The Illusion of Collaboration? Reexamining Taught Postgraduate Programs in Sino-Foreign Joint Universities and the Promise of Educational Peacebuilding

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Enactment Matters: Empirical Perspectives on Curriculum Implementation

Proposal

In an increasingly fractured geopolitical landscape, cross-border higher education is often positioned as a conduit for peace, mutual understanding, and international cooperation. Sino-foreign joint universities—such as The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHKSZ) and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou (HKUSTGZ)—are commonly presented as embodiments of this aspiration. Legally independent yet affiliated with globally ranked Hong Kong universities, these institutions occupy a privileged space in China’s internationalization agenda. However, this paper argues that their taught master’s programs reveal a significant disjunction between the rhetoric of educational collaboration and the reality of institutional practice.
Through close examination of program documents, regulatory frameworks, and public governance structures, this study finds that although CUHKSZ and HKUSTGZ are marketed as collaborative entities, their taught postgraduate programs are largely designed, delivered, and governed independently at the mainland campuses, with only final academic approval routed through the parent university senates or joint boards. There is little evidence of co-teaching, shared course delivery, student mobility, or integrated academic staffing between Hong Kong and mainland campuses at the master’s level. In short, these programs function more as parallel systems than genuinely collaborative educational ventures.
This gap has deeper implications. Education is frequently invoked as a peacebuilding mechanism—a platform to bridge cultural divides, cultivate shared values, and foster intercultural empathy. Yet, when transnational institutions operate without meaningful cross-campus pedagogical integration, they risk becoming symbolic expressions of soft power rather than engines of transformative understanding. The findings suggest that the “joint” in joint universities may be more structural than substantive, calling into question whether these institutions are fulfilling their peace-oriented mandates or merely reinforcing administrative segmentation along national lines.
Building on frameworks from internationalization theory, peace education, and institutional sociology, the paper positions CUHKSZ and HKUSTGZ as emblematic of a wider trend in global higher education: the appearance of cooperation without pedagogical convergence. This raises urgent questions about the future of cross-border education. Can institutions designed around sovereign compromise and regulatory caution truly become spaces of intellectual fusion? Or do they inevitably default to a divided architecture, one that mirrors rather than mends the fractures of the world they claim to transcend?
The paper concludes by proposing a framework for evaluating “peace potential” in cross-border taught programs, emphasizing not only institutional collaboration but also curricular integration, intercultural faculty teams, and mobility mechanisms for both students and staff. If higher education is to contribute meaningfully to peace in a divided world, then academic collaboration must go deeper than shared branding or governance—it must be experienced in the learning encounter itself.

Author

• Jie Liu, The University of Hong Kong