Chinese fashion designers in Shanghai : identifying a fresh perspective about their role in the world order of fashion

Shanghai possesses an apt legacy, once referred to as “Paris of the East”. Municipal aspirations for Shanghai to assume a position among the great fashion cities of the world have been integrated in the recent re-shaping of this modern city into a role model for Chinese creative enterprise yet China is still known primarily as centre of clothing production. Increasingly however, “Made in China” is being replaced by “Created in China” drawing attention to two distinct consumer markets for Chinese designers. Fashion designers who have entered the global fashion system for education or by showing their collections have generally adopted a design aesthetic that aligns with Western markets, allowing little competitive advantage. In contrast, Chinese designers who rest their attention on the domestic Chinese market find a disparate, highly competitive marketplace. The pillars of authenticity that for foreign fashion brands extend far into their cultural and creative histories, often for many decades in the case of Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Christian Dior do not yet exist in China in this era of rapid globalisation. Here, the cultural bedrock allows these same pillars to extend only thirty years or so into the past reaching the moments when Deng Xiaoping granted China’s creative entrepreneurs passage. To this end, interviews with fashion designers in Shanghai have been undertaken during the last twelve months for a PhD dissertation. Production of culture theory has been used to identify working methods, practices of production and the social and cultural milieu necessary for designers to achieve viability.

Chinese resort of epic proportions

A travel article about Haikou, southern China. Publication title: "Mission Hills Resort in Hainan, China" A giant spa, 10 golf courses and amazing hazards in the swimming pool – what more do you need at a resort, asks Kari Gislason If I kept to this line, I could make it through the passage between the iceberg and the castle, however narrow...

Theorising the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation: A case of Chinese diaspora in Australia

With the scope of Chinese diaspora in Australia, this paper theorises the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation in the new media landscape. People’s identity is the outcome of their social interactions with other individuals. In the new media landscape, digital media technologies are changing the way in which people communicate with others. On one hand, space and time are unprecedentedly compressed by media technologies so people can maintain more frequent and instant connections with others than before. On the other hand, the digital media technologies have constructed a virtual social space that might withdraw people from their physical social interactions. As we witness today, our social interactions are increasing digitally mediated, in the forms of posts and comments in social network sites, as well as the messages in social apps. As to the diasporic groups, this new media landscape is presenting a challenge to their identity formation. They physically live in the host countries but still keep close social and cultural connections with their homelands. Facilitated by digital media technologies, they are facing two platforms in which they can practice different identity performances: one is the digitally mediated social network; the other is the physical social network. In the case of Chinese diaspora, the situation is more complex due to the language factor and media censorship in Mainland China, which will be articulated in the main text. This paper aims to fill a gap between media studies and diaspora research. Most of existing research on the relationship between diasporic identity and media primarily focuses on the development of ethnic media institutions, and the production and consumption of ethnic media in the pre-digital media context. However, the process of globalisation and digital media technologies are increasing the homogeneity and hybridity of media content worldwide. In this new context, attributing the formation of different identities to the consumption of media content is arguable to some extent. Therefore, the overlapped area of new media studies and diaspora research still has space deserves further investigation.

The challenges of Weibo for data-driven digital media research

Data generated via user activity on social media platforms is routinely used for research across a wide range of social sciences and humanities disciplines. The availability of data through the Twitter APIs in particular has afforded new modes of research, including in media and communication studies; however, there are practical and political issues with gaining access to such data, and with the consequences of how that access is controlled. In their paper ‘Easy Data, Hard Data’, Burgess and Bruns (2015) discuss both the practical and political aspects of Twitter data as they relate to academic research, describing how communication research has been enabled, shaped and constrained by Twitter’s “regimes of access” to data, the politics of data use, and emerging economies of data exchange. This conceptual model, including the ‘easy data, hard data’ formulation, can also be applied to Sina Weibo. In this paper, we build on this model to explore the practical and political challenges and opportunities associated with the ‘regimes of access’ to Weibo data, and their consequences for digital media and communication studies. We argue that in the Chinese context, the politics of data access can be even more complicated than in the case of Twitter, which makes scientific research relying on large social data from this platform more challenging in some ways, but potentially richer and more rewarding in others.

Corporate disclosure in relation to combating corporate bribery: A case study of two Chinese telecommunications companies

This paper investigates the association between global community concerns about bribery activities and anti-bribery disclosure practices by two Chinese telecommunication companies operating internationally, namely China Mobile and ZTE. Based on content analysis of annual reports and global news media articles over a period of 16 years from 1995-2010, the findings suggest that the changes in the level of disclosures by the two major Chinese telecommunications companies were closely associated with the level of international concerns over bribery practices within the Chinese telecommunications industry. This finding indicates that the companies adopt anti-bribery disclosure practices in order to minimise the gap of trust (Social capital) between companies themselves and global stakeholders. In this paper we argue that, for domestic companies in China, culturally constructed social capital, such as guanxi, creates a level of trust between managers and their stakeholders, which obviates the need for managers to disclose anti-bribery performance information. However, for companies operating internationally, as social capital is inadequate to bridge the gap of trust between managers and global stakeholders, managers use disclosures of anti-bribery performance information as a way to minimise such a gap.

The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics

Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media. Drawing together empirical analyses of the use of social media by political movements and in national and regional elections and referenda, The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics presents studies ranging from Anonymous and the Arab Spring to the Greek Aganaktismenoi, and from South Korean presidential elections to the Scottish independence referendum. The book is framed by a selection of keystone theoretical contributions, evaluating and updating existing frameworks for the social media age. "Comprehensive and definitive, this is an outstanding book that provides a panoramic view of politics in an era of social media. From the Mediterranean to East Asia to Oceania, from Scandinavia to sub-Sahara Africa to Latin America, the volume as a whole is truly global, yet with nuanced regional and national analyses in each chapter. Theoretically informed, the research presented here breaks new empirical grounds using latest digital methods. The result is a milestone for our collective understanding of new media technology and comparative politics in the twenty-first century." ―Jack Linchuan Qiu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong "This book brings together top scholars from across disciplines and across the globe to examine social media use in a variety of political systems and for distinct purposes. It is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the many ways that digital communication technologies now are used in political life." ―Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Syracuse University

The Chinese Television Industry

Television is a massive industry in China, yet fewer people are watching television screens. This ground-breaking study explores how television content is changing, how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges presented by digital media, and how businesses are brokering alliances in both traditional and new media sectors. Table of Contents Acknowledgments p. vi Introduction p. 1 1 Television in Transition p. 8 2 Nation Building p. 34 3 Soft Power p. 56 4 Formats p. 85 5 Channels and Content p. 111 6 Convergence p. 141 7 Rethinking Chinese Television Research p. 164 Bibliography p. 173 Index p. 184

Open access and soft power: Chinese voices in international scholarship

Networked digital technologies and Open Access (OA) are transforming the processes and institutions of research, knowledge creation and dissemination globally: enabling new forms of collaboration, allowing researchers to be seen and heard in new ways and reshaping relationships between stakeholders across the global academic publishing system. This article draws on Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘Soft Power’ to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape academic publishing in China. It focusses on two important areas of OA development: OA journals and national-level repositories. OA is being supported at the highest levels, and there is potential for it to play an important role in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship. Investments in OA also have the potential to help China to re-position itself within international copyright discourses: moving beyond criticism for failure to enforce the rights of foreign copyright owners and progressing an agenda that places greater emphasis on equality of access to the resources needed to foster innovation. However, the potential for OA to help China to build and project its soft power is being limited by the legacies of the print era, as well as the challenges of efficiently governing the national research and innovation systems.

Varities of National Metonymy in Media Accounts of International Mergers and Acquisitions

International mergers and acquisitions (M&As) often invoke national identification and national cultural differences. We argue that metonymy is a central linguistic resource through which national cultural identities and differences are reproduced in media accounts of international M&As. In this paper, we focus on two revealing cases: the acquisition of American IBM Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company Lenovo and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch (A-B) by the Belgian-Brazilian company InBev. First, we identify the forms, functions and frequencies of national metonymy in media accounts of these cases. We present a typology that classifies varieties of national metonymy in international M&As. Second, we demonstrate how these metonyms combine with metaphor to generate evocative imagery, engaging wit, and subversive irony. Our findings show that national metonymy contributes to the construction of emotive frames, stereotypes, ideological differences, and threats. Combinations of national metonymy with metaphor also provide powerful means to construct cultural differences. However, combinations of metonymy with wit and irony enable the play on meanings that overturns and resists national and cultural stereotypes. This is the first study to unpack the deployment of metonymy in accounts of international M&As. In doing so, it also opens up new avenues for research into international management and the analysis of tropes in management and organization.

State Vector: A New Approach to Prediction of the Failure of Brittle Heterogeneous Media and Large Earthquakes

The concept of state vector stems from statistical physics, where it is usually used to describe activity patterns of a physical field in its manner of coarsegrain. In this paper, we propose an approach by which the state vector was applied to describe quantitatively the damage evolution of the brittle heterogeneous systems, and some interesting results are presented, i.e., prior to the macro-fracture of rock specimens and occurrence of a strong earthquake, evolutions of the four relevant scalars time series derived from the state vectors changed anomalously. As retrospective studies, some prominent large earthquakes occurred in the Chinese Mainland (e.g., the M 7.4 Haicheng earthquake on February 4, 1975, and the M 7.8 Tangshan earthquake on July 28, 1976, etc) were investigated. Results show considerable promise that the time-dependent state vectors could serve as a kind of precursor to predict earthquakes.

A geometry model for tortuosity of flow path in porous media

A simple geometry model for tortuosity of flow path in porous media is proposed based on the assumption that some particles in a porous medium are unrestrictedly overlapped and the others are not. The proposed model is expressed as a function of porosity and there is no empirical constant in this model. The model predictions are compared with those from available correlations obtained numerically and experimentally, both of which are in agreement with each other. The present model can also give the tortuosity with a good approximation near the percolation threshold. The validity of the present tortuosity model is thus verified.

Topological constraints on scroll and spiral waves in excitable media

A conservation equation for topological charges of phase singularities (scroll and spiral waves) in excitable media is given. It provides some topological properties of scroll (spiral) waves: for example, the topological charge of the generated or annihilated spiral pair must be opposite. Additionally, we obtain another equation on scroll waves, which shows that singular filaments of scroll waves occur on a set of one-dimensional curves which may be either closed loops or infinite lines.

Chinese herb medicines analyses by capillary electrophoresis with amperometric detection

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) with amperometric detection (AD) has been widely used in various fields of analytical science, especially in the pharmaceutical industry recently due to its high separation efficiency and low detection limit. The determination of active ingredients in Chinese herb medicines by CE-AD is of great importance in developing the researches on pharmacology of herbs, quantitative analysis and quality control. Analyses of the effective components in Chinese herb medicines and compound Chinese herb medicine by CE-AD are reviewed in this paper. In contrast with other analysis methods, the advantage of CE-AD is discussed. The development in analyses of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) by CE-AD in future is mentioned.