Immersive Field Course: China and Taiwan

I designed this course to enable students to examine cross-strait issues between the Peoples Republic of China and the Republic of China—(Taiwan) at a critical juncture. Many products produced for the global marketplace—televisions, computers and computer components, smartphones, communications/processor chips, and networking equipment to name just a few have designers in Taiwan and manufacturing or assembly on the mainland. Many mainland manufacturers with huge export revenues such as Hon Hai Precision Industries (Foxconn) or Quanta Computer are Taiwan-based. This is at a time where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set goals to increase the innovation and design content of work done on the mainland, while funding the acquisition of technology from abroad. While there is some visibility to this in Western markets, it is viewed as an existential crisis in Taiwan, something that has by and large escaped global notice outside of East Asia.