GEA China 2020 Day Four: May 21, 2020

Garrett Penderghast

Hello everyone, thanks for keeping up with our online adventures! Now for our fourth day of class we started off with listening to an incredibly peppy song called “Little Apple” by the Chopstick Brothers. Keegan said that he knows a workout routine to this song and he would show us in class sometime soon, so be on the lookout for when that happens! As we moved into the lecture portion of our class, we also had a much deeper introduction to Professor Sheehan. He told us about his life and the winding path he took to become an accomplished and active member of the USC community. I am sure that we all have a deepened appreciation for Professor Sheehan now as we move forward with our studies in the program!

The song “Little Apple” by the Chopstick Brothers

Transitioning into the information phase of the lecture, Professor discussed the global issues of the 1920s to the 1940s and how these events affected China’s international footprint during this time. Major highlights of international events included the Great Depression, the growth of the Japanese Empire, and World War II. Then after receiving a recap of the international contexts, we dove into China’s domestic history in this period! This was mainly characterized by the development of major party influence by both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party (GMD). Very interesting!

Artist’s depiction of The Long March, undertaken by Mao Zedong and the CCP

As we finished our historical lecture, Keegan shared with us the long-awaited dance routine for “Little Apple.” This proved to be a great pick-me-up as we continued into our discussion of the readings. The first chapter focused heavily on the idea of brand acquisition while the second chapter discussed the importance of overcoming negative country stereotypes and building positive national associations to certain brands. Our post-reading conversations were fairly interesting as we were able to bring real-life examples to help us understand the readings. One specific instance was when Sean talked about how his mother used to boycott Japanese products because of some tensions between Japan and Korea at the time. This situation is a real-world example of how negative country associations can affect the market, and this allowed us to see how these associations have a significant impact on international brands.

Photo of Korean efforts to boycott Japanese products

Now as we began to wrap up the lecture, Professor Sheehan split us up into our research project groups to establish what we want to pursue in our projects. The groups that have been formed so far have been focused on discussing TikTok, Fast Fashion efforts, Snacks/food, and Tencent! My specific group is looking to research how Tencent is advertising its product, League of Legends, to an American population. At this point, we are still trying to figure out exactly how we will analyze Tencent’s advertising of League of Legends, but we want to focus on the cinematic videos that have been published by Tencent and see if there are common themes being presented that may be appealing to an American audience. Progress is being made on all fronts and I am sure that all of our projects will turn out amazing!

Here is the beginning of research on TikTok advertising! Way to go Callie!

Thanks again everyone for stopping by and I look forward to more days of interesting discussion and learning as we continue with our EASC China course. Be on the lookout for our research projects at the end of this course, I am sure that you will be blown away by what we find! See you all again soon!


Here is an update from the class:

GEA China 2020 Day Three: May 20, 2020

D’Angelo Diaz

Dr. Sheehan with the cover slide of his awaited third lecture.

Dr. Sheehan with the cover slide of his long-awaited third lecture.

Ni hao! The third day of class kicked off to the rhythm of Chinese singer Rosie’s “Zen Me Hai Bu Ai (Why Not Love?)”. Two of our fellow classmates – Sarah & Kerrigan – are in the middle of traveling back home this week. The main topics for today were dissecting a marketing research report on Chinese brand power & understanding how the world shaped China (and vice versa) during the 1800s and early 1900s.

The “BrandZ 2019” report provided a list of 50 Chinese brands that are well-known throughout the world, from Alibaba to Zenjoy. This list will prove helpful for the class with selecting a Chinese product to research! The report also highlighted a few key themes that brands will need to focus on in the future, including drawing in local business talent & leveraging transnational partnerships to better convey a company’s mission.

The top 50 Chinese global brands - how many do you recognize?

The top 50 Chinese global brands of 2019 – how many do you recognize?

The lecture delved into the rise of colonialism, and how China was impacted by these changes. An example mentioned in class was the tale of the British opium trade with China. This supply of opium was made possible due to colonies in India controlled by a British corporation, the East India Company. The flow of opium into China severely impacted the country’s public health and economic prosperity and would lead to the Opium Wars between Britain & China during the mid-1800s.

Dr. Sheehan also discussed the expansion of the Japanese Empire, as this was an important factor that influenced Asian globalization. One of the many interesting anecdotes he shared about this time is how Qingdao’s famous beer has Germanic roots since Qingdao (Tsingtao) was previously a German colony.

An geographical overview of China by 1925 CE.

A geographical overview of China

After the class discussion concluded, it was time to assemble our research teams! With the majority of students interested in technology, Dr. Sheehan created a few breakout rooms for students to parlay with one another over possible research topics. What Chinese brands & products shall we choose? Stay tuned for future updates…


And now for an update from our class members:

GEA China 2020 Day Two: May 19, 2020

Helena Lu and Callie Truong 

Hello everyone! Today was the second day of class for the 2020 Global East Asia program. We’ve started to become more familiar with one another and adapt to the online format of the class!

Today the professor played the classic song “月亮代表我的心” (The Moon Represents My Heart) by Teresa Teng, the most famous Chinese pop singer in the 1970s and 1980s. We then dove into our discussion of globalization and its many facets and practiced analyzing images. Everyone had really insightful analyses of the Haier advertisement we looked at. It was beneficial to see how we could apply what we learned about globalization to pictures we see in real life. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to develop our image analysis skills and apply them in our own projects!

A Haier advertisement that we used for practice

Professor Sheehan then gave us a lecture on globalization before 1850. Globalization, far from being a new phenomenon, has been around for about as long as humans have. The professor urged us not to think of globalization through a Eurocentric perspective, and discussed the Silk Road and the expeditions of Zheng He, whose global expeditions had tens of thousands of people and ships exponentially larger than Christopher Columbus’. It was really interesting to see how global connections functioned throughout history in ways we don’t typically think about.

Part of today’s lecture

We then held a discussion of the reading and its significance in understanding Chinese brands’ perspectives in marketing before beginning to split off into different groups based on our research interests. We have a ways to go before we can really start our research projects, but everything is starting to come together!

The professor then shifted his lecture to Chinese history before 1850. This was very interesting because we learned about the different global connections that were already influencing China much before the years we typically think of as “globalized”. The Ming emperor, for instance, had a palace modeled after Versailles, and some wealthy Americans owned Chinese porcelain with American motifs on it. Chinese and Western markets have influenced each other for a long time.

We closed off the class today with a fun poll of everyone’s favorite Chinese foods. We saw an interesting range of answers!

Our classmates’ favorite Chinese foods!

Though COVID has limited a lot of what we can do in this class, hopefully, we’ll work together to continue our research and have productive discussions in the coming weeks!

GEA China 2020 Day One: May 18, 2020

Callie Truong and Helena Lu

Greetings everyone and welcome to the 2020 Global East Asia China blog! Today marked the beginning of the first-ever GEA China online non-travel version. Although we could not meet in SOS 250 and travel together to China this summer, we are still excited to dive into our research projects and work with our classmates and Professor Sheehan.

GEA China 2020 Class

Each day, the professor begins the class by playing a Chinese music video from YouTube. Today he played “漂向北方 Stranger in the North” by Namewee and Wang Leehom. Then he described how the class will run for the next two weeks. We will primarily focus on building our analytical toolkit, which we will utilize when researching Chinese global brands and their international marketing campaigns. We began constructing this toolkit with a class activity on analyzing images. Students volunteered and shared an advertising image that they analyzed. This was a fun and interesting part of the class because not only did we get to practice the tools, but we also got to learn a little about our classmates’ interests.

GEA China Students’ Selection of Advertisements for the Analyzing Images Activity

After the activity, Professor Sheehan gave us his “Quick and Dirty Guide to Globalization” and emphasized how globalization is multi-faceted and can be characterized in several different ways. We also will be using primary and secondary resources in our research, so the professor provided us with a worksheet on how to read secondary resources in a non-linear fashion because it will be easier to understand the content and save time. We divided into breakout rooms to apply the worksheet to our day one readings that focused on globalization key concepts and the idea of invented traditions. Overall, day one was full of great conversations and I am excited for the next few days as we begin to navigate our toolkits and potential research topics!