Higher education in Asian countries and the role of international ...

1. East Asia: China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea and South Korea
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2. Southeast Asia: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the
Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam
3. South Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan , India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
4. Southwest Asia: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lebanon,
Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, U.A.E, and Yemen
5. Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
Among all continents of the world, Asia has the largest area (43.8 million km², covers 29.9% of
the earth‟s land area and 8.6% of earth‟s total area), biggest population size (4.05 billion in 2008,
60% of the world‟s population), highest population density (91 person/ km²) and highest GDP
(PPP) of US$ 28.4 trillion.
4.2 Some Historical background
4.2.1 Socio-Political history of Asia
The history of Asia, either socio-economic or political, is not easy to grasp due to the immense
size of the continent and its long and scattered history. The socio-political history of Asia begins
from the day when the first human being put his/her feet on this continent. Now here a question
arises that when did the first human arrived? To answer this question a great deal of work has
been done by anthropologists.
As the period of the human evolution is very long so we don‟t know much about our ancestors.
We have only DNA and fossil evidences, which give us limited information what we have today,
thanks to modern science! These evidences conform that modern human “Homo Sapiens” first
appeared in Africa about 200,000 years back (Potts, 2010). These Homo sapiens or “wise man” 2
spread to the other parts of the world with the passage of time: 70 millennia (70,000) years ago
they settled in western Asia (now Middle East), 50 millennia ago they arrived in south Asia and
by 30 millennia they spread in all regions of the Asia including eastern Asia; Japan, Korea
(Wikipedia, 2010). In 10000 BP [Before Present or accurately before 1950 (Dincauze, 2000)]
human societies were hunter-gatherers, later on human started practicing agriculture that gave
birth to an agrarian society, which later on led to the establishment of villages and towns. All
2 Human: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens Retrieved on February 2010