Economic globalization is initially represented by the flow direction of capital. The following examples prove part of the story. Financial investments from Japanese enterprises put in Chinese market amounted to 490,000 million yen in 2004. Thus the total Japanese investment in China has accumulated to 66,600 million US dollars. International stock markets also see the listing of enterprises such as China Telecom and China Mobile. Japanese capitals are injected in the invigorated Chinese companies like UTStarCOM, Sina, while Lenovo China has recently bought out PC business sector from IBM. Even Sony, which is so familiar to you, set up a joint venture named Beijing Sohong in 1995 with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), the university I come from. What Sohong produces is handsets used in wireless communications.
Today, more and more foreign enterprises have set up their research and development (R&D) centers in China. At BUPT, we have jointlabs with Hitachi and Anritsu; we have R&D collaborative agreements with Fujitsu and KDDI. What’s more, Toshiba is on the list of initiators of BUPT Education Foundation. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, ZTE have established offshore R&D institutions in America, Europe and Asia as well. At the Science Park (YRP) in Yokosuka, the founder of one of the research institutions is Prof. Zhang Ping from BUPT.
It is all because of the internationalized penetration like this in the development of science and technology that accelerates the globalization of human resources market. University graduates with different levels of academic degrees from different nations are found working together in transnational enterprises everywhere in the world. Industry giants even try to recruit brains directly from oversea education institutions. Enterprises like NEC, Anritsu started to recruit BUPT graduates a few years ago. Last year, BUPT graduates went directly to work in the labs of NICT and KDDI here in Japan.
There are also waves of international students mobility. In the last two decades, Chinese students studying abroad have snowballed to more than one million. According to the statistics, in the year 2005, Chinese students in Japan alone reached 80,500. At the same time, China opens its door to more and more international students. In 1992, the number of overseas students studying in China was about 14,000, while in 2004 this number amounted to more than 110,000. What I would like to draw your attention to is that in the process of the globalization of job market, science and industry benefit from it not only the qualified professionals with scientific, technological and managerial expertise, but also the rich education nutritious elements marked by different characteristics of different nations, which in return will give impetus to the development of higher education.
Nowadays, the world we are living in sees the boom of information and communication technology. A ubiquitous network is putting every company, every school and every family in the linkage, and is bringing all social members into contact by means of mobile communications. Business will be operated more efficiently due to the application of ecommerce; industry structures will be more flexible because of remote offices and home offices. Distance learning and web learning will enable varied modes of education by supplying learners with different means of knowledge acquisition. You younger generation will definitely benefit from unprecedented development of InfoCom technologies - mobile internet, video phone, mobile TV, digital film, to name a few.
While to build and promote the civilization in information and communications to a new level, more qualified professionals are needed. It’s certainly an inescapable responsibility to higher education, especially to the institutions like UEC and BUPT renowned for excellent teaching and research in the field of information and communications.
Last October, five university presidents from Korea, France, Germany, Japan and China, including President Masuda and me, initiated an international forum for university presidents on information and communication technology education (IFUP on ICTEducation 2005). More than 80 universities, distinguishing themselves in ICT education, from 26 countries joined at the forum. The presidents from these universities shared the view that in building the new civilization in information and communications, more intercollegiate exchange in the world, more collaboration with industry is of high necessity to foster talents readily adaptable to the changing world.
My dear fellow students, no matter from which part of the world, you were all brought up in the places called hometown, and most of your families are of unitary nationalities. While when you arrive at UEC, you find you are in a multinational environment. In the not far future, many of you will find yourselves either working in enterprises or teaching and researching at universities and institutions that are located on foreign soils. Therefore, university students in the changing world should not only learn the history and culture of their own nation, but should also try to find out what’s true about other nations with respect. They should learn to get well along with not only their fellow classmates but also international students. Only in this way can you find yourselves qualified for the international working environment.