Under the huge financial pressures, higher education institutions rush to internationalisation with “marketised, competitive and unethical interpretations” instead of “ethical and cooperative development policies and programmes for mutual learning and benefit” (Khoo, 2011). The majority of UK universities have internationalisation strategies (Lawton et al., 2013), but these in some sense appear to simply equate to international recruitment strategies under the pressure of market imperatives. The 2008 Bone Report called for a shift in higher education internationalisation from the obsession with student recruitment to the construction of long-term partnerships to avoid instability and pressures from the markets of South East Asia (Drummond, 2008). Despite the fact that Chinese government has not published a written internationalisation strategy, the idea of international academic exchange and cooperation has appeared frequently in the educational policies in the past three decades (Wang, 2014).  However, universities in mainland China are still substantially lacking in careful thinking in terms of international outreaching, and research on international networking among universities in China is still lacking and undertheorized (Yang, 2014). Numbers of international partnerships may have grown considerably but many colleges and universities find their existing partnership agreements are "plentiful in number but thin in substance" (Sutton, 2010).

The aim of this research is to examine the institutional perspectives on international partnerships in relation to sustainability and to expound how international partnerships develop, stagnate or flourish in a global context, offering an empirical understanding of what it means to be a sustainable international partnership and what factor in sustainable international partnerships building. In order to answer this main research question, three sub-research questions are framed as follows:

•    How is the international partnership in relation to sustainability constructed in the policies in the researched English and Chinese higher education institutions?

•    How is the international partnership in relation to sustainability perceived by the staff in the researched English and Chinese higher education institutions?

•    How do international partnerships develop, stagnate or flourish in the researched English and Chinese higher education institutions?

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