China has a long tradition of guanxiwang, the concept of a personal connection between people in which each may prevail upon the other for a favor or service. In a recent trip from Beijing to Shanghai, we personally experienced how guanxiwang works.
It is becoming ever more trendy to refer to ying and yang when discussing nutritional & health issues in the west but where does the concept come from and how can we, as westerners understand it? For many generations children have been brought up in the west with only a shallow induction into the effects different foods can have on the body and your health. “Make sure you eat all your greens” for some children was the only parental nutritional education they ever received. Only now is this beginning to change as science has recognized some of the harmful effects of modern dietary trends and “eastern” thinking and philosophy has moved more mainstream. But for thousands of years in China parents have passed down to their offspring the importance of balance in their diet and the classification and effect eating different types of foods can have on their health.
Since the market reforms of the late 1970’s, China has gained a global reputation for mass production of cheap, often low-quality, consumer goods. No one expects this massive market of fakes to disappear suddenly or for the country’s manufacturing to be on par with that of Germany overnight, but China clearly is not content to be the world’s cheapest copycat. From having no design schools at all until 1982, China now boasts 450, with hundreds more in the planning phases.
Sometimes debates emerge that challenge my long-held assumptions and prompt me to “go back to the beginning” to examine why those assumptions are held. Recently I was reading a discussion led by Grant McCracken’s blog on “why culture matters” (http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/). McCracken cites both sides of the argument – that understanding culture holds a minor role in innovative marketing & branding versus the notion that understanding culture plays the prime role. In reading the comments and dialogue, I couldn’t help but consider how relevant this discussion is to the work we do at Cheskin.
