Sino-Latin American relation: from coolies to Confucius institutes

A considerable amount of scholarship on higher education hinges around knowledge production, which is by far the most looked up among the three purported raison d'être of colleges and universities. This presentation takes a closer look at Asian knowledge production in social sciences and humanities in the context of Asian transition from her colonial past and inextricably neoliberal present. From the Far East to the Central Asia steppes through Southeast Sea, most of today’s Asian nation-states were colonial territories. While a lot has been said about neoliberal impact on Asian higher education such as ‘brain gain/drain’, marketization and globalization, in a century that is called after her, Asia is yet to come to terms with her past under imperialism and Cold-War ‘peripheriality’ amidst fresh nationalistic struggles and territorial disputes from within. Thus, instead of celebrative descriptions or eulogies, this paper takes a rather critical position regarding the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education in Asia. To this end, it examines the discourse of Confucian heritage culture and its methodological issues in knowledge production followed by some recent counter-arguments against universalism of research methodology, namely, Asia as a higher education research methodology.