Transnational higher education and internationalisation-at-home : reflections on Sino-foreign cooperative universities in China

Given the current COVID-19 pandemic that has restricted international student mobility and changed conventional face-to-face classes, transnational higher education (TNHE) provides an exciting opportunity for those who want to gain foreign experience but are unable to stay abroad. With this sudden transformation, the increasing role of the TNHE contributes to the internationalisation-at-home (LaH), which is characterised as an opportunity for intercultural learning between international and domestic students. Drawing upon the LaH, this paper has major objectives. Firstly, it aims to explore the opportunities that TNHE creates for intercultural and international learning. Secondly, from the geopolitics perspectives, this paper examines how TNHE is governed, particularly pertaining to the degree of autonomy and the consequences of reconciling different demands and requirements. Based on the policy and case studies, this paper presents the preliminary findings of our pilot research, which delineates transnational law by looking at how different TNHE arrangements interact with one another, along the regulations in the country of the degree-awarding institutions. We focus on the interaction between USA and UK; in-country provision regulations in Hong Kong and Mainland China, and the institution-specific arrangements that reflect the local leeway.