Developments And Implications Of ICC In Taiwan With Reference To ICC In The US And The Chinese Mainland

There must be some evidential information as regards the emergence and status of a newly-established academic discipline. Compared with literary studies, history, law, linguistics and some other "classic" disciplines, intercultural communication (ICC for short) may sound too strange for "outsiders" to determine, in any degree, its disciplinary status, which is well recognized in the US and in the circles of foreign language education, journalism and communication across the Taiwan Straits. Therefore, researchers from the Chinese mainland have had their papers published either in the Mainland or in Taiwan on the development, historical divisions and characteristics of intercultural communication studies in the Mainland, but no comprehensive summary has yet been found of ICC in Taiwan as a historical development, let alone a comparative study of ICC between the Mainland and Taiwan. This is an academic gap needing to be filled. Therefore, the present dissertation takes upon itself to trace the developments and implications of ICC in Taiwan, belonging to area studies on a discipline. As no discipline ever appeared all of a sudden from nowhere but emerged out of certain social and historical needs, there must be a frame of reference for the present study, which is in our case a reference to ICC in the US and the Chinese mainland, covering such aspects as the initiation of ICC, the gradual recognition of its disciplinary status, courses in ICC, academic associations, conferences and journals for ICC, and ICC theory construction. All this will hopefully contribute to advancing ICC across the Taiwan Straits, promoting ICC theories with Chinese perspectives and rendering more effective ICC instruction. The present tentative study has revealed the following major findings:(1) The "importation" of ICC in the US to Taiwan in 1974, as compared with the same event in 1983 in the Mainland, can be attributed to American influence on Taiwan. (2) There is a quite clear-cut boundary between the Mainland's kuawenhua jiaojixue (??????) with a foreign language teaching background and kuawenhua chuanboxue(??????)with a media studies background, while in Taiwan kuawenhua chuanboxue(??????),kuawenhua goutongxue(??????)or wenhuajian jiaojixue(??????),different translations of the same term used for so many years at the will of different researchers, covers a large area including the Mainland's kuawenhua jiaojixue(??????),kuawenhua chuanboxue(??????)and even bijiao wenhua yanjiu(??????).(3)Courses in ICC in the foreign language education circle are more prominent than those in mass media studies in the Mainland, while the reverse trend is found in Taiwan. This case in Taiwan is simply because most researchers or teachers of the course are returned students with PhD degree in the field of communication studies from the US. (4) There are 4 monographs in the Mainland on ICC theory, but no such achievement has been made in Taiwan. (5) Co-cultural communication studies in Taiwan, including cultural studies on the indigenous people there, have much for researchers in the Mainland to draw upon. (6) Researchers and practitioners of ICC on both sides of the Taiwan Straits should reinforce critical and experiential studies of ICC through a "rhetorical turn" in order to advance ICC theories with Chinese perspectives. Due to technical terms used in different senses for different references across the Taiwan Straits and due to the foreign language teaching background of the writer, the present study is inevitably inadequate in relevant data collection and thus subjective in nature. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the present study may have well paved the way for further studies in this direction and more puzzles are expected to be solved in the near future. All this has hopefully proven the academic significance of promoting ICC across the Taiwan Straits and will probably prove far more practical than the oversimplified propaganda targeted at Taiwan for the reunification of China, as most researchers in the Mainland on the humanities and social sciences have been doing.