Hong Kong as an international education hub — backed by regional synergy and upgraded infrastructure and with “both the East and West on its dance card” — is ready to “start a good night”, but its universities must now grapple more intensively with how to navigate an increasingly geopolitically intricate and crowded field, a high-profile talent forum heard on Wednesday.

Hong Kong brings a multi-faceted set of advantages to its ambition of becoming an education boom land, Simon Marginson, an emeritus professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, remarked during a panel discussion on the future development of education, which is also part of Hong Kong’s Global Talent Summit Week which kicked off on Wednesday.

Marginson listed that at its core, the city possesses a deeply ingrained culture of self-cultivation that propels academic excellence, now pepped up by enhanced infrastructure offering expanded capacity for events and schooling.

To these, add the growing synergy among cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and robust national support, which, he noted, are “virtually making Hong Kong sit next to a vast talent pool, the biggest in the world that is a stable, global giant and that respects Hong Kong, knows it, and is interested in it”.

Marginson, however, was quick to outline the city’s vulnerabilities: First, its bid for hub status is new, and under-focused compared to rivals like Singapore; second, geopolitical strains could cool some overseas interest; and third, fierce competition is emanating from other Chinese metropolitan centers — Shanghai, Beijing and fellow Greater Bay Area cities, he cited.

Marginson and his fellow panelists — President of Peking University Gong Qihuang, President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) Nancy Ip Yuk-yu, American President and Executive Vice Chancellor of Duke Kunshan University (DKU) John Quelch — agreed on higher education’s future, one punctuated by pursuit of internationalization, global engagement, the welcome and instrumentalization of new technologies, but ultimately defined by the goal of cultivating “creative”, “critical” and “cross-disciplinary” talent.

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China’s higher education sector, after nearly five decades of development bolstered by overseas-trained talent, has reached a good level of maturity with which it can and must begin to give back to the world, Gong said, so it must stay open, and bring in more international students and faculty.

Gong noted that Chinese mainland universities lag behind their Hong Kong counterparts in internationalization, offering Peking University as a telling example: Currently, of its roughly 50,000 students, only 3,000 — or six per cent — are from overseas, while just over 100 of its 3,000 faculty members are of foreign nationality.

According to Ip, half of all HKUST students have spent time outside the city on student exchanges.

Ip further underscored the future imperative for higher education institutions to deepen collaboration with industry partners at home and abroad, which she saw as vital in ensuring graduate employability.

She said HKUST now partners with more than 30 companies to form joint labs, among them the Chinese tech giant Huawei.

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Speaking from his vantage point at DKU — a leading Sino-American undertaking between Duke University and Wuhan University — Quelch struck a chord by noting any successful joint venture ultimately rests on “a strategic alignment”, “communication”, and “trust” among partners.

“The values and the principles that govern academia are universal principles, in terms of evidence-based, scientific research, and human development through teaching excellence,” he said, “it’s not so difficult to find common ground.”

Amid the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, all panelists affirmed that education’s fundamental mission endures as one aimed to create knowledge, nurture critical-thinking talent, conduct research, and enable knowledge transfer.

The role of teachers and universities, they concluded, remains both “indispensable” and “impossible to replace”.

Gong noted the role of teachers is evolving in the face of technologies, yet their importance may well be growing.

With machines now part of the learning process, educators must prioritize imparting innovative thinking and critical analysis — guarding against the tendency for students to “simple-mindedly follow the machine’s lead”, he said.

Contact the writer at wanqing@chinadailyhk.com