Renowned communication scholars and practitioners from all over the world have gathered at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) for a three-day conference on professional communication and management and business communication in both global and local contexts.

The 7th Asia-Pacific International Conference was organized by CityU’s Department of English and Communication and the Association for Business Communication from 28 to 30 March under the theme “Professional communication: Globalizing the local and localizing the global”.

This is the first time the Association for Business Communication had held its conference in Hong Kong, demonstrating CityU’s proactive role in promoting academic dialogue among scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. More than 100 participants from all over the world attended.

The Association for Business Communication is an international organization founded by a group of professors in 1935 to foster excellence in business communication scholarship, research, education and practice.

Professor Richard Ho Yan-ki, CityU’s Vice-President (Undergraduate Education), said in his opening address that it was an honour for CityU to host the event. “We are now in a world interconnected by ‘global value chains’,” he said. “Economic activities from design and production to marketing and distribution are now divided among different countries. As every segment of the process is interconnected, effective communicating with one another is a matter of necessity if we are to contribute to the global value chain as a whole.”

Dr Hiromitsu Hayashida, Vice-President (Asia Pacific) of the Association for Business Communication, said he was delighted that the 7th Asia-Pacific Conference had been held in Hong Kong, the city where East meets West, adding that the occasion was a precious opportunity for participants to better understand different cultures.

Scholars from CityU’s Department of English and Communication played a major role at the conference. Dr Bertha Du-Babcock, Associate Professor, was the Conference Programme Chair; Dr Anne Peirson-Smith, Instructor, served as Co-Chair; and Professor Vijay Bhatia gave a plenary address on “LSP: Professional communication and professional discourse: Towards a shared understanding”.

“This international conference has provided a unique opportunity for academics and practitioners to share their knowledge and experience about professional communication from local and global perspectives, while representing those positions in face-to-face interactions,” Dr Du-Babcock said.

The conference featured three other plenary addresses:

• Dr David Victor, Professor and Director of International Programmes at Eastern Michigan University, spoke on “What is the language of business? : Affecting business outcomes before you say a word”;
• Mr John Jamison, Executive Manager of the British Chamber of Commerce Guangdong, spoke on “The changing face of expats in Guangdong: Who’s actually doing this communication thing?”; and
• Dr Naoki Kemeda, Professor of the Faculty of Commerce at Doshisha University, Japan, spoke on “Communicative challenges for Japanese companies: Strategies in the global marketplace”.

In addition, there were around eighty parallel presentations on intercultural communication, international communication, organizational and corporate communication and global communication.

Further to this event, CityU’s Department of English and Communication is organizing a series of international conferences in the coming months on topics including intellectuals and the press in Republican China; inter-Asian culture, communication, conflict and peace; an international roundtable on discourse analysis, and the discourse of international arbitration practice.