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This article examines how the Singaporean state has reformed the higher education sector in order to co-opt different political and economic agendas at both the global and local levels, utilising quality assurance as a regulatory process of control. The core argument is that quality assurance has been used as an instrument to reshape the higher education landscape in Singapore. The article begins with a review of the literature on the role of the Singaporean state in higher education. Next, it reviews how the Global Schoolhouse initiative was developed and implemented and how public and private higher education sectors were audited. The article then analyses the establishment of a new quality assurance mechanism for private higher education in 2009. Finally, the article suggests that this new regulatory regime exemplifies the importance of political factors in the implementation of neoliberal managerialism in higher education.

This paper aims to investigate the possible framework for encouraging the presence of local dimensions in an internationalised and globally competitive system by using Taiwan's higher education system as a case. It begins by discussing the notion of internationalisation and its implications for higher education. It then turns to look at Taiwan's responses to these global developments. It also reviews different opinions on the position and importance of local dimensions in the world of globalised higher education. Based on these perspectives, the paper advocates promoting the concept of state-building in Taiwan's as well as in other higher education systems for preserving or even strengthening the local dimensions of individual academic systems operating in the international knowledge network.

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Interpreting modernisation and globalisation in East Asia as processes of Westernisation creates confusion and discomfort among some academics from the region. To illustrate why such discomfort occurs, this article explores the changes in the higher education systems of Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China in terms of their 'Chineseness' as a potentially unifying regional identity that can be counterposed to Westernisation. The recent and polyvalent theme of 'Greater China' is invoked in this article to describe and interpret the institutional frameworks, within which higher education is developing in this imaginary region, as well as to establish possible discursive linkages in the continuing transformation and strategic reorientation of higher education and its role in the recent economic, political and socio-cultural developments. In this regard, the interrelated discourses of Chineseness and Greater China have the following functions: they imply regionalism; they enable a break with their imperial and colonial past; and they provide the basis for different kinds of hybridisation between Chinese and Western intellectual, educational and cultural traditions and values.