Intercultural Communication professor grateful to help shape China’s burgeoning IC discipline

Developing a discipline to develop people

Steve’s Chinese name is 顾力行 (Gu Lixing), which, according to him, summarizes his life purpose. “力 (Li) means that I try to depend on God’s strength to provide what I need every day to cultivate inner capacity. 行 (Xing) is to live out that capacity. 顾 (Gu) is to seek to be a good advisor or help to care for others.” His name is therefore a reflection of his dedication to China’s education.

At SISU, Steve not only founded intercultural communication (IC) courses, but several IC programs. In 2002, he was asked to start the intercultural communication MA program, and by recruiting a group of like-minded local and overseas colleagues, they have trained over 300 MA graduates in IC. During 2005, he, Prof. Zhang Hongling and several others at SISU drafted plans for a research center to integrate resources, promote the development of the discipline, and better serve the university and its students.

Thanks to university-level support, the SISU Intercultural Institute (SII) was launched in September 2006 and has steadily grown in staff members and influence. Currently, there are eight core academic scholars/staff on the team and other affiliated partners in other colleges. SISU has become one of the leading locations for teaching and researching IC as an interdisciplinary subject, especially through the IC “state of the field” and “disciplinary development” conferences that were hosted in 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2016, and publication of the institute’s books and key articles. Since 2010, SISU has been recruiting PhD students and more than a dozen of the first graduates are now working to build the field in universities across China.