Katina Yong

Hello! Today was the 5th session of Global East Asia China. We’re almost done with this week and are ready for the long weekend.

We started this class off with listening to Keegan’s music pick, 曲婉婷 – 我的歌声里, Wanting’s You Exist in My Song. There was also a reminder to take our first quiz on image analysis, a skill that we have been practicing for the past week on various advertisements.

We jumped straight into lecture on the end of WW2 and subsequent rebuilding of many countries. It was great to learn more about the framework used after WW2 as it mostly focused on the context of the Cold War and the US and USSR as the two opposing forces. This struggle was reflected in the upheaval that took place in China afterwards with the Chinese Communists and Nationalists. China was largely isolated from the world during this time and Taiwan represented China in various international organizations. This was a turbulent time for China with mass starvation and famine. There were also conflicts between landlords and peasants and land distributions. One interesting fact was that Mao tried to get peasants to start manufacturing and refining steel, a completely fruitless venture because the peasants didn’t have ore or hot furnaces for the process.

Village Steel Refining

After this lecture, we had a discussion on the reading assignment, chapters 6 and 8 from Brand Breakout, on the Cultural Resources and National Champions routes. There was a lot of discussion on the cultural resources chapter and how companies market themselves on the basis of culture. Professor Sheehan mentioned how companies might not even market themselves on “authentic culture,” but on a preconceived image of what a culture should be like with the Shanghai Tang example. For the national champions chapter, the discussion centered around Chinese natural resource companies and their lack of transparency. Since this was the last Brand Breakout chapter we discussed what we thought about this book overall.

Shanghai Tang Store

From the discussion we moved to status updates on our group projects: we all identified several advertising sources and settled on a company that we would like to focus on. It was interesting seeing how the advertising differed depending on the industry. We received several pointers on how to further refine our research question. After this discussion, we broke into breakout rooms for individual group questions.

See everyone after the Memorial Day Weekend!