How The Beijing Olympics Has Changed Chinese Popular Television, Entertainment, and People’s Everyday Lives

The 2008 Beijing Olympics was one of the greatest achievements for Chinese people around the world. It was an event that changed Chinese popular culture and made the Chinese people proud of themselves. In the past, China had lost its popular cultural identity because of historical upheavals and what cultural identity it did have was dominated by foreign-influenced ideas. Through hosting and preparing for the 29th Olympiad, China rediscovered its popular cultural identity, which I conclude is a reintroduction of its traditional culture. The country was also able to change how others perceived it. To conduct this study, I interviewed experts from the fields of television, Chinese history, Beijing Opera, and journalism. There was a period when the recirculation of Western-influenced television shows dominated Chinese popular entertainment. For the Chinese to host the Olympics meant so much more than it would have for any other country; therefore, hundreds of television shows and documentaries were produced and China’s television producing skills improved. The media also softened their style of reporting. All these changes and improvements throughout the society were a result of China’s urge to host the Games. Besides these changes, the Olympics restored to China its popular cultural identity. However, it did not just bring out untouched older traditions and turn them into popular culture. The country reinvented and polished old traditions and made them more appealing to a modern audience. In the future, it will be China that will influence others culturally and lead other nations, and not the other way around

The Contents of Different Forms of Time

Conceptual hybridization can occur either through internal evolution, when new historical circumstances invest an existing concept with new semantics, giving rise to a commixture in it of both old and new meanings. It can also occur when a concept is used to translate a foreign idea, creating a composite of native and imported semantics. The new semantics a concept acquires when used to translate foreign ideas are usually more radically heterogeneous to the target culture than those it can engender through internal evolution. Conceptual hybridization effected by translation could thus be revolutionary, as was the case with the Chinese concept geming when used to translate the modern Western concept “revolution.” However, as is generally the case with conceptual change, the old semantics of geming did not immediately get displaced by the new. More often that not, old semantics linger on, because old institutions and old worldviews continue to hold sway over a people and their language for a period of time, till the old ways of thinking and historical circumstances have disappeared. In the case of geming, an old worldview which prevented an immediate takeover of the concept’s old semantics by the new was the traditional Chinese cyclical time in which geming was embedded and from which the concept derived its meaning in pre-modern China. The classical Chinese term geming was used by the Japanese and then readopted by the Chinese to translate the modern western concept “revolution”. The modern concept was shunned by the Chinese until after 1898. Scholars have so far focused on the contents of traditional Chinese values to explain this initial cold reception. I, by contrast, argue that the cold reception was rooted in the conflicts between the old cyclical and new linear temporalities framing respectively classical and modern gemings, causing the shared sets of contents in the two gemings to be inflected differently by two temporal forms. Before the Chinese could embrace the modern western concept “revolution,” they needed to have first developed the modern western linear time consciousness. My paper examines how the Chinese population’s change of heart toward the modern concept of “revolution” was intertwined with the Chinese assimilation of modern western linear time. I examine how China’s embrace of the modern concept of “revolution” was made possible by its adoption of linear temporality, evident from how the country’s new positive stance toward modern geming roughly coincided with its newborn enthusiasm for progress. Keywords: Revolution and Time, Translation, Geming, Cultural Revolution, Hybridization of Idea

Changes in a Chinese interior design firm due to the development and use of a blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system inspired by Chinese philosophy: An autoethnographic case study

Dao (Way) The Way that can be experienced is not true; The world that can be constructed is not true. The Way manifests all that happens and may happen; The world represents all that exists and may exist. To experience without intention is to sense the world: To experience with intention is to anticipate the world. These two experiences are indistinguishable; Their construction differs but their effect is the same. Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way\u27. Which is ever greater and more subtle than/he world. Lao-Tzu, TaoDeChing, tr. Peter A. Merel This thesis is a reflective practitioner autoethnographic account of the way in which a Chinese interior design firm, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy (as exemplied in the beginning quotes), developed and used a reflective practitioner knowledge management system, called kBlogCentral, based around web-based blogs. The objective of setting up kBlogCentral was to build a simple, low cost knowledge management system for managing knowledge regarding various projects among the staff. All members of the firm are encouraged to perform reflective practitioner research and publish their knowledge as part of virtual teams regarding their professional practice. This reflective practitioner study depicts the rationale, process, and implications of building the system especially regarding inspiration from traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy as this is seen as a culturally appropriate philosophical underpinning. The research outcome, present d throughout the thesis, is a rich description and reflections of employing action reflective practitioner research and a Web technology on the Internet, called Blog to manage knowledge in the interior design company in the light of Chine e thinking. Blog technology is mainly manifested in interactive websites that allow for rich Web based interaction and communication. The research question is: How did the process of developing an using a Blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy, change the professional practice of member of a Chinese interior design firm? As part of answering this question, I report on my attempts to inspire change in the purpose, behaviour and underlying culture of a Chinese design firm aspiring to transform its management and practice. The major arena for this transformation is the KBlogCentral knowledge management system. The Dao (way) to such transformation is the member of the firm employing heuristic elf-reflective action research to \u27find it future\u27, with and through its people. In this process I have reported on innovative and, to my mind, valuable discoveries in knowledge elicitation and methods of integrating the views f my colleagues. This doctoral thesis, reporting on my finding of these discoveries, is my contribution to knowledge within the academic information systems, design, and management fields. The research reveals that knowledge, as a social product of human interactions, does not exist outside an agent - human beings. Thus the main role of knowledge management is to support social human interactions instead of just employing information technology to manipulate data, information and explicit knowledge as advocated by the functionalist approach. Knowledge management practices in China are found to be highly influenced by the contemporary interpretations of strands of traditional Chine e philosophy. The existence of a linguistic divide, resulting from some obsolete or misinterpreted doctrines of traditional Chinese philosophy, impedes the processes of creating and sharing knowledge in China. This thesis is a b ginning endeavour to critically examine these obsolete and distorted doctrines as a contribution towards a modem form of Chinese philosophy revitalizing Chinese to meet the challenges of a growing knowledge economy. Thus an undercurrent of heuristic hope runs through this thesis in that, within technology originating from and dominated by the West, this thesis reveals how knowledge management practice in China can be inspired by Chinese philosophy

Agency beyond subjectivity : the unredeemed project of May Fourth fiction

This paper is part of a larger project in which I make a case for the central importance of the problem of free will to considerations of Chinese modernity. I begin by distinguishing between two key aspects of modernity and the Enlightenment: (1) subjectivity, or the realm of consciousness including the capacity for critical reason, and (2) agency, or acting on the world outside consciousness in a way that makes a difference. I then suggest that neglecting the development of rational agency cripples the force of the commitment to human freedom that drives the project of modernity. In calling attention to agency and proposing to explore its place in modern Chinese fiction, I do not mean to belittle the first line of inquiry into subjectivity and its various aspects. My point is simply that investigations of subjectivity can encompass only one part of modernity, one aspect of modern consciousness and only some of the questions that modern literature can pose. Modernity may mean a rise of individual consciousness, yet equally crucial is the possibility that reason can advance human freedom

Migration, Risk and Livelihoods: A Chinese Case

China has turned from a ‘low risk’ to a ‘high risk’ society since the start of the market reforms in the late 1970s. Market, while bringing diverse livelihood opportunities to rural people, has simultaneously distributed risks, and the exposure and vulnerability to them unequally among different social groups. This paper attempts to apply the risk concept to the study of one of the most socially disadvantaged groups in China, namely rural-urban migrants, through analysing the narratives of members of a migratory family of the Hui Muslim national minority from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, who run a business in the northern city of Tianjin. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research adopts an actor-oriented perspective combined with qualitative longitudinal research methodology (or ‘extended case method’) to delineate a livelihood trajectory of this family, and explore the relationships between livelihood, risk, social networks, agency and public policy interventions

Disillusionment with Chinese culture in the 1880s : Wang Tao\u27s Three classical tales

Leading scholars of modern Chinese literature have long discussed how the May Fourth became a hegemonic force and have sought to uncover the “burdens of May Fourth”; that is, those discourses eclipsed by the May Fourth intellectuals as they promoted the goal of openness and pluralism in the New Culture Movement. They have discovered Chinese modernity in the Late Qing writings as early as the mid-nineteenth century, decades before the May Fourth movement. Particularly, some scholars have argued that features of modernity might have stemmed from indigenous genres or classical language. My study of how the West is portrayed in three classical tales written by the pioneering Late Qing thinker Wang Tao 王韜 in the 1880s contributes to this discussion. These three classical tales, “Biography of Mary” 媚梨小傳, “Travel Overseas” 海外壯遊, and “Wonderland under the Sea” 海底奇境, were first published as literary supplements in Dianshizhai Pictorial 點石齋畫報 and later reprinted in Wang Tao’s story collection Songyin manlu 淞隱漫錄. They are notable because they represent the first tales in Chinese literary history to imagine Western cities and Western women—as opposed to any other places or races or ethnicities—in a period when Chinese intellectuals had begun looking to the West for ways to modernize their nation.5 I argue that these three tales reveal signs of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture surfacing as early as the 1880s, a time when most reformers were advocating solely for technological and institutional changes. Even more interesting, modern sentiments are expressed in classical Chinese. Wang Tao utilized the traditional narrative form of the classical tale to lament the degeneration of the very civilization in which it had flourished

Girls’ access to education in China: actors, cultures and the windmill of development management

The world has a mixed record towards achieving EFA and the MDGs in relation to the targets on gender equity in basic education. For researchers and practitioners, this raises the question of which factors influence the processes leading to the improvement of access and quality of girls’ education and how. This case study from China examines the human and cultural dimensions of project management in determining the planning, implementation and evaluation of interventions designed to improve gender equity. The monograph combines concepts from the actor-oriented approach of development studies, with theories of culture and development management. It generates an analytical framework composed of two super ordinate ‘cultural landscapes’. One is the ‘relational’ landscape with its dimensions of power distance, masculinity-femininity, and collectivism-individualism. The other is the ‘time-orientation’ landscape with its dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and universalism-particularism. The ‘cultural landscapes’ and dimensions provide a powerful description of how the perceptions and strategies of interaction vary and change between and within individual actors. The monograph illustrates how managers act as innovators with varied perceptions and interaction strategies influenced by multiple levels of culture, social and political contexts. Using the metaphor of a windmill, the monograph suggests that project management moves beyond the linear cyclical logic presented in many of the planning texts and manuals of development agencies. The steps and stages of development management are the windmill’s blades. The cultural interactions between actors form the wind that gives the blades energy and speed. The blades run both synchronically and sequentially depending on the wind strength. The monograph recommends that development managers should move beyond superficial concerns for outputs and products to a deeper concern for human and cultural processes that lead to results for achieving EFA and the MDGs

Cross-Cultural Communication within American and Chinese Colleagues in Multinational Organizations

Globalization is a mantra nowadays that has been employed to describe the highly active exchange activities between countries and regions across the globe. It takes a multidimensional form, connecting people and things regardless of spatial and temporal confines, and permeating into all walks of life. Along with changes brought by this dynamic international interaction, a myriad of organizations, no longer isolated and static, are beginning to ride on this gravy train by expanding tentacles into every cranny and nook of the globe. One of the challenges that is facing the multinational organizations is the increasing diversity of the workforce and similarly complex prospective customers with disparate cultural backgrounds. After all, language barriers, cultural nuances, and value divergence can easily cause unintended misunderstanding and low efficiency in internal communication in a multinational environment. It leads to conflict among employees and profit loss in organizational productivity. Therefore, in international organization, cross-cultural communication, also known as intercultural and trans-cultural communication, serves as a lubricant, which mitigates frictions, resolves conflicts, and improves overall work efficiency; likewise, it serves as coagulant, which integrates the collective wisdom and strength, enhances the collaboration of team work, and unites multiple cultures together between race and ethnicity, which leads to desirable virtuous circle of synergy effect. This paper identifies three aspects of culture that constitute people’s understanding between each other in professional settings, namely, language and non-language code; cultural values and beliefs; as well as cultural stereotypes and preconceptions