The developmental and state-driven logics in Intra-Asia student mobilities: Insights from Singapore's ‘foreign talent’ scholarship schemes and China's English-medium medical programs

The world higher education (HE) landscape has seen a significant rise in internationalization and international student mobility over the past decades. In the Anglophone world, the prevailing model of internationalization is economically driven, with education commercialized as a lucrative export commodity. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of this model and calls for a critical re-examination of HE internationalization. This chapter offers an Asian perspective by drawing on author's research into two cases of intra-Asia student mobility: (1) Singapore's long-standing schemes of recruiting students from China as ‘foreign talent’ and (2) China's English-medium medical programs that attracted students from India. It argues that these two student mobility cases are driven mainly by the student-recruiting/receiving states’ developmental and non-commercial objectives, thus representing a divergence from, possibly an alternative to, the economic-driven model. However, the chapter also cautions against essentializing or idealizing these Asian experiences by highlighting certain problems found in both cases as well as parallels with aspects of Western HE internationalization.