When Google Meets Xiaomi: Comparative Case Study in Western and Eastern Corporate Management

Google Inc. of the West and Xiaomi Inc. of the East are recognized as ‘flat organizations’. They exercise ‘flat management’ in their corporate culture, wherein mid-level management is abridged, leaving the corporate structure less-bureaucratic, top-down-and-less-hierarchical, and more laissez-faire. Using the Confucian criteria of Wu Yu, namely morality (or, virtue), intellectual (or, wisdom), physical ability (or, sportsmanship), groupism (or, cooperation), and aesthetics (or, elegance), this paper assesses managerial philosophy and corporate practice of Google and Xiaomi. It is found that under flat management, although each company nevertheless reveals its corporate idiosyncrasy, they achieve business success and sustainability through adopting small-team orientation, vision of integrating innovation with business, effective communication, work liberty and flexibility, working with best talents, and cultivating collegiate workplace, of which these administrative components may suggest new managerial standards to modern corporate management

Cosmopolitan culture and counterculture among Chinese youth: face-to-face communities in the smartphone era

Young Chinese people have come of age in a communicative environment that is radically new, involving near-pervasive mobile broadband internet access and unprecedented exposure to global media. I employ a mix of ethnographic and computational methods to compare two groups of cosmopolitan Chinese youth – elite university students and subcultural bohemians – to explore the political implications of their cosmopolitan communications. The cosmopolitanism of Chinese youth, understood as both communicative diversity and globalized cultural engagement, is shaped in divergent ways by the influence of China’s orthodox Confucian and heterodox cultural traditions, with marked implications for patterns of online and offline communication. Constraints imposed by the university environment and Confucian social norms embed elite students in homogeneous networks that their extensive online communications do little to diversify. Exposure to the competing perspectives of global and domestic news and academic content generates both a normative relativism and a sophisticated grasp of practical political possibilities and constraints. This supports a hierarchical and pragmatic politics in which both national interests and those of their own social echelon, including progressive identity claims, are seen as being furthered by meritocratic authoritarianism. By contrast, bohemian proclivities for free-wheeling face-to-face interaction embed them in heterogeneous, cross-cutting networks, within which they synthesize discontents from diverse areas of Chinese society; combined with the influence of the heterodox tradition and the oppositional symbolic repertoires of global subcultures, this results in an egalitarian and reductively idealistic politics that supports opposition to the Party-State and its authoritarian system. The dominance of elite students’ orthodox cosmopolitanism suggests that the internet-mediated, globalized communications of Chinese youth constitute little immediate threat to the authoritarian system. However, the increasing scale and influence of bohemian heterodox cosmopolitanism and its idealistic politics, driven by factors beyond the control of Party-State, may ultimately undermine the manageability of Chinese youth

Commodification of Korean Culture in the West: Orientalism in the era of modern social media

South Korea, hereafter referred to as Korea, lies within the Korean Peninsula. It currently boasts a population of 53 million people residing within 38,724 square miles and a GDP of 1.811 trillion US dollars, making it the 13th largest economy in the world. Since the Korean War to today Korea has turned into a major economic and cultural epicenter remaining at the center of technological advancements and pop culture production. While the exportation of this pop culture has allowed the economy grow at unprecedented rates, it has also led to less favorable interactions with Korean culture by people all over the world. This research focuses on the creation and development of cultural commodification through social media within the 21st century. By framing the issue both through social media but also through modern understandings of exoticization, orientalism, and othering this research posits that the ability to view, interact, and consume South Korean culture outside of its naturalized home leads to cultural commodification. Through such media consumption, the South Korean other has become a commodity in the orientalist West. In conducting this research, I looked at the ways antiquated terms such as orientalism apply to a contemporary context, the power given to Whiteness within the internet and abroad, the effects of the echo chamber of social media on the anti-globalization movement within South Korea and interviewed Korean women to understand their views on the growing animosity towards women within Korea

Regime Type, Censorship, and Trust in Government With a Special Look at China

This research stems from a fascination with the unique social media censorship efforts in China. In order to determine if such heavy social media restrictions are unique to China this study uses data from the World Values Survey to investigate the relationship between regime type and social media censorship. The paper then examines the relationship between government censorship effort and citizens’ trust in government. Ultimately, I find that while regime type is a predictor of censorship, censorship does not have a substantial effect on citizens’ confidence in government overall. However, the data does seem to suggest that censorship may be important to autocracies and that censorship may actually be effective in China

Commodification of Korean Culture in the West: Orientalism in the era of modern social media

South Korea, hereafter referred to as Korea, lies within the Korean Peninsula. It currently boasts a population of 53 million people residing within 38,724 square miles and a GDP of 1.811 trillion US dollars, making it the 13th largest economy in the world. Since the Korean War to today Korea has turned into a major economic and cultural epicenter remaining at the center of technological advancements and pop culture production. While the exportation of this pop culture has allowed the economy grow at unprecedented rates, it has also led to less favorable interactions with Korean culture by people all over the world. This research focuses on the creation and development of cultural commodification through social media within the 21st century. By framing the issue both through social media but also through modern understandings of exoticization, orientalism, and othering this research posits that the ability to view, interact, and consume South Korean culture outside of its naturalized home leads to cultural commodification. Through such media consumption, the South Korean other has become a commodity in the orientalist West. In conducting this research, I looked at the ways antiquated terms such as orientalism apply to a contemporary context, the power given to Whiteness within the internet and abroad, the effects of the echo chamber of social media on the anti-globalization movement within South Korea and interviewed Korean women to understand their views on the growing animosity towards women within Korea

(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades

This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women. This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel

Physical Documentation of Censored Incidents Liberates One from the Doubts of Existence.

Clouds are free. Hovering aimlessly, they drift with no set forms, looking down on humans high from the sky. As an artist, I explore the freedom between humans and nature, with ‘cloud’ as a carrier, and extend its definition to the perspective of Chinese society and individuals through the format of jewelry. As both a translator and jeweler, I am acutely aware of the ongoing censorship of language and events in Mainland China. My jewelry documents a diverse range of texts in China that expose the societal constraints imposed on its people, a miserable contrast to the freely floating clouds. My pieces serve as a reminder, a warning, and a memorial that the voices of the people should not be silenced by the grandiose narratives. At the same time, the cloud reflects on the mysterious and wondrous connection between individuals and the natural world. Through context, materials and formats, I value the distortion of paper and emphasize the detailed aggregation of enamel and engraving. I seek to preserve and celebrate the special ways in which humans connect with nature. While creating pieces that capture the raw and unbridled energy of the natural world, I try to restore the free and wild perceptual channels of humans to nature that have been destroyed or blocked by the modern society