This article presents a study of how to attract students from the Asian markets to pursue higher education in Hong Kong. The study found that the strategies of internationalization, at both the system level and the institutional level, attempted to address problems generated from the barriers of exporting higher education and so build on the attractions of studying in Hong Kong's higher education system. These strategies are mainly driven by concerns of brain gain and income generation. Although these strategies help to attract overseas students, we caution the importance of going beyond recruiting overseas students and put forward a more humanized way of looking at internationalization to counteract the overriding economic-driven globalization.