Next week a group of 40 mainland scholars will gather in Taipei to participate in this year’s Communication Forum sponsored by the Department of Media and Communication. 

 

Since 2004-05, COM has hosted 113 young communication scholars from the mainland.  Forming a strong “invisible college,” they also hold a communication forum every summer and this year’s forum will be moved to Taipei.  The forum will be held from 20 to 23 August.    In previous years the forums have taken place in Shenzhen, Lushan, Nanjing, Kunming, Xiamen, and Hong Kong.

 

On the first day of the Taipei forum, Dr. Cheng Jei-cheng, a communication scholar who serves as Taiwan’s former Minister of Education, will deliver the keynote speech.  It will be followed by a two-hour session attended by a distinguished panel of five senior journalists and scholars to analyze the role of the media in Taiwan’s democratization process and the challenges the media are facing in terms of ownership concentration and commercialization.   Professor Lee Chin-Chuan will moderate the panel discussion.  Other COM faculty members to attend the forum include Dr. He Zhou and Dr. Shen Fei.

 

These mainland scholars will have an opportunity to visit significant media and cultural sites such as the world-renowned Palace Museum.  Besides, they will pay tribute to the Teresa Teng Memorial, a popular Taiwanese singer who played an important role when these mainland scholars were growing up in the 1980s.   

 

Following the Communication Forum, many of the scholars will also attend a two-day conference on public relations and advertising that COM sponsors with Shih Hsin University in Taipei and Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.