ABSTRACT
The Inter-University Program (IUP) for Chinese Language Studies passed its half century mark in 2013. In academic year 1995- 96, IUP began to prepare for the worst case scenario. When IUP recruited its first cohort of teachers in February and July of 1997, higher education in China was still largely state-funded. The pool of applicants for teaching positions in IUP came from a small but growing free labor market that was pushing its way through a crack in the state-controlled system. National Taiwan University's (NTU's) attitude toward IUP, just as the political climate in Taiwan at large, was by no means monolithic. Transferring IUP from the sponsorship of a group of American institutions to NTU entailed much more than changing its name from Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies to International Chinese Language Program (ICLP). Language skills in Chinese as well as English were important factors, but not prior training and experience in teaching Chinese.
