imaginaries, a theme we explore albeit briefly, in our discussions of nations and nationalisms. Imperial region-making projects used nationalist and racialised logics to justify their aspirations. By the end of the nineteenth century, new imperial agents—Japan, Soviet Russia, and the United States—emerged, keen to distinguish themselves from the older imperial powers of France, Britain and the Netherlands. They reconfigured their imperial aspirations, using logics of modernisation, while retaining sentiments of cultural exceptionalism (Duara 2010; Aydin 2007, 2017). A binary between reason and emotion was conscripted to ‘develop’ subject people, who, it was argued, were prone to ‘excessive emotionalism’, ‘superstitious’, ‘fatalistic’ and ‘reactionary’ (Adas 2010, 71–75), qualities that rendered them backward in scientific and technological attainments, then considered to be uniquely western capabilities. Emotions crystallised the morality of the work of those servicing the colonial project, from soldiers and administrators, to teachers and medical personnel. Imperialism was also an epistemological project. To harness value from the extraordinary diversity of landscapes, new knowledges were developed and given disciplinary form. Geography, statistics and anthropology flourished (Gough 1968; Pels 1997). New institutions were set up, drawing on metropolitan exemplars; colonial languages were introduced through the development of education institutions (Hall 2008; Clayton 1995; Willinksy 1998). At the height of the European imperial project, three loosely configured political and intellectual movements—Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism and Pan-Islamism—challenged the moral foundations of imperialism. Enabled by flows of migrants and modern technologies of print, telegraph and steamship travel, their adherents were united in seeking to ‘…erode the legitimacy of an uneven and imperial international order based on colonial hegemony and race discrimination’ (Aydin 2013, 18). Intellectuals such as Dubois, Tagore, Zhang, Lu Xun, Tenshin, Al-Afghani and Syed Ameer Ali, faced the formidable task of recovering and resituating the intellectual and aesthetic contributions of non-western cultures in the face of an aggressive ideology of racial supremacy. Racialised discourses of Islamophobia

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and narratives of ‘yellow peril’ were openly espoused by leading western politicians and intellectuals (Aydin 2013; Low 2003). Into this melange arrived the rationality of Social Darwinism. An ideoscape with scientific legitimacy, Social Darwinism travelled to Asia through the bodies of international students returning from the United States, Britain and Europe, many intent on using their newfound knowledges to break from the past. The Qing-era intellectual Yan Fu, returning to China after studying in United States was a strong advocate of using Social Darwinism in nation-building. China’s defeat at the hands of imperial powers was now understood as a weakness in its body politic. If the country was to reclaim its sovereignty from foreign powers, the moral and physical revival of its citizenry had to be urgently undertaken (Mitter 2013). Republican-sponsored nationalist discourse was no less enthusiastic. Sun Yat Sen’s minzu zhuyi (translated literally as ‘the doctrine of the people’s lineage’, see Leibold 2004) reflected these impulses. The struggle to build a republic was subsequently framed as a racial war between the Manchu-led monarchy and the republicans. Social Darwinism also influenced relations within the region. It rationalised Japan’s position as racially ‘superior’ to its Asian neighbours, since it had ‘exited’ from Asia through Meiji-era modernisation (Low 2003; Morris-Suzuki 1998a). Korea’s and Taiwan’s engagement with racial and Social Darwinist ideologies—different again—were heavily mediated by their status as colonies of Japan. Both were regarded as ‘racially backward’ places in need of modernist intervention, this time by an emerging Asian power, Japan. China would itself be subjected and dominated through the racialised script of Social Darwinism at the hands of Japan, although this did not stop its ‘reformers’ including the Chinese Communist Party under Mao from embracing of Social Darwinism (Mitter 2013; Duara 1995). Although not a formal state-sponsored ideology, the drive to emulate western imperial powers through modernisation produced a tolerance, if not a whole-hearted acceptance for Social Darwinist logics among Korea’s elites (Tikhonov 2016). Residues of this thinking would re-emerge after the Asian Financial Crisis. What is notable in these discussions are the contestations within the broader community of political leaders, intellectuals and scholars at the height of the imperial project. Intellectuals who were well-versed in the arts of the west as well as in non-western aesthetics, knowledges and languages, sought to introduce ethico-philosophical norms that stressed education, self-contemplation, and ‘correct’ behaviour to create ‘a society in

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balance’, shaped by mutual obligations between governors and the governed. Their attempts would be roundly defeated by their peers, who fell prey to ‘pragmatism’, leading to an acceptance of the racialising logics of Social Darwinism (Mitter 2013). Reflecting on these lost opportunities, Amelung and Holbig (2016, 309) had this to say about the practices of statecraft in ancient China, Korea, and Japan: Asian intellectual traditions paid a high degree of attention to the protection of weaker groups of society and those exposed to different kinds of calamities. East Asian states for centuries have gone to considerable lengths to put these ideas into practice. One actually could go one step further and include nonhuman interests in this observation, such as, for example, the protection of certain animals.

They go on to argue, prefacing the work of Wong (1997) that …China’s state-sponsored granaries for famine relief during the dynastic era represented official commitments to material welfare beyond anything imaginable, let alone achieved, in Europe. To think of state concerns for popular welfare as a very recent political practice makes sense only if we again limit ourselves to Western examples.

Traditional East Asian practices of statecraft were sophisticated mediations, seeking to manage the tensions between cultural attainment and martial valour. But in the face of an encroaching and increasingly entrenched western imperialism, normative masculinity veered towards the martial end. In The Emperor’s Sons Go to War, Morris Low (2003) documents the reworking of Japanese masculinity to build a distance between the Japanese and other East Asians; the aesthetic re-subjectification of the Japanese male as a samurai was used to justify Japan’s imperialist impulses. Nationalist art captured the rise of new modes of racial nationalism. Analysing depictions of the Sino-Japanese war, Low found that the Chinese were portrayed in a ‘…. cowardly light, with protruding cheekbones, mouths agape, and effeminate pigtails, while the Japanese were portrayed more nobly, with European facial features, smart haircuts and military-style moustaches’ (83). In Asia for the Asians, Paula Harrell (2012), argues for a complication of the normative historical reading of Japan–China relations. She uses the biographies of key Japanese officials, invited to China to advise on public security, education and law in the final decades of the nineteenth century as

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her sources. Her profile of Atsumaro Konoe, a high ranking Japanese official, is a case study of ambivalence. Konoe sought cooperation with China, seeing it as a natural ally and part of the same civilisation (dobun). Having earned his doctorate in Germany, he held warm feelings towards the west, but abhorred its racialised policies, seeing in China an ally to fight imperialism. Telling in its exposures of domestic political and intellectual rivalries, this and other work (see Aydin 2006, 2013) deploys transnational historiography to offer some powerful insights on the sleight of hand through which a ‘moral’ case was made for Japanese imperialism. Dealt a devastating blow by Japanese imperial ambitions and further weakened by the rise of nationalist sentiment in and through ‘emancipatory’ independence movements, Pan-Asianism lost its moral authority. The ‘free’ Asia that emerged would be a cause for celebration and trepidation, as the Indian intellectual Tagore warned: It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism. (Tagore cited by Sen 1997)

These historical portraits are telling of the magnitude of the task confronting intellectuals in their attempts to script an imaginary of an Asia free from imperialism. Forceful and emotional debates would ensue about ‘western’ scientific knowledges, known to have been deliberately mobilised to serve colonial capitalist interests, yet offering opportunities for emancipation (Tilly 1990; Prakash 1995). Susan Blackburn (2013, 2) writes that ‘in the course of the anti-colonial struggle it was clear that nationalists were divided and held different visions of the nation. Once the colonial yoke had been thrown off, the nation was openly revealed as lacking solidarity. The issue of ethnicity emerged as one of the most pressing and divisive’. The notion of Asian solidarity was further weakened by Cold War animosities. A brief interlude in the form of the 1955 Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations, attempted to reassert the ideals of Pan-Asianism but the dye was cast (Adas 2010; Chakrabarty 2010). The leaderships of the newly independent Asia harboured suspicions of their minorities and their transnational connections. In a context of economic autarky, crossborder commerce by ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs was not well perceived and this and other floating diasporic populations were targets of state disciplinary action. Leo Suryadinata’s (2011, 2017) portraits of postcolonial

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statecraft, seen through the prism of managing ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, is instructive of the hybrid forms of governance used to exercise control over minorities. The three cultural pillars of Chineseness—newspapers, schools and cultural organisations—were subjected to state censorship enabled through colonial-era laws and practices and given force and intensity by mobilising populist frustrations, along with an introduced fear of communism (see also Egreteau 2011; Hack and Wade 2009; Wang 2013). Pan-Asianist ideas of transnational solidarity did not disappear entirely. They survived, supported by a diverse range of thinkers and leaders across the political spectrum buoyed by the growing economic interdependencies and ever-present people-to-people relations (Morris-Suzuki 2016).

Concluding Comments This extended historical backdrop helps to resituate contemporary coordinates of region-making to imagine ways in which regionalism’s benefits might be widely shared across and within countries (Li 2014; Raghuram et al. 2014; Saaler and Szpilman 2017). Our interest is in inquiring into the roles that globalising universities might play towards this end and the cautionary tales that they might take from the past even as they celebrate the power of region-making through technocratic imaginations. Universities are modernist institutions. Funded by national budgets and framed by national policies, they are concerned with nation-building. National imaginaries are ever-present including in matters relating to the administration of international students, who are recruited, grouped and ordered by nationality. National student associations are encouraged or at least not discouraged, receiving access to university accommodation to organise and group together. The consolidation of national selves is also given impulse and momentum by students’ embassies and consulates. While regionalist ideals are espoused in and through political discourse and within the institutional architecture of individual universities, the extent to which these visions are operationalised in curricular terms through nuanced, sophisticated and interdisciplinary scholarship remains aspirational (Breaden 2018). If the region, like the nation, is best understood as having an intermittent, emergent and relational quality, then universities must pay more attention to curricula and to student interactions in teaching and learning environments. The challenge universities face is to understand how a plural (non-hegemonic), inclusive idea and feeling for the region might be fostered through curricular regionalism.

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The Asian Financial Crisis briefly introduced in Chapter 2, signalled the urgency of regional cooperation. Since then, a flurry of activities and engagements have been undertaken in the name of regionalism. Asian economic interdependence, seen in regional supply chain production, highlights one set of interconnectivities. Cultural contact through peopleto-people interactions is another, materialising in high levels of regional tourism as well as through education-driven migration. ASEAN, currently regarded as the oldest regional bloc, has driven debates for greater cooperation to further a new development discourse. The explicit naming of Regional Public Goods is illustrative and extends to include environmental management (clean air, water security, clean energy and natural disaster mitigation), public health infrastructures and institutional strengthening to police money laundering and the trafficking of humans and drugs (Asian Development Bank 2018). The question of whose interests are served by region-making remains uppermost in the thoughts of critical scholars. If regionalism is, as Robertson et al. (2016) suggests, ‘a moment of identity’, international study and the trajectories of international students are fertile spaces for imagining alternative modes of region-making, in other words, Asia as an ethicopolitical project, which we explore in the next and final chapter.

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Harrell, Paula S. 2012. Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese. Portland, ME: Merwin Asia. Holt-Lunstad, Julianne, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson. 2015. “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2): 227–237. Huang, Shirlena, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Mika Toyota. 2012. “Caring for the Elderly: The Embodied Labour of Migrant Care Workers in Singapore.” Global Networks 12 (2): 195–215. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters. 2002. “The Political Rationality of ‘New Regionalism’: Toward a Genealogy of the Region.” Theory and Society 31 (3): 391–432. Leibold, J. 2004. “Positioning minzu Within Sun Yat Sen’s Discourse of minzuzhuyi.” Journal of Asian History 38 (2): 163–211. Li, Tania Murray. 2014. “Asian Futures, Old and New.” Asia Colloquia Papers 4, no. 1. Toronto: York Centre for Asian Research. Low, Morris. 2003. “The Emperor’s Sons Go to War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan.” In Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, edited by Kam Louie and Morris Low, 81–99. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Mitter, Rana. 2013. “Nationalism in East Asia, 1839–1945.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly, 287–307. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998a. Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998b. “Invisible Countries: Japan and the Asian Dream.” Asian Studies Review 22 (1): 5–22. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2016. “Asianisms from Below: Japanese Civil Society and Visions of Asian Integration from the Late 20th to the 21st Century Chapter.” In Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, edited by Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, 156–180. Singapore: NUS Press. Ochiai, Emiko. 2011. “Unsustainable Societies: The Failure of Familialism in East Asia’s Compressed Modernity.” Historical Social Research 36 (2): 219–245. Pels, Peter. 1997. “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1): 163–183. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Prakash, Gyan (ed.). 1995. After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Raghuram, Parvati, Pat Noxolo, and Clare Madge. 2014. “Rising Asia and Postcolonial Geography.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1): 119–135.

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CHAPTER 6

Situating Critique and Care: What Kind of Asia?

Abstract This chapter introduces critique and care as foundational principles for reimagining transnational education. We present an ethical framework inspired by a postcolonial feminist ethics of care to analyse the prospects for regional sociabilities and solidarities. The chapter delves into the particularities of students’ everyday encounters to identify ‘critical attitudes’ and the formation of ethical sensibilities. Student narratives suggest alternative ways of acting, including critically questioning standard nationalist tropes. The chapter situates the critical attitudes of students in a context where emotionalisation strategies are taken up by states to govern their mobile citizens, specifically, transnational students. We examine how the conditions for affective nationalism are (re)produced and alternatively mediated when emotions of righteousness, anger and disappointment stick to the bodies of sojourning students. However, these technologies of governing remain aspirational. Many students distance themselves from the ambitions of states by either claiming an apolitical subjectivity or by displaying a kind of ‘voluntary insubordination’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what kind of Asia might be assembled by globalising universities and international student mobilities. Keywords Critique · Care · Ethics · Affective nationalism · Regional sociabilities

© The Author(s) 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4_6

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Ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection. (Foucault 1997, 284)

Ethical Geographies? Michel Foucault’s (1997) pronouncements on ethics as freedom and reflection—‘the care of the self’—informs this, our concluding chapter, where we explore alternative ways of imagining and enacting Asian regionalism. Our interest is in the possibilities of an Asian regionalism that foregrounds an ethics of care and critique to address the region’s pressing needs. We begin with a brief overview of an idea offered by the French theorist, Michel Foucault—‘critique as an ethos’. We follow this up with an exploration of ‘affective nationalism’, by inquiring into the kinds of ‘conduct’ (emotions, actions, practices) that enable the ‘banal affirmation of the national through moments of encounter’ (Militz and Schurr 2016). Here, we are exploring whether national affective ties might take hold of international students such that feelings for, and solidarities with, the region are restrained (Merriman and Jones 2017). We follow on from the discussion in Chapter 5 on how emotions simultaneously align or disconnect student-subjects to the ‘national’. Returning to Ahmed’s (2004) framework—sociality of emotions —we discuss how students make sense of and develop feelings in and through their encounters with circulating objects, subjects and discourses. These ‘affective economies’ are a basis for understanding the emergence, persistence and mediation of feelings for the nation, including its potentiality to support or alternatively undermine regional affects. We end the chapter with a brief discussion on care ethics and care activisms. Specifically, using our empirical findings, we inquire how East Asian universities might move out of defensive internationalisations to foster alternative ways of imagining and enacting Asia.

Critique: An Ethos In What Is Critique, Michel Foucault, makes the case for critique as ‘a virtue and as an ethos’. Foucault went to some lengths to address the question of why things stay much the same despite the proliferation of ‘discourses of criticizability’. He took to task the normative manner in which criticism was conducted. Critique is not merely a matter of pointing out deficits in arguments made, or errors in the evidence tendered. Critique is, more

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importantly, an ethical-political gesture framed by experience. Elaborating further, Foucault saw critique as a ‘critical attitude’ that takes inspiration from ‘the will not to be governed like that or at that price’. Thus, for Foucault critique involves ‘a movement by which the subject assumes a right to question truth on its effects on power, and power on its effects on truth’ (Foucault 1997, 32). The foundations of critique lie in ‘experience’, understood as ‘a complex and dynamic interplay that articulates forms of knowledge, mechanisms of power and relations to the self’ (Lemke 2011, 29). These three axes— power, knowledge and care of the self—establish the basis for ongoing scrutiny of ‘what we are, the limits imposed on us and what it might take to experiment with possibilities of going beyond the limits’ in the everyday (Foucault 1984). Three dimensions of critique are identified by Foucault: ‘problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one’s own status as a subject’ (Lemke 2011, 27). In problematisation, he sets out to analyse and question how singular rationalities have emerged, taken hold and become institutionalised. By posing the question, ‘what kind of rationality is being used?’, the practice of problematisation presupposes a plurality of rationalities. Problematisation thus sets us on the path towards questioning universals, towards fragmenting ‘unquestionable facts’ and monolithic entities. Universals cease to be the starting point of analysis; they are seen for what they are—systems of heterogeneous elements and the effects of historical practices. Systems of acceptability take hold because of ‘connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on at a given moment that help establish the ‘self-evident’, the ‘necessary’, the ‘facts of the matter’ (Foucault 2000 cited by Lemke 2011, 31). Second, critique relies on the existing normative institutional system. In other words, it is exercised from ‘within’, and requires those inside to push to make visible the limits of reason. Having witnessed the reinsertion of strikingly similar relations of dominance into so-called ‘transformed’ systems, Foucault was keen to distinguish and distance ‘critique’ from revolutionary conduct. Hence, he gave attention to ‘the art of voluntary insubordination’—the act(s) of ‘not being governed like that, at that price’. The third dimension of a Foucauldian critique concerns a level of risk, exposing one’s own ontological status, making visible, ‘a historical ontology

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of ourselves’. In other words, ‘suspending and undermining one’s own ontological status so as to engage in self-questioning’ (Lemke 2011, 37). Deeply suspicious of any critical activity in which there are asymmetries between ‘those who know and those who do not’, Foucault (1984) was calling in question a central premise in Enlightenment thinking—a touching faith in those who exercise authority. Foucault’s treatment of critique as relational and contingent sets him on course to both accept and challenge the central tenets of Enlightenment. He was dismissive of binary logics found in the ‘blackmail of Enlightenment’: ‘you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within its tradition of rationalism, or else you criticize the Enlightenment and try to escape from its principles of rationality’ (313). This is often the ‘package’ that is sold to those who agitate for different policies of the state and different forms of conduct from its functionaries. Access to vaccinations and education are discursively assembled to go hand-in-hand with modernist paradigms of unsustainable economic ‘development’ even as the search for new resource frontiers brings enclosures, displacements, marginalisations, growing inequality and ecological imbalances (Rigg 2015). The Foucauldian theorisation of critique opens a context for questioning what is now a common mode of political conduct: ‘pedagogical politics’, where political leaders are seen as ‘teachers’ or parents and expected to be obeyed unfailingly (Chakrabarty 2014). In the same way that European kings once fashioned themselves as ‘god’s representatives on earth’, so too did pedagogical politics demand compliance and complicity rather than a critical attitude. Those at the bottom of the class hierarchy should learn from those higher up; the masses should learn from their leaders (Chakrabarty 2014, 46–52). And fully sovereign, postcolonial countries should learn lessons by emulating the policy ‘successes’ of the metropolitan centre. However, exercising pedagogical authority on populations while steering them to become self-steering performative nationalist subjects, is a project riven with ambivalence. We return to this point when we discuss the possibilities of re-subjectification when students reassess their nationalist socialisations (see also Bhabha 1990). The assemblage of ‘compressed modernization’ is one example of pedagogical politics. We turn briefly to this political rationality, given its durability and presence in discourses on ‘Rising Asia’. An unremitting goal of newly independent nation-states, compressed modernisation was roundly supported by independence era leaders who were intent on ‘catching up’. There was broad acceptance among the largely western educated political

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elite that the west had assumed its dominance through ‘rationality, empiricism, punctuality and progress’. ‘What Europe did in one hundred and fifty years, we must do in ten or fifteen years’ declared the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, an aspiration that resonated with other Asian leaders (Chakrabarty 2014). An identical heroic picture of the achievements of compressed modernisation are found in the emotional archives of East Asian nation-states. ‘From third world to first world’, is the boast of the Singapore’s ruling party. Similarly, Korea’s development journey is described as nothing short of ‘astonishing’ in moving from colonial suppression by Japan, overcoming the ravages of the Korean War, and achieving the status of an advanced economy and high-income society (Fleckenstein and Lee 2018). This imaginary would remain an agentive force, fuelled by the murmurs of desire for all of the goods of modernity, from healthcare, schools, roads to high end, luxury brands (Chakrabarty 2014, 54). In sharp contrast to these heroic claims and the legitimacies accorded to pedagogical politics, lies Foucault’s gloomy pronouncement on Europe and European systems of thought: ‘I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. …the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that state yet’ (318). Seeking to (re)evaluate ‘the price of being governed’, Foucault invited readers to examine their investments as subjects of knowledge and as persons who exercise and submit to power. The ethico-ontological question at hand concerned what it takes to become subjects who think, feel, act and behave—to conduct selves—ethically. This was, he argued, not a time-limited task; it was never-ending—this ‘permanent critique of ourselves’ (Foucault 1997). Foucault’s idea of critique rested on a modest kind of political activism, which is in sharp contrast to contemporary ideas about social and institutional change through the delivery of ‘big ideas’ by ‘thought leaders’. In its place is a more inventive ‘stylization’ or aesthetic refashioning of oneself—as an individual or as a collective—in relation to how we might engage with being governed (Allen and Goddard 2014, 48). Foucault’s restrained critical ethos has been interrogated by critics who find little in this approach to inspire the emotional basis for critique and ‘counter-conduct’. We are attracted to consider this low-key approach, having witnessed ostentatious projects that fail to achieve promised change. A different approach—centring the care of ourselves, vigilance and where possible, refusal to become the subjects we are invited to become—seems a promising alternative.

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Critique proceeds through affective practices, ‘It is the role of the governed to take offense and to put passion into their reactions’, declared Foucault. Speaking in a 1981 interview following the imposition of martial law in Poland, he described ‘hope and a moral awakening’—a kind of ‘political affect’—as people took to the street, ‘positive, lively, intense’ as they engaged with ‘inventing a future for themselves’ (67–471). We ended Chapter 5 with a discussion of how emotional discourses have been enlisted to enable the consolidation of particular regional and national imaginaries over others. In this final chapter, we draw on fragments of reconstructed events offered in students’ biographical interviews to examine episodes that might suggest ‘oppositional thinking’. We begin by exploring how the national is (re)called, reconfigured and repositioned into relevance through the everyday affective encounters of international students.

Affective Nationalisms and Counter-Conduct Using biographical interviews, we scrutinised the ‘experiences’ recounted by student interviewees through the three sets of coordinates identified by Foucault: power, knowledge and relation to self. More specifically we examine students’ agencies in meaning-making in those situations scripted by relations of power through which they reconsider their emotional investments in the nation. In Chapter 4 we described some of the emergent insights held by Xiaoling who was studying for a Ph.D. in nanoengineering at Tokyo University. We return to her reflections on the China–Japan sovereignty disputes over the uninhabited islands, Senkaku (for the Japanese) or Diaoyu (for the Chinese). Xiaoling described a feeling of emotional ambivalence about these diplomatic tensions and linked her changed capacity to being affected by studying overseas: If it were 4 years ago, my reaction would be very strong, but now my views have been diluted. Because such political issues, to summarise, is just about the country’s interest. China is after its own benefit. Japan is after her own. [It’s] hard for me to say who’s right or wrong., just like the Three Kingdoms,

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can you say that Cao Cao was wrong and Liu Bei was right? Both1 of them were fighting for political authority, or personal benefit.

Once captive to emotions of nationalist fervour, students’ access to polyphonic conversations and debates help to loosen the hold of hegemonic nationalist accounts of how they see ‘major’ diplomatic events. Xiaoling returned to this issue, describing at length the ‘re-formation’ of her thinking: I feel that my experience abroad is a very precious lesson on life. Sometimes this experience can result in the way I view things/problems, have a broader perspective. For example, if the same event occurred, and I had stayed in China, I’d have used a completely Chinese perspective but if the same thing happened, now I have experience living abroad, the way I view things [is] broader, especially some sensitive political issues. If I’m in China I would say without hesitation, ‘this should be this and that’. But after living overseas, I’d view this same event in many different perspectives. Because I have overseas experience, I know how foreigners view China, how other people think.

A similar example of oppositional thinking and sentiment was offered by Nuying, also from China, who was studying foreign languages in Japan: After I went overseas, I have access to more news media that is different from that in China. There are also quite a lot of negative views on China, so I will think about these things.

‘Thinking about these things’ suggested that students were reassessing information circulating around them. ‘Thinking about’ might involve making sense of the many texts circulating in the public spaces—in both home and host countries—that may collide with nascent and sedimented ideas and feelings. Emotions produced through their manifold encounters with people, texts, images and symbols and places can reshape individual perspectives, with long-term effects on their lives, although we make no bold 1 Xiaoling was referring to the central characters in the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel, attributed to Luo Guanzhong and composed in the Ming era, in the fifteenth century. The book is set at the end of the Han dynasty (220–280 AD) during a period marked by civil war, natural disasters including drought, rural dissent and growing inequality. It is read as a treatise on ancient Chinese statecraft. The protagonists Liu Bei and Cao Cao embody different political subjectivities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms#Legacy_ in_popular_culture).

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claims from this small-scale study. Identifying and documenting the kinds of ‘technologies of being’ that may arise from emotion-filled encounters between people and ‘matter’ is a complicated matter. For the purposes of our discussion, it is clear that international students are not simply caught up in the forces and intensities of nationalist feelings, but seem to work through them to re-subjectify their political affects. Having lived through the war in Sri Lanka, Avanthi had acquired strong feelings against ethno-nationalism and the manner in which it was assembled in and through class and gendered logics and practices. In the course of the interview, she reflected on the energies and emotions invested in ethnocultural identity-making projects by the nation-state, relayed in and through her education in Sri Lanka: Though we have this whole ethnic conflict, if you look at it, it’s based on class issues at the end of the day. Even school is divided along class. Within university, I had a lot of issues to face, again it’s class-based. Our university department - geography [is] very nationalist! Girls are not allowed to wear pants! The only day I wore pants was the day it was compulsory fieldwork day!

Curiously, the English department emerged as an unlikely micro-space of freedoms: My three friends, we all selected English as a subject, we hung around the English department a lot. So, these girls wear pants, but long blouses so they can’t say anything too much and you just stand firm. For first year [students], you have to wear long skirts [the whole semester].

Refusing to allow their bodies to be commandeered into submission, Avanthi and her friends reclaimed the right to exercise autonomy over their clothing: ‘It was a fight from Day 1 to establish yourself within that structure. I’m not buying a whole wardrobe of skirts, I’m not going to do that! So, it was a stand that we took’. Avanthi’s experiences of university study in Sri Lanka is suggestive of the many creative ways in which ethnocultural subjects are administered, sometimes through formal rules, but also through seemingly arbitrary acts of control, involving episodes of physical, sexual and emotional violence under the guises of ‘rites of passage’ such as ragging (Nelson 2009; Sun 2016; Zhao 2017).

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In the interstices of nationalist struggles over language, religion, culture and identity, the university’s English and sociology departments allowed their students to sit their exams in English, while still sticking to the official languages policy of delivering lectures in Sinhala (in Sinhala dominated areas). Avanthi is one of ‘30 from the batch of 500’ who chose the English avenue, seeing it as an escape route out of the ethno-national container. But this investment in autonomy—choosing one’s clothing and deportment came with risks, marking out individuals for attention, increasing their vulnerabilities to the threat of gendered violence: Senior (students] could just walk up to you [and] harass you for one whole semester and it’s acceptable. Sometimes these things go overboard, and someone could just say ‘take your belt off’….[One] girl committed suicide. The university is divided into politics, anti-ragging and pro-ragging. The nationalist parties are for ragging.

Complicating her positioning were ongoing attempts to bring her back into the fold by members of the Singhalese diaspora she encountered in Singapore, who frowned on her irregular and sporadic attendance at the Sri Lankaramaya Buddhist temple in Singapore. For Avanthi, this was a small way to resist communal subjectification: I don’t want to be your typical Sinhala Buddhist. I [stay] away from that. Lots of people are a bit shocked. The Sri Lankans I met, they’d say ‘oh did you go to that temple in Little India?’ I’d say ‘maybe once or twice’. And they’d be shocked! ‘Two years in Singapore and only once or twice?’ That’s how they see Buddhism.

For Avanthi, interacting with other international students loosened her ties to a highly gendered Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalist subjectivity imposed during her undergraduate education in a national university. That stated, although she rejected the pull of ethno-nationalism with its gendered and classed aspects, there were moments when she was typecast by other students attempting to fix and essentialise her Singhalese ethnic identity: It was orientation and I was going into one of the shuttle buses. There were some South Indian students, all sitting together and smiling…so I was like, ‘Ok, hi’ at least somebody was friendly enough, since I was alone. After orientation we had little snacks and [talked]…so they were like ‘oh so you’re

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from India Chennai’? I said ‘No, I’m from Sri Lanka’. They said ‘ok, so you’re Tamil?’ I said ‘No, I’m Sinhala’. I just took a sip, turned around and all of them are gone! I would say that was the biggest cultural shock for me because you have so taken for granted your Sinhala identity. I think I [have] become more nervous about my identity when I’m interacting with South Indians.

Yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, Avanthi’s desire to have a good relationship with her parents drove her to respond to the gendered expectations of their world, including accepting normative ideas about marriage. Having ‘failed’ to find a partner by herself and now approaching her late 20s, she was confronted with having to accept the gendered regimes of community and family ‘intervention’ to ‘settle’. For Zia, a female Korean-Chinese student, oppositional thinking led her to recalibrate her feelings for the nation. Her encounters with fellow Chinese nationals studying in Korea led Zia to experience a deeply troubling dissonance. She had been socialised into master narratives of sacrifice and collectivism as a citizen of a socialist country. As one of an ethnic minority in China, keen to be a model citizen, she strove hard to conduct herself accordingly. The security of this ontological position—being a socialist citizen —was thrown in sharp relief by the extravagant lifestyles of co-national peers with family working for the state: I have seen these kids (other Chinese nationals) spend money crazily here. [Their] parents work as public service people in China [without] a really high pay. I can see these [are] social problems of Chinese society.

Cracks appeared in the emotional structures that had bound Zia to a vision of socialist China. Uncomfortable feelings followed, prompting her to distinguish between patriotism—love of ‘country’—and allegiance to ‘the political party’. Once the emotional distinction had been established, she was able to articulate an ethical stance on corruption. While my patriotic feelings are becoming stronger, I have developed more objective understanding towards my homeland since I can see things that I couldn’t see when I was in China. When I was in China, I see the political party and country as the same thing. Now I am overseas, I differentiate these two concepts.

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Similarly, Hayun, speaking in her final year as a postgraduate student in engineering at Korea University identified an emergent critical attitude: [In China] we received education about Marxism and materialism ever since junior high school. You just naturally take lots of things for granted and believe in lots of things as the way they are. But when you are overseas, you start to question things. I guess I am in a period of questioning things.

Speaking in general terms, Hayun did not elaborate on how specific events and encounters led her to re-evaluate the regimes of power and knowledge aimed at capturing and fixing her as both loyal socialist subject and globalised Chinese citizen. But she acknowledged that she was in a period of questioning the kinds of subject positions offered to her by an education steeped in Marxist materialism and Chinese nationalism. The end result was a critical attitude which questioned the normative ‘opinions’ of Korea and Japan encountered in China: Chinese people don’t have high opinions towards Korea or Japan. But since I came here, I think Korea has been good. It is not that bad like we thought. People here are friendly and the weather is good. I think living in Korea is not a bad choice. [In the past] I didn’t really ask myself what China’s bad aspects are and what its good aspects are. Now I am here, I start to look at China from different perspectives and obtain different kinds of information. I do know that China has some problems and I realize that I don’t have to stay within China in the future.

We cannot speculate on whether these practices of self-formation (askesis ) prompted Hayun towards re-subjectification, by turning her nationalist loyalties towards a regional identity. She was still keen to eventually return to China (‘for me China is still very attractive’), but she was certainly more positively predisposed towards Korea and Japan, and tentatively moving towards taking a more critical position on the historical conflicts between Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan. National histories are nationalist narratives concerned with governing through subject-formation, for the purposes of producing particular kinds of patriotic subjects, even as these imaginaries shift over time (see Duara 1998; Seo 2008). Historical narratives, argues Shih (2003) with reference to China, are mobilised by state and market to manage the vicissitudes of

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‘globalisation’. Shih labels this as ‘therapeutic nationalism’, drawing attention to the brisk trade in flags and other symbols of patriotism arising from popular consumption of these nationalist icons. China’s march into the global capitalist system is acknowledged for producing all manner of estrangements, given popular force by the uneven distribution of opportunities. Emotions such as distrust, resentment, fear and anger have the potential to unsettle the Party’s legitimacy, which is staked on consolidating China’s socialist identity. Nor is the issue of nationalist identity politics recent, beginning more than a century ago, as we outlined in the previous chapter. Struggles over China’s identity are long-standing. The question of whether it would become a sovereign state or remain a celestial court was debated at the turn of the twentieth century. Later, discourses of class struggle were embraced to script China’s identity. The post-Mao era saw tensions within the Party on what might be the correct balance in ‘opening up’ China, with protagonists arguing about the dangers of ‘spiritual pollution’ from bourgeois liberalism and individualism (see also Carrico 2017). Shih’s observations on therapeutic nationalism has resonances with other Asian countries. International study can open up a space to think critically about these and other habituated ways of performing patriotism, but this does not always diminish feelings of national pride, as we learn from Ngoc’s account of affective nationalism: [A]t home, [we] have been taught that Vietnam is a great country that defeated France and the USA. Being a communist is something we should be proud of [these are] things [we] have been taught in school. [My] own grandparents were communists. They fought for independence of the country and my granddad lost one eye just [in] the war and fighting. I am very proud of being the grandchild of [one] of the first people fighting for the independence of the country.

Here, Ngoc describes the emotional legitimacy constructed in and through Vietnam’s journey to sovereign nationhood. It is a legitimacy that is multi-sited (see Mbembe 2001; Closs-Stephens 2015). It starts from a family narrative of courage and debilitating injury. Patriotic feelings like these are reinforced through schooling and all manner of national spectacles to which citizens are exposed. The annual May Day parades which celebrate military victories with the ritual flight of fighter jets over towns and cities and a public holiday bring a celebratory mood and carnival-like

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atmosphere, complete with flag-waving children. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the state and the family, between acceptance and resistance and between hegemony and counter-conduct. In this context, the suspension of critique seems almost inevitable, but a nagging disquiet can emerge through international study, as Ngoc’s account suggests: ‘I had no idea what other people think about communism. After I came here [Singapore], I had a broader perspective of how people perceived communism. I think it’s not all good’. Having already voiced her aspirations to return to Vietnam for its economic opportunities (‘get rich quickly’), Ngoc described how she managed the tensions inherent in her evolving political subjectivity between her affiliations with ‘communism’ as performed by her family and the narratives encountered while studying in Singapore: I have been thinking why and doing some research. It doesn’t mean that you change your mind about what you have in the past. It’s for you to understand what had happened in the past that had made the people think like that. [Maybe] you can play a part to change some of their perspectives. Like me and my close friends, we have been trying to make friends with people from all over the world. We try to show them how Vietnamese are; how they are friendly and how they are nice and very gentle. They welcome you to their country.

Singapore, where Ngoc was studying, reserves a special place for communism in its history books. Communism is described through narratives of danger as ‘… a big threat to Singapore’s stability and security from the 1940s to the 1980s’. The persona of the communist terrorist is explicitly framed as a public enemy for conduct such as ‘bombings’, ‘assassinations’ and ‘political agitation’. Communism set in motion an image of an entire region rendered vulnerable, as captured in ‘the domino theory’. Whole countries were anticipated to fall, like dominoes, to Communism. Once she became aware of these historic relations, Ngoc decided that the solution was to humanise the ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ subjectivity through warm and friendly people-to-people contact, thus repositioning Vietnam and its people as ‘nice’ and ‘very gentle’. Even though it can be reasonably inferred that Ngoc and her friends had, in some ways at least, ceased to inhabit a socialist identity through their aspirations, these (grand)children

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of the soldiers and cadres of a communist order were now intent on generating welcoming, affective atmospheres, through rebranding the communist subjectivity. Before concluding our discussion of affective nationalism, we examine the use of emotionalisation strategies by states to intensify their influence over their mobile nationals. This is not a recent phenomenon, although as history attests and following our students accounts, the effects of these strategies are highly ambivalent.

Emotionalisation and the State Often, the emotionalisation strategies mobilised by states have the simple objective of encouraging the return home of nationals. Alternatively, they are concerned with encouraging remittances, return tourism, retirement migration and so forth. Singapore’s Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth has an Overseas Singaporeans Unit which ‘coordinates a whole-ofgovernment effort to engage overseas Singaporeans to keep them emotionally connected to Singapore’ (quoted on its website). The Ministry develops and circulates all manner of useful information about studying abroad and thereafter, return and reintegration, including employment opportunities. Where once those who moved away permanently were regarded as unpatriotic and labelled ‘quitters’, the thrust of the state’s emotionalisation strategies at present is to maintain relations with a high achieving cosmopolitan diaspora, ensuring that they remain emotionally connected to the island-state. China’s use of emotionalisation strategies to broaden the spatial governance of its citizens has been the focus of much recent commentary and criticism. In the wake of attacks by Chinese student ‘patriots’ in a number of study destinations in 2019, their response to rolling protests organised by Hong Kong students and residents, international denunciations have flown thick and fast (see for example Power 2019). Criticism has also been directed at the manner in which the Chinese state uses strategies to mediate the conduct of domestic politics in study and migration destinations in order to bolster support for China’s overall policy positions. These include China’s relations with Taiwan and Hong Kong, its arguably punitive management of religious and ethnic minorities such as Uighurs and Tibetans, and broader concerns relating to human rights, to name just a few. China’s international students often come in contact with these strategies through the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) of which there are

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150 chapters, all receiving financial support for social and cultural activities from China’s network of embassies. The bulk of criticisms has been directed at CCSA’s links with a key instrumentality within the Chinese Communist Party, the United Front Work Department (Gill and Jakobson 2017; Groot 2018). The management of students abroad by governments is not restricted to the Chinese government, neither is it a recent practice. The students in our sample conceded that while attempts were made to steer international students towards particular forms of conduct, these were not always successful. Students kept a distance from those who were seen to be heavyhanded in their patriotism, often citing heavy workloads or boredom with politics as excuses. Rui was one such student. He was prompted to leave China for a doctorate in computer science in Singapore, convinced that the research environment at his Chinese university was compromised because of patronage politics: ….there is a [term] called ‘guanxi [in] China. This term is particularly influential in academic circles, if you want to do a major project with a lot of funding, it is not really dependent on [your] research/academic ability, but it depends on who you know. This caused much unhappiness.

Although socialising mainly with students from mainland China, he kept more ‘official’ engagements with the Chinese student associations at arm’s length. He was after all a busy Ph.D. student: My life is super simple—get up in the morning, come to school, sit in the office, do whatever I need to do, and when it’s evening, I’d go back—very very simple. In China we have this saying called a life connected by two dots and a line, home to work and then back home, it’s just like that.

Rui exemplified many of the students in our sample. They were acutely aware of the manner in which power was exercised—not only by the Chinese state but also the Singaporean state—known to govern closely any form of activism and political dissent. Nonetheless, Rui spoke at some length about being changed by the experience of studying overseas: …having ‘jumped’ out of the mainland environment, in the past the things that you thought were only right to accept, take for granted, now looking back I question why I would accept these things without questioning.

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Rui concluded with a prescient observation on the effects of an illiberal, top-down governmentality of control: ‘the Chinese especially like to discuss politics. The government hopes that the people do not touch politics, but because you stop us from doing so, all the more we want to’. Given the scepticism and oppositional thinking exercised by some students towards the national, we raise the prospects, possibilities and limitations for developing an affective transnationalism that is de-racialised, plural and non-hegemonic. This too has complications. We return briefly to Thien Long, an East Malaysian student at Renmin and his identity dilemmas to illustrate. He experienced a cool distancing at the hands of host PRC students, despite identifying with, and being subjected to, the category of ethnic Chinese ‘other’ in Malaysia. Thien Long responded by re-essentialising Chineseness through a claim that Southeast Asian Chinese heritage communities and Taiwanese were custodians of a more ‘authentic’ Chinese culture: [The] culture in China has changed radically through the Cultural Revolution, Reformation and the Opening period. I think it is [now] a different lifestyle, [a] different culture. [Maybe] we are still keeping the culture [from the time] our ancestors came from the Southern China Sea in Qing Dynasty. Even the terms [we, Malaysian Chinese] use in daily life are different from them. We are more used to the words Taiwanese use.

Where some scholars have invested emotions in the emancipatory potential in Taiwan’s liminality (see Corcuff 2012), others like Chun (2017) are more sceptical. Both China and Taiwan he argues, have called on ‘culturalisation’ strategies framed by essentialism to maintain their position and legitimacy in the domestic and international spheres. These practices can close off plural ways of imagining and enacting Asia (187). Critique that is firmly situated in nationalist frameworks stands, the argument goes, to paralyse and inhibit cosmopolitan regional solidarities (Chen 2010). The emotional registers of student encounters, as we have shown, illustrate the many tensions and contradictions embedded in the nationalist politics of territorial universities (Kenway 2018). In concluding this chapter, we introduce the possibilities of care and care activisms by universities as a means to enable different governmentalities. What does it take for East Asian universities to be careful places, where hope is nourished and critique is enabled, and where a different imagination

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might be fostered, beyond those suggestive of competitive nationalisms held together by defensive internationalisations?

Care Activisms The feminist philosopher Virginia Held (2005), upholds care as ‘the most basic of moral values’, a value that is universal. ‘Without some level of caring we cannot have any morality’. For Joan Tronto, approaching ethics through a focus on care rests on three features: attentiveness, responsibility and responsiveness. Being attentive might involve engaging with people, listening closely to and learning from their standpoints. Responsiveness involves practical measures, while responsibility enshrines a recognition of moral action on the parts of particular agents (Tronto cited by Robinson 2011, 121). Emotions inform all three aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility and responsiveness. An ethics of care challenges the excessive stress on rationality claimed by other traditions of moral philosophy such as utilitarianism and Kantian moral philosophy. Like other critical feminist theorists, Held (2005) rejects the normative ideal of subjectivity—the liberal individual, situated in a marketplace—as the basis for organising social relations and social institutions. At best, this ideal of subjecthood is suitable for a restricted and limited part of human existence. She argues that ‘[Moralities] built on the image of the independent, autonomous, rational individual largely overlook the reality of human dependence’ (73). Care ethicists take the position that emotions such as empathy and sensitivity are better guides to what we ought to do above the highly abstract rules and universal principles about ‘all men’ or even all persons (Held 2005, 158). Care theorists vary in the spatial units they prioritise. Some argue strongly against assuming a parochial lens. Others prioritise co-present interpersonal relations such as those between parents and their children or within individuals of the same social, religious or cultural groupings. Our position is inspired by postcolonial care ethics, expressed evocatively by bell hooks (2000), who wrote about scaling up care by taking collective action against structural inequalities—‘care activism’. Similarly, Raghuram et al. (2009) draw on postcolonial insights to make the case for a care ethics which recognises relationality and interdependence between colonial and postcolonial spaces and subjects. They take as their starting point the mutual constitutions of geographical spaces, between the Global North and Global South to rethink distance and proximity between people and places,

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prodding us to reimagine what this might mean for feelings, affiliations and ethical conduct. Places and people, they argue, are meshed together through long-standing relations which embrace market and non-market exchanges and which span the economic, cultural and social fields. To these interconnections, we add the vast web of ecological relations linking up human and non-human communities. The basis of moral personhood is thus reframed by taking into account the constitutive relationality of space and time, humans and non-humans. Raghuram and her colleagues thus offer a set of imaginative tools to re-ontologise ethical relations, whether between the Global North and South or within a region like Asia. This recognition of the enduring, inseparable, enmeshed relations that make up the spatio-temporal matrix is a decisive intervention in care ethics. In a university setting, care activism might extend to attentiveness to the curriculum and to pedagogical conduct, along with responsiveness to tackle the underrepresentation of particular groups, support for individual students in teaching and learning and responsibility to contribute towards multiple publics. Care as activism, performed through pedagogical work that centred justice, equity and environmental well-being seemed to be present in the accounts of university staff we interviewed, even in institutions driven by instrumental concerns. For example, Japanese educators spoke about taking care in how they developed and delivered their international relations curriculum, acknowledging ‘…the terrible mistakes this country has committed in the past’. At National Taiwan University, educators from the medical school, spoke passionately about socialised medicine in Taiwan (jianbao), and the benefits that trainee medical personnel from other countries might accrue by doing a health placement in Taiwan. Care in this latter example, we acknowledge, can become a governmental project, aligned with altruistic and geopolitical rationalities. Taiwan comes to be showcased as a good global citizen and a polity concerned with social justice, a sticky place, known for its generosity in hosting international students and scholars. It is portrayed as an advanced country deserving recognition and respect in the international order of nation-states. Examples suggestive of care as activism also emerged in interviews at NUS, where the problems of urbanisation and environmental degradation found their way into the curriculum. For example, the architectural department had initiated an annual international competition aimed at identifying good practice in the construction of built environments. Student entrants were expected to address population density, including housing for some of Asia’ most disadvantaged communities (a ‘critical problem’). Efforts

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were thus being made to expand students’ emerging professional identities, going beyond an arguably elitist preoccupation with prestige architecture.

Conclusion: What Kind of Asia? We embarked on this book to offer a different set of perspectives on international student mobilities in East Asia. Our interest was in the regionimagining and region-making practices of international education seen from the prism of emotional geographies. We brought our research-driven insights to understand how international education ‘structures the field of possible actions’ for individuals and globalising universities (Foucault 1982). In such ways, the book contributes to emerging debates on Asian governmentalities, specifically on higher education’s role in narrating alternative governmentalities for a Rising Asia, where the reasoned emotions of young people sustain their capacities to feel and to act on behalf of the multiple worlds they find themselves in. As spatial practices, the feelings and sensibilities of students are indicative of the plural ways in which Asia is imagined and enacted. We note that the students who participated in our study did not support an imaginary of Asia as a space captive to historical animosities. Most of the students we spoke to had some sense of the state’s interest in harnessing ‘therapeutic nationalism’ towards convenient ends. Some of the participants in our study saw the region largely as an expansive market and space of opportunity for wealth generation. Having chosen an Asian study destination because of familiarity and proximity to family, other students read the region as a familial space. For some, Asia was an emergent space for refashioning their ethical and political identities. Resolute in their patriotism and professing love of their countries, they grappled with how they might meet the conditions of being good citizens, while keeping at arm’s length some of the broader nationalist narratives they had been socialised into. Some questioned the emotional archives of their countries, rejecting fear, suspicion and hostility towards the nationals of neighbouring Asian countries. Exposed to an unanticipated Japanese cultural exceptionalism, Yu-Shih, a Taiwanese student, directed felt emotions of disappointment and anger towards an ethical refashioning through which she entertained the idea of class and cultural solidarity with other Asian migrants in Taiwan. The feelings of discrimination she had experienced as an ‘other’ in Japan were found in Taiwan, too, experienced by the many Asian labour migrants who moved there to better their lives.

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These examples gesture to the importance of emotional technologies in the fashioning of political subjectivities. This is a small-scale study, situated at a particular juncture and we are reluctant to make sweeping claims. However, some general and analytical insights are useful for understanding how international student mobilities might be harnessed to invigorate hope. Here, we follow others in seeking to develop an expanded subjectivity for the international student, as part of a move to write against the neoliberalisation of Asian spaces and subjects. An Asia of capitalist markets and avid consumers does exist, but other ways of imagining Asia are also being actively assembled, often through everyday interactions such as those described by students in our study. Events such as the 2019 protests inspired by students in Hong Kong can be read as the latest of a long list of struggles to re-appropriate nationalism(s) so as ‘not to be governed like that, at that price’. Reimagining Asia as a space that can nourish different forms of co-existence is as much an ethico-political project as an economic and intellectual project. Many of the students in our study were in technoscientific disciplines, often having little exposure to the broader canon of social theory that might have given them intellectual tools to question the received truths of globalisation and nation-building. Remarkably, they were able to consider other imaginative possibilities for self-formation. Some in our sample summoned their ethical selves by refusing to be conscripted into narrow logics of national and cultural exceptionalism. Love of country did not mean accepting uncritically, the narratives of political and bureaucratic elites, or of fellow co-nationals. Love of country also meant being alert to the configurations of power that might foster and perpetuate exclusions. This is a heartening finding. The urgent political compulsions that confront Asia necessitate a citizen-subject who does not see a dichotomy between selfinterest and ethical conduct, between ethical practices in national spaces vis-à-vis regional spaces. Family relations figured strongly in decisions on where to study and where to work, again suggesting that the rational, calculative Asian student intent on self-advancement above all other considerations, is perhaps just one subject in the broader assemblage of international education. There are many situated norms that can interfere with the critique–care nexus, for example, when an over-emphasis is given to students’ instrumental value—their positioning as potential ‘talent’ and part of a global pool of human resources—without understanding the emotional challenges they

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face. The critique–care nexus is vulnerable again when students are objectified as targets of foreign policy matter and as receptacles of soft power. Further, as Chapter 4 has shown, every biopolitical project in every context is driven by gendered, classed and racialised dynamics. Certain bodies continue to be coded as ‘deficit’ or ‘lesser’ (Mbembe 2013). The core purpose of universities has always been framed by their social contexts and universities in Asia are no different. They face expectations and challenges, both known and unknown that are augmented by hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The issues are myriad and we list a few: Migration and living with difference to further social cohesion; public health to tackle the border crossings of microbes; sustainable forms of production; labour rights and cultural dignity; digital security; cities vulnerable to rising sea levels. These challenges will confront Asia’s citizens and scholars to ‘go beyond the limits’, to engage in critique, to tackle the forms of knowledge and mechanisms of power that privilege some representations of Asian futures while impeding others (Raghuram et al. 2014). At the same time, critique without care is not enough. Instilling care in sub- and inter-national relations is a radical and continuous practice. It requires recognising each other’s vulnerabilities. It requires turning towards each other, even in the face of an inevitable distance between the spatialities that make ‘Rising Asia’. Crucially, care requires re-engaging emotionally with the many differently situated Asians left out of the prosperity of a turbo-charged capitalism. As nodes in globalising knowledge economies, East Asian universities and nation-states like their peers elsewhere in the Global North, have enjoyed collusive relationships with globalising capitalism. Their task now is to critique these enduring enchantments with a singular capitalist future and to care enough to sponsor plural Asian futures for the well-being and security of the many differently situated Asians. Our book has contributed to new ways of thinking about the Asia’s international education. We set out to question conventional tropes such as ‘knowledge economies’ and ‘world class universities’ by exploring the emotions that they evoke—febrile excitement, pride and adulation and anxiety and fearfulness at stagnation, and ‘being left behind’. This book questions the meme of the rational, calculating, utility-maximising Asian student, by showing how hopeful social relations are felt, narrated and sustained in the everyday practices of learning and living as an international student.

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Postscript The restless and relentless flows of people, ideas and ideologies coproductive of new emotionally charged developmental landscapes are taking a new turn with the roll-out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative amidst sharply escalating trade tensions between China and the United States. Facing the possible end of a US-driven rules based multilateral order, new iterations of ‘Looking East’ and ‘Acting East’ are emerging. Political and economic currents are sweeping Asian universities and their students into a vortex of change, in which the forces of connection and fragmentation are simultaneously advancing and receding. Emotions of love, anxiety, fear, joy and hope stand once again to become objects of governmental power. New and old assemblages collide, drawing in and pushing out differently positioned actors: ‘worried’ states, ‘coveting’ entrepreneurs, ‘patriots’, opportunists and ‘aspiring’ students, among others. New political projects are being aligned in the name of great power struggles, national interest, hegemony (soft power), reputation and profit. Taking form and force are fledgling grassroots movements, counter-conducts, calling for alternative political projects. From climate action to demands for inclusion, young people are refusing to pin their futures on the premise of ‘business as usual’. The work of universities to lead and offer careful epistemologies for just and sustainable, ethical futures has never been more urgent.

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Index

A Affective, 7–9, 11, 22, 23, 58, 59, 65, 80, 93, 95, 97, 109, 122, 138, 142, 148, 150, 152 economy, 7, 16 practice, 24, 86, 122, 142 Alumni interviews, 21 Asia identity, 15, 23, 59, 60, 65, 72, 73, 116, 133, 152 Pan-Asianism, 22, 128, 131 regionalism, 22, 34, 116, 117, 125, 126, 132, 133, 138 Rising, 5, 14, 32, 36, 47, 50, 68, 110, 116, 126, 140, 155, 157 Asian Financial Crisis, 31, 33, 72, 129, 133 Asian learner, 3 C Care, 11, 21–23, 25, 65, 67, 80, 86, 93, 100, 101, 118, 120, 122, 124, 138, 139, 141, 152–154, 157

activisms, 138, 152, 153 geographies, 21, 138, 155 of the self, 80, 138, 139 Circulation, 5, 7, 25, 34 Cosmopolitanism, 86, 87, 89, 90 criticisms, 61, 67, 150 sociabilities and solidarities, 4, 22, 86–89, 95, 110, 152 solidarities, 4 Counter-conduct, 89, 141, 149 Critique, 11, 21, 22, 36, 77, 80, 87, 138–142, 149, 152, 157 Cultural politics, 15, 58

E East Asia economies, 4, 14, 22, 32, 50, 157 global universities, 58 Emoscapes, 59 Emotions anxiety, 11, 36, 63, 70, 76, 85, 90, 102, 157, 158

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. K. Sidhu et al., Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27856-4

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162

INDEX

emotionalisation and the state, 22, 109, 150 excitement, 69, 157 geographies of, 21, 80, 81, 100 optimism, 58, 68, 69, 85 Emplacement, 86, 93, 107, 109, 121 Ethical conduct, 80, 154, 156 Ethics, 22, 23, 73, 80, 88, 138, 153, 154 Europe, 2–5, 25, 43, 49, 78, 90, 108, 117, 129, 130, 141

F Feminism, 8, 9, 16, 21, 22, 153 and care, 22 Friendship, 22, 88–90, 93, 94, 97, 101, 104–106, 110, 111

G Globalisation, 12, 60, 63, 70, 74, 87, 103, 117, 127, 148, 156 Governmentality, 9–11, 21, 46, 86, 87, 90, 93, 96, 104, 116, 152 East Asian governmentalities, 11, 16

H Higher education, 18, 34–37, 39, 43, 62, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 78, 155

I Internationalisation, 24, 35, 61, 63, 65–67, 72–75, 80, 86, 138, 153 Interviewing institutional leaders, 18

K Knowledge, 5, 8, 10, 13–16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 47, 48, 50, 58, 62, 66–68, 72, 80, 85, 86, 93, 95, 97,

100–103, 107, 116, 122, 125, 128, 129, 139, 141, 142, 147, 157 economy, 32, 34–36, 38, 47, 50, 51, 78, 95, 126, 157 global, 4, 59, 68, 75, 103 spatial, 8, 34, 50, 58, 72, 85

M Methodology, 20, 127 Mobilities, 4, 6, 16, 20, 21, 46 international students, 14, 48, 94, 155, 156

N Nationalism, 4, 22, 33, 128, 153 Neoliberalism, 12, 111, 126

O On methodology and reflexivity, 15

P Policy, 5, 6, 21–24, 31, 33–36, 38, 42, 50, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 87, 103, 116, 118, 119, 127, 140, 145, 150, 157 makers, 13, 43, 80, 87, 118

R Racialisation, 9, 13, 35, 88–91, 104, 106, 110, 128–131, 157 Radicalisation, 9, 16, 20, 23, 35, 70, 87, 152, 157 Reflexivity, 16, 17 Regionalisation, 117 of policy, 116 Researching emotions, 17

INDEX

S Situating our study, 15 Spatial imagination, 126, 128 family and home, 108 friendship, 103 learning, 86 Student biographical interviews, 20 Subaltern positionalities, 87 Surveying international students, 18 T Technocracy, 132 Technologies of power, 10, 116 Technologies of the self, 10, 59

163

Technology-mediated communication, 22, 109 U University, 4, 5, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 24, 31, 34, 35, 37–39, 41, 43–45, 47–51, 58–80, 85, 86, 91–96, 98–106, 109, 117, 119, 121–125, 132, 138, 142, 144, 145, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158 officialdom, 64, 76, 80, 81 world class, 21, 32, 58–62, 64, 71, 72, 76, 77, 110, 157