This year’s intake is notable for the breadth of new ground it covers. The 2026 cohort introduces fellows from four countries that had never been represented in the program before: Bulgaria, New Zealand, Thailand, and Venezuela. That expansion pushes the fellowship’s cumulative footprint to its current total of 60 countries and territories, a figure that underscores how a program rooted in Hong Kong has gradually woven itself into policy, business, and civil society networks on nearly every continent. For the institute, the widening map is more than a statistic; it reflects the premise on which the fellowship was built, namely that the complex problems confronting governments and economies in the 2020s cannot be understood from any single regional vantage point.

The professional depth of the cohort is striking. On average, the 2026 fellows bring nineteen years of professional experience to Hong Kong, drawn from public policy, business, civil society, and multilateral organisations. That figure places the group firmly in the mid-career bracket that the program targets: individuals senior enough to shape decisions within their own institutions, yet early enough in their trajectories for an intensive period of cross-cultural exchange to alter how they approach those decisions. The fellowship’s model rests on the idea that policy innovation travels through people rather than documents, and that embedding experienced practitioners in a shared residential environment produces conversations and collaborations that conventional conferences rarely achieve.

Professor Heiwai Tang, Director of the Asia Global Institute, Victor and William Fung Professor in Economics, and Associate Vice-President (Global) at HKU, welcomed the incoming group and framed the program’s continuing mission. We are pleased to welcome this international group to HKU, he said. The AsiaGlobal Fellows Program continues to analyse complex global issues through Asian perspectives, facilitating the cross-cultural dialogue needed to address modern policy challenges. His comments position the fellowship within a broader intellectual project: the effort to build analytical frameworks for globalisation, trade, technology governance, and sustainable development that take Asian experience and Asian voices as central rather than peripheral to the conversation.

The individual profiles within the 2026 cohort illustrate the range of expertise the program has assembled. Among the selected fellows is Angel Eduardo Cardenas Sosa, a Venezuelan finance executive who manages a transport, energy, and digital infrastructure portfolio valued at more than twelve billion dollars for CAF, the development bank of Latin America. His presence in Hong Kong links the fellowship directly to the financing questions that dominate infrastructure policy across emerging economies, from how to fund resilient energy grids to how digital connectivity can be extended to underserved populations. Infrastructure finance has become one of the defining policy battlegrounds of the decade, and a fellow with hands-on responsibility for a multibillion-dollar portfolio brings practical weight to those discussions.

Another fellow, Priscilla Gatonye of Kenya, serves as a UNESCO-UNEVOC officer coordinating global Technical and Vocational Education and Training policy across a network of more than 250 centres. Her work sits at the intersection of education policy, labour markets, and international development, a space that has grown increasingly consequential as economies worldwide grapple with skills gaps, automation, and the transition to greener industries. Calum Handforth, a British specialist with the United Nations Development Programme, adds a technology governance dimension to the cohort; he has advised heads of state on artificial intelligence governance across nearly forty countries. As governments race to establish regulatory frameworks for AI, the presence of someone who has worked directly with national leaders on these questions gives the 2026 cohort a front-row perspective on one of the most contested policy domains of the era.

The cohort also bridges the worlds of technology entrepreneurship and international commerce. Mika Noh, a South Korean tech entrepreneur, is the founder of AI Culture Lab, an organisation pioneering the application of artificial intelligence, culture, and digital media to drive regional creative industries. Her work reflects a growing recognition that AI is not solely a regulatory or industrial challenge but also a cultural force reshaping how content is produced and consumed. Raquel Ramirez, an American vice-president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, drives national policy advocacy, government relations, and market access for a network of more than 1,700 European companies. Her vantage point on the commercial and diplomatic frictions between major economies offers the group a grounded view of how trade policy is negotiated and experienced at the level of individual firms.

During their eight-week residency, the fellows will live and work in Hong Kong, immersing themselves in the city’s distinctive position as a hub where East Asian, Western, and global currents of commerce, finance, and governance converge. The program’s structure typically combines seminars, field visits, and collaborative projects, encouraging fellows to test their assumptions against the perspectives of peers from radically different professional and national contexts. The institute has confirmed that the 2026 fellows are available for media interviews, academic panels, and speaking engagements throughout their stay, a provision that opens their expertise to journalists, researchers, and the wider Hong Kong public while the cohort is in residence.

The Asia Global Institute itself occupies a specific niche in the landscape of policy research. An independent think tank based at The University of Hong Kong, it generates and disseminates innovative thinking and policy-relevant research on global issues from Asian perspectives, with the stated aim of informing global policy and actions towards a prosperous and sustainable future for all. The fellowship is among its flagship activities, and the tenth-anniversary cohort arrives at a moment when the demand for such convening power appears to be growing. Questions of AI governance, infrastructure finance, vocational education, and trade diplomacy, all represented within this single cohort, are precisely the issues on which international coordination has struggled in recent years, and programs that build durable personal networks across borders argue that they offer a corrective to that fragmentation.

As the 2026 fellows settle into their Hong Kong residence, the tenth edition of the AsiaGlobal Fellows Program stands as a case study in how a regional institution can cultivate a genuinely global community of practice. From its base at HKU, the program has grown from an initial experiment into a network of 120 alumni across 60 countries and territories, now joined by a new class whose members manage billion-dollar portfolios, coordinate United Nations policy networks, advise heads of state, and build companies at the frontier of artificial intelligence. Whether the next decade of the fellowship can match the geographic and professional expansion of its first ten years remains to be seen, but the 2026 cohort suggests that the institute’s core proposition, that global problems demand dialogue conducted from Asian perspectives, continues to attract accomplished practitioners from around the world.

Subject of Research: The 2026 AsiaGlobal Fellows Program at the University of Hong Kong and its international cohort of mid-career policy professionals

Article Title: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows

Article References: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: AsiaGlobal Fellows, University of Hong Kong, Asia Global Institute, policy fellowship, global governance, artificial intelligence, infrastructure finance, vocational education, international trade, Hong Kong, cross-cultural dialogue, mid-career professionals

At the heart of Yang’s book is a systematic comparison of how Chinese and Anglo-American societies conceive the public good of higher education. Using a method the review describes as trans-positional analysis, Yang moves between the two traditions across five key themes, refusing to treat either as a universal benchmark against which the other must be measured. In the Anglo-American tradition, the public good of universities has been framed largely through liberal individualism, market accountability and the state’s retreat from direct provision. In the Chinese tradition, by contrast, education has long been entwined with the moral cultivation of persons, the responsibilities of family and collectivity, and the state’s role as guarantor of social harmony and meritocratic mobility. Yang’s argument is that these are not merely different policy preferences but structurally different ways of generating public value.

The reviewers sharpen this point by distinguishing three levels at which the structural differences operate. At the normative level, the two traditions answer differently what a university is for: individual enrichment and economic productivity in the Anglo-American frame, versus self-perfection and collective flourishing in the Confucian frame. At the institutional level, they differ in how funding, governance and evaluation distribute responsibility between state, market and society, with Chinese higher education embedding the state more deeply in defining educational purpose, as seen in debates over the gaokao entrance examination and its double constraints. At the subjective level, students and academics internalise these divergent logics, shaping how individuals imagine their own agency, obligation and belonging within the university.

What makes the review—and the book it examines—technically significant for the field is the concept of epistemic justice, borrowed from Miranda Fricker’s 2007 work on power and the ethics of knowing. Applied to higher education research, epistemic injustice means that knowledge produced in non-Western traditions is systematically discounted, translated into Western categories or treated as exotic raw material rather than as theory in its own right. Tao and Li argue that Yang’s comparison directly challenges this Western-centrism. By drawing on Chinese philosophical resources with the same seriousness conventionally reserved for liberal political theory, the book performs what the reviewers call an advance in epistemic justice: it insists that the Chinese tradition can generate concepts, not merely case studies.

The most conceptually charged of these resources is tianxia, often translated as all-under-heaven, an classical Chinese vision of world order in which political and moral community extends across the entire known world rather than being bounded by nation-states. In recent years, philosopher Zhao Tingyang has revived tianxia as an ontological argument for a new world order, and Yang and her collaborators—including Simon Marginson and Xin Xu—have developed it as a heuristic for higher education, proposing a world-centred rather than nation-centred imaginary for global academia. Their 2024 article in Globalisation, Societies and Education, titled Thinking through the world, and their 2025 Higher Education paper on the global aspirations of Chinese universities both treat tianxia as a lens for imagining universities as contributors to a shared human world rather than competitors in a zero-sum rankings game.

Yet the review is refreshingly candid about the disputes this agenda has provoked, and it engages critics rather than dismissing them. Four risks receive sustained attention: reductionism, essentialism, re-orientalism and the co-optation of tianxia. Reductionism is the danger of flattening vast, internally diverse civilisations into single explanatory formulas. Essentialism treats Chinese and Western cultures as fixed, homogenous essences rather than dynamic, hybridising formations—a concern echoed by W.W. Lo and Rui Yang’s work on hybridisation and recombination in Chinese societies, and by Zhu, Shen and Yang’s 2025 Higher Education study showing how Chinese humanities and social science scholars actively transform traditions into academic resources rather than merely inheriting them.

Re-orientalism poses a subtler trap. Building on Edward Said’s 1977 critique of Orientalism and subsequent debates in Chinese scholarship by scholars such as Wang Ning and Zhou Ning, the reviewers note that even well-intentioned efforts to celebrate Chinese traditions can reproduce the same East-West binary that Orientalism created, positioning China as a mystical civilisational Other. Mulvey’s 2026 article in Comparative Education goes further, asking whether the essentialisation of China within so-called critical internationalisation studies constitutes a new Orientalism. The tianxia concept attracts the sharpest critique of all: Fei Yan’s 2026 article, The darker side of Tianxia, warns that the framework carries imperial histories and could be co-opted to serve state power, while Moreno García and Pines’s comparative historical work on Maat and Tianxia reminds readers that ancient world-order ideologies, Egyptian and Chinese alike, were instruments of rule as much as philosophies of harmony. Berlin debates between Zhao and Western philosophers, documented in World Philosophy, show that these objections are not merely external attacks but live controversies within the tianxia literature itself.

The reviewers’ response to these disputes is arguably the review’s most important analytical move. Rather than concluding that tradition-based research is too dangerous or too essentialist to pursue, they argue that the risks are internal to any serious cross-cultural scholarship and must be managed through methodological reflexivity, attention to hybridity and genuine two-way dialogue. They situate Yang’s book within a broader movement documented across the field: Xu’s work on epistemic diversity in comparative research and on a Chinese definition of internationalisation; Bamberger, Mulvey and Yan’s 2026 call for internationalisation scholarship beyond the Western horizon; Jackson and Kwak’s probing question of whether philosophy of education is Western at all; and parallel non-Western resources such as Dladla’s Ubuntu philosophy of liberation and Mun and Min’s account of the Korean public good as jeong. Seen together, these works suggest a discipline in the midst of an epistemic diversification whose trajectory Yang’s book may well consolidate.

The practical stakes extend well beyond theory. For policymakers, the three-level framework—normative, institutional, subjective—offers a diagnostic tool for understanding why policy transplants so often fail: a governance model detached from its civilisational soil produces different, and sometimes perverse, effects when grafted onto another tradition. For university leaders navigating international partnerships, the review implies that cooperation grounded in mutual conceptual translation will be more durable than arrangements that quietly assume Anglo-American categories are universal. For students, particularly the growing cohort of globally mobile learners whose identity negotiations are documented in Xiaoshi Li’s own research on Chinese master’s students in Hong Kong, the debate determines whether their educational traditions are treated as liabilities to be overcome or as resources to be drawn upon.

Tao and Li close with a forward-looking assessment: Yang’s book, they conclude, will prompt more equal and meaningful cross-cultural dialogues in the field, making it invaluable to researchers, policymakers, students and anyone interested in what they call civilisational dialogues. The phrase is telling. What began as a book review has become a statement about the future epistemology of higher education research itself—a field long dominated by centres in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and increasingly challenged by scholarship from East Asia and the Global South. Whether tianxia, Confucian self-cultivation and kindred concepts can enrich a genuinely global conversation without hardening into new orthodoxies remains an open question. But the review makes clear that the question can no longer be avoided, and that the answer will shape how universities everywhere understand their public purpose.

Subject of Research: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research

Article Title: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects

Article References: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Keywords: higher education, public good, cross-cultural dialogue, tianxia, epistemic justice, comparative education, Chinese tradition, Anglo-American higher education, Western-centrism, civilisational dialogue, Lili Yang, internationalisation