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In recent decades many East Asian countries have initiated ambitious policies to increase their global prominence as education hubs. This article examines the development of Taiwan's international student recruitment policies from 1950 to 2011, exemplifying the case in a non-Western, non-English speaking context. While Taiwan's case is distinctive with the dominance of noneconomic factors in shaping the state policy orientation and agendas, the strong role of the state and the Confucian model of higher education constitute a valid example of developments in the internationalization of higher education in East Asia. The analysis further shows that the intertwining forces of localization, nationalization, and globalization influenced the policy development throughout three stages of the trajectory. These findings demonstrate the transformationalist viewpoint of globalization and support the "glonacal agency approach" proposed by Rhoades and Marginson claiming that local, national, and global domains are simultaneously significant in understanding globalization and higher education.

A central theme in the literature on transnational migration is the embeddedness of such movement in social networks and the utilisation of social capital in facilitating mobility. This case study on overseas Chinese students and mainly non-Chinese foreign students studying at a top university in Taipei brings in the notions of cultural capital and city. It investigates the ways social networks shape the destination choices of these two groups of students, and how their patterns of adjustment in the host milieu and attachment to the host city are affected by the transnational migration network (and the lack of it), embodied cultural capital and different host imaginaries constructed by the Taiwan government. The results show that these two groups of international students differed in their reliance on transnational migration networks in making destination choices prior to migration. Furthermore, the different forms of social networks and the differential social and cultural capital embedded in their respective groups, along with the distinctive host images that were constructed by the Taiwan government to cater for these two groups, shaped their overseas experiences and attachment to the city of Taipei in distinctive ways.

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University reputation and destination image are key factors shaping the choice to study in developed Western countries. While East Asia is emerging as a new contender in the international higher education market, little is known about how international students perceive and are attracted to the higher education institutions in this region. Moreover, while the destination image was represented by the host country image in most studies, the effect of city image on study destination choice should be given more attention due to the geographic and social embeddedness of universities in cities. This study drew the survey data from a flagship university in Taipei to examine the impact of university reputation and city image on international student destination choice, and employed factor analysis to identify the dimensions of university reputation and city image. The analysis confirms university reputation and city image as important elements in international student destination choice in the Asian context. It further identifies four factors creating discrepant weighting of these two elements in study destination choice: degree/non-degree program, level of study, type of international student identity, and region of origin. Theoretical and policy implications of findings are discussed at the end of the paper.