Development of Technical Communication in China: Program Building and Industrial Trends

In the past decade, technical communication as an academic domain and a profession enjoys rapid advancement in China with leading Chinese universities establishing programs both in undergraduate and graduate education, as well as industries attaching more significance to the building of technical communication capacity. In this paper, the development of technical communication in academia and industry in China is introduced with a leading university’s graduate program as an example. Literature review and interviews are major methods adopted to study the industry-academia dynamics. After the preliminary research, the paper presents features, different viewpoints, challenges, and opportunities of Chinese technical communication. It is shown that technical communication in China features close international cooperation and academia-industry relationships. The increasing market need, the underdevelopment of educational and vocational training programs, and the lack of established national standards jointly result in the situation that technical communication is identified as a gap in the Chinese market.