45Examples from the Literature on East Asian Higher
Education
The names mentioned above are usually outside education: John Brenkman in
American literature, Samuel Huntington in political sciences, Elizabeth Perry in
Asian studies, and Gregory Chow in economics. What then about education and
especially the study of higher education in East Asia? To answer this question, I
searched for the literature using Ingenta Connect via the electronic library at the
University of Hong Kong on October 29 in 2015. It needs to note that this survey
has its clear limitations. Its aim is not to provide a comprehensive survey of the
existing English literature on East Asian higher education. Rather, it attempts to
offer an example of some current literature to illustrate who are observing East
Asian higher education development and form what angle. The keywords used for
searching the literature were East Asia and higher education. There was no time
limit set for the search.
Altogether 55 items popped up on my computer screen, with the earliest pub-
lished in 1995 and the latest in 2015. They have covered a wide range of topics, and
those on education are at various levels of schooling. Each was checked carefully.
Three of them were not available at the time. Seventeen items excluded because of
their irrelevance were respectively on foreign-trained dentists in the United States,
socioeconomic variation in tobacco consumption, progress of the doctoral students
from the Middle East, the impact and treatment of allergic rhinitis in the Middle
East, European convergence in dental education, structural change and wage
inequalities in the manufacturing sector, post-Communist youth in Central Asia,
skilled migration from India, Africa’s economic growth, Pakistan’s electronic
access, physical activity in early pregnancy, smoking in migrants in New South
Wales, socioeconomic disparities in low birth weight outcomes in Quebec, OECD’s
economic outlook, benefits of growth for Indonesian workers, East Asian child-
rearing attitudes, and human rights in EU-China relations.
While there are so many irrelevant items included in the above list, some works
that fall squarely into the field of East Asian higher education to my knowledge have
been excluded, such as Howe ( 2009 ). This might be due to the coverage of the
searching engine and/or the indexing situations of different academic journals.
There were four book reviews that cannot be regarded as research work. Thirty-one
publications were finally included in the following analysis. They were published in
1995 (1), 1998 (1), 2001 (1), 2002 (1), 2003 (1), 2005 (2), 2006 (1), 2007 (6), 2008
(1), 2009 (1), 2011 (4), 2012 (1), 2013 (4), 2014 (4), and 2015 (2). Among them,
some work are only remotely related to East Asia such as three World Bank Working
Papers, respectively, on economic analysis of World Bank education projects (2001),
education and earnings in Vietnam (1998), and promoting growth in Sri Lanka
(1995). A number of works claim research on East Asia yet indeed only look at one
society such as Hong Kong, Thailand, and Japan. Altogether 14 were considered
directly on East Asia.
3 Foil to the West? Interrogating Perspectives for Observing East Asian Higher...