ABSTRACT
As a MPhil Communication student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the early 1980s, I had the privilege of attending a seminar by Alex Edelstein, a visiting professor from the University of Washington, and reading his booklet Comparative Communication (Edelstein, 1982). In retrospect, he, among others such as Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch, Jack McLeod, and Karl Rosengren (Gurevitch, 1990; Blumler, McLeod, & Rosengren, 1992), was ahead of his time when he harped on the importance of comparative communication, while most scholars would only focus on national communication. For some two decades after these scholars called for more studies in comparative communication, comparative studies remained more often said than done. Meanwhile, the ethnocentricity of communication theories developed in the West became more widely recognized and criticized, which is sometimes expressed as repeated calls for their dewesternization and internationalization (Curran & Park, 2000; Thussu, 2000; Lee, 2015).
