The Asian region remains to be current target of imperialists, mainly the United States', economic and political offensives. For the past years, countries in the region have experienced the on
slaught of economic destruction brought about by imperialist globalization. Since the 1970's the third world counties have been forced to systematically implement neo-liberal economic policies starting with the Structural Adjustment Programs. The 90's saw the intensified exploitation of the world superpowers of the vast human and natural resources of the region. Globalization became the slogan of imperialism which they used in order to deceive the people of their own interest - that is, to curb the steady downfall of their economies due to their chronic crisis.
Liberalization, deregulation and privatization have been rampantly pushed in countries throughout the region and that resulted economic collapse or went to the brink of devastation. Even the countries like Japan, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan could not escape from the destructive impacts of globalization.
The economic collapse throughout the region has brought unspeakable hardships to our people and of course students are not excluded. Students continually face the attacks against the basic right to education. Globalization of education has been rampantly implemented in order to produce the needed workforce to ensure the operations of imperialist-owned industries. Governments are systematically reducing the fund of Education, privatising them entirely, in order to facilitate the entry of the private sector in this basic social service. As a result, fees have soared high and school dropouts have increased, unemployment ratio has increased every year. Courses that promote social relevance and critical thinking are reduced into the sidelines to give way to the more 'global-oriented' subjects of science, engineering and mathematics essential to the information technology and E-commerce being hyped by the world powers.
The education should to be a means of social mobility in the nation. But commercialization and privatization in education are totally wiping out any hint of such possibilities. Students from poor and middle class backgrounds are being priced out from higher education, which is being gradually reserved for the elite upper middle class. Education, rather than being defined as mass education', is rapidly coming to mean class education. Education is fast becoming a means of class hegemony rather than of social mobility.
The student's issues of commercialisation, privatisation and unemployment, and the attacks on their democratic rights, are a direct fallout of anti- people policies implemented by the government in the respective countries, at the dictates of imperialist powers. The student movement can tackle this assault only by developing a nationalist and anti- imperialist perspective.
A student movement that aims to put up a decisive struggle on student issues must offer a challenge to imperialism and fascism. And therefore it must also be autonomous. The international student movement has, in the past few years, given us many examples of the power and potential of the student movement as an autonomous force of political change. We can take inspiration from all those historic student movement which became the moving force to oust the autocratic dictatorship and to develop the new and genuine society.
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