How Milwaukee’s schools, universities, and industry reveal an overlooked connection to Taiwan

The relationship between Milwaukee and Taiwan does not announce itself. It does not appear in the headlines generated by cross-strait military tensions or semiconductor supply chain analyses.

It appears in a K-8 public school on West Wisconsin Avenue, where students receive weekly Mandarin instruction, in an engineering program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) that has been graduating Taiwanese students for over a decade, and in the ruins of a $10 billion manufacturing promise that turned Racine County into a footnote in both American and Taiwanese politics. The connections are real, specific, and largely unreported as a unified story.

The Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language has operated as a Milwaukee Public Schools program since before the current international conversation about Taiwan became a fixture of American foreign policy coverage. The school currently serves students from kindergarten through eighth grade, offering weekly Mandarin Chinese instruction beginning in K4 and building a curriculum around global understanding of Asian cultures and their role in the broader world.

It is the first MPS program to offer instruction in Mandarin. It also houses the International Newcomer Center, a program serving recently arrived middle school refugee students who are simultaneously learning academic content and acquiring English language skills.

That combination, a school teaching Mandarin to Milwaukee children while sheltering newly arrived refugees from across the world, sits at the intersection of language, displacement, cultural continuity, and the movement of people across borders that feel permanent on a map and provisional in a life. The school is not a Taiwan story in isolation. It is a Milwaukee story that the Taiwan context makes visible.

In November 2010, officials from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago traveled to Milwaukee specifically to meet with the school’s principal. The visit was a working meeting, not a ceremonial one. The agenda included a Chinese summer program in Taiwan, a visit by school leaders, and the possibility of grants and scholarships for students of Chinese heritage in Milwaukee.

Young Milwaukee students welcomed the visitors from Taipei in Mandarin and performed a song, eighth graders served tea, and the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools was invited to attend. That visit showcased a direct institutional relationship between the government of Taiwan and a Milwaukee neighborhood school, established through official contact and built around the expansion of Chinese language education in a Midwestern city. That relationship predates most of the current public urgency around Taiwan by fifteen years.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s connection to Taiwan operates at a different scale and through a different mechanism but reflects the same pattern of sustained institutional commitment developing outside public awareness.

The UWM College of Engineering and Applied Science has maintained a formal academic partnership with Chung Yuan Christian University, a technical university in Taiwan, for over a decade at the graduate level. The two institutions run a dual master’s program in electrical engineering and industrial and manufacturing engineering that has produced graduates whose careers now connect Milwaukee’s research community to Taiwan’s technology sector in ways the supply chain conversation rarely makes visible.

In 2022, UWM partnered with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago to host the Taiwan-U.S. Business Forum in the Midwest, bringing together Wisconsin and Illinois legislators, policymakers, industry leaders, and academic researchers to address energy infrastructure challenges. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce co-sponsored the event.

In 2023, the partnership with CYCU expanded. UWM launched a 2+2 undergraduate program recruiting CYCU students in electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science to complete their final two undergraduate years in Milwaukee, receiving degrees from both universities upon graduation.

The first cohort of 17 students completed the program in May 2025. Eight of the 17 graduates immediately enrolled in advanced degree programs at UWM and other American universities. A second cohort of 16 students returned as seniors in fall 2025. Ten more arrived as juniors in September of the same year.

Brett Peters, dean of UWM’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, noted at the graduation that the program had given its students a valuable international dimension — credentials and experience that move between two educational systems and two economies simultaneously. His observation understated the impact of the program, which produces people whose professional formation spans Milwaukee and Taiwan, whose networks connect both places, and whose careers will carry that connection forward regardless of what happens in the Taiwan Strait.

That kind of sustained institutional commitment is different in character from the more dramatic Wisconsin-Taiwan connection that dominated public attention for several years beginning in 2017. The announcement that Foxconn Technology Group would build a major manufacturing facility in Mount Pleasant, Racine County, generated a scale of political attention and public investment that the UWM-CYCU partnership never sought and never received.

The promised figures were extraordinary, and bluntly disingenuous to outside observers. Republicans assured the public that the opportunity would deliver thousands of jobs, billions in investment, and a facility that would anchor a new kind of manufacturing economy to Wisconsin. Former Governor Scott Walker committed public subsidies to support the project. Local governments restructured around the anticipated arrival, enabling land grabs for profit. The groundbreaking drew national political figures, including Donald Trump at the beginning of his first term. Trump claimed the investment as evidence that American manufacturing could be rebuilt.

What followed was not a mismatch. It was a failure of delivery on commitments made with public money and political force. Job creation targets went unmet. Promised facilities in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities sat empty. Industry experts publicly questioned whether LCD manufacturing in Wisconsin was ever economically viable, raising the harder question of whether anyone in the deal believed it was. Wisconsin taxpayers had committed billions in subsidies to a project that industrial logic could not support.

The then-chairman of Foxconn, Terry Gou, announced a run for the presidency of Taiwan during the period when the Wisconsin project was falling short of its promises, a development that clarified what the Mount Pleasant facility had always been. It was a prop in two political campaigns simultaneously, one in the United States and one in Taiwan, with Wisconsin workers and Wisconsin public money bearing the cost of both.

The Foxconn episode did not demonstrate that economic relationships between Taiwan and Wisconsin lack substance. It demonstrated what those relationships look like when they are constructed around political timing rather than institutional depth. The contrast with the UWM-CYCU program is not incidental.

One relationship was announced at maximum political volume, consumed public resources at scale, and delivered a fraction of what it promised. The other was built incrementally through faculty agreements, student recruitment, and academic programming, without public subsidies or political ceremony, and has produced graduating classes that are still growing.

The Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language sits in a different position from either the university partnership or the Foxconn fiasco, but it connects to both. The K-8 public school is the place where Milwaukee’s relationship with Taiwan is most human in scale and least visible in the public record. That invisibility is the point.

The distance between Milwaukee and Taiwan is measurable in miles and time zones. It is also measurable in the students who graduated from universities in Milwaukee, and in the Taipei officials who traveled to West Wisconsin Avenue. Those connections did not begin with the current conversation about Taiwan’s future. They have been building in Milwaukee’s classrooms, engineering labs, and public institutions for longer than most people in either city have been paying attention to the Taiwan Strait.