The three main articles in this issue of China Currents portray an array of winners and losers in China’s development process. The article by Mao, Pih and Bao conveys a sense of mixed opportunities for people in the Northwest-one of the poorest areas in China. Migration to cities can benefit families, but not necessarily. The factors that social scientists often look for as determinants of success, such as education and government-sponsored job training, do not always work in expected ways. As a result, this part of China has not advanced much relative to other parts of China, missing out first on the rural industry movement and now on the opportunities for migration for better jobs.

In the second piece by Cai and Liu we learn that some people in China have many of the same choices as the middle class in the U.S. Here consumers are discussing a brand new product-an Apple i-Pad. In this case study consumers are evaluating an expensive consumer product, and while many consider the i-Pad quite expensive, some of them could certainly afford to purchase one. The study is based on Internet postings, reflecting that China now has more Internet users than any country in the world. The article focuses on the ways that these new consumers communicate their opinions online as compared with similar evaluations by American consumers.

Finally, the films of Jia Zhangke described in the third article by Shu-chin Wu capture glimpses of the bewildered and those adrift in this new society. This is a reality of Chinese life that the filmmaker believes is missing from the visual arts in China. When foreigners visit China it is also not easy to see these aspects of the lives of ordinary people amid the glitter of new buildings and sleek trains. Today there is a new bullet train running between Beijing and Taiyuan. Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi province, where Jia grew up in the small town of Fengyang, and where many of his films are set. But a trip to Fengyang-either in person or via one of Jia’s films-will help bring these other lives into perspective.

The post Introduction: Winners and Losers within China’s dynamic social change appeared first on China Research Center.

Since the advent of economic reform in China, the Chinese government has channeled most of its resources to the development of its coastal provinces. Northwestern China has lagged behind in infrastructure and economic development. The poverty associated with geographical limitations and decades of resource extraction policies in these provinces has created significant economic stagnation in the region. In the 2000 Chinese Census, two thirds of the officially defined poor households were located in western China (The World Bank 2001). Starting in 1999, the western development policies have injected much needed capital into the northwestern provinces and have promoted structural changes in the rural economy in the region. The shift of rural labor out of crop production has been much faster and greater in its magnitude compared with other regions in China (Du et al 2005). Based on the 2009 Western China Migration and Labor Resources Survey (CMLRS), we explore several factors related to rural-urban migration and social stratification in Northwestern China. We find that the migrant labor regime within the neoliberal framework does little to alleviate poverty because the regime has failed to increase capital accumulation in rural villages in Northwestern China. To develop its northwestern region, we suggest that the Chinese government further lessen its control over the hukuo, or household registry system, to allow greater migration between the village and township levels.
The Neoliberal Turn

Chinese reform since 1978 has coincided with the emergence of neoliberal ideology in the world. Since the collapse of the Fordist-Keynesian regime in the 1970s, a new model of production, flexible accumulation, has dominated the global market. As flexible accumulation expanded, high levels of structural unemployment and rapid destruction and reconstruction of skills became prevalent conditions in the labor market. The reliance on part-time, outsourced labor further weakened the strength of labor unions and nation states in relation to the flow of capital (Harvey 1991:150, 170). The ever present drive to shorten the return time on profit in the expansion of a capitalist economy demands the constant compression of time and space in production and consumption patterns. With rapid development in information technology, the acceptable turn-around time for capital accumulation decreased. The subsequent changes in relations among capital, labor, and state-induced manifestations of a schizophrenic condition, where the present triumphed over history, eliminated the sense of continuity and coherence in social lives around the world.

Neoliberal development tends to focus on short-term financial gain instead of long-term stable growth. As capital becomes a circulatory process of commoditization, consumption, and accumulation, the resulting phenomenon of “accumulation by dispossession” leads to an enhancement of the position of elites at the expense of the working class (Dicken 2007; 343). Globally, most countries that adopt neoliberalism have experienced increases in social inequality and the concentration of economic and political power to the upper classes (Harvey 2007:48-50). Neoliberal capitalism invariably creates a debacle in which debt-financed growth has to simultaneously depend on eliminating employment opportunities for efficiency while increasing consumption from the bottom. The end result has been a global shortage of jobs. According to Dicken (2007), in the next decade, the global economy needs to create at least 400 million new jobs in addition to the volatile, flexible (read part-time) positions that already exist (450). In developing countries, massive underemployment is appearing due to the growth of labor that far exceed the limitation of the “Green Revolution” in the agricultural sector (511). In China alone, it is estimated that 15 million jobs need to be created every year as rural surplus labor accounts for close to 62% of the total labor force (Ash 2009).

Migrant Labor Regime

True to the neoliberal ideology, China’s astronomical growth in GDP is based on the exploitation of the “migrant worker regime,” the most flexible employment arrangement possible. Rural migrant workers fill the lower tier of the split labor market. China’s rural surplus laborers fit into the neoliberal framework which “requires a large easily exploited and relatively powerless labor force and is vulnerable to super exploitation” (Harvey 2007: 127,144). Migrant workers tend to work in assembly line positions and in construction while workers with urban registration status enjoy welfare coverage from the state and the upward mobility to join the burgeoning middle class. The enduring division between urban hukuo holders and temporary migrants, in terms of different life expectations, has demonstrated that rural migrants remain excluded from full participation in urban society in both living conditions and social welfare provisions (He et al 2008). Research has repeatedly demonstrated that migrant workers still suffer from a multitude of discrimination and blocked upward mobility in cities across China (Ash 2009, Du et al 2005, and Fan 2008). Compared with the rural population, people with urban registration enjoy significant advantages in resource allocation and life chances. The inequality of opportunity embedded in the hukou system has invariably contributed to severe social stratification between the countryside and the urban areas, which has propelled massive rural to urban migration, especially after Deng’s tour of the southern Special Economic Zones. According to Harvey (2007), the dire condition of the rural sector and the instability associated with rapid urbanization is one of the most serious problems facing the Chinese government (Harvey 2007: 127). It was estimated that from 1995 to 2004, between 5 million and 6 million peasants joined the army of 150 million migrant workers in the city each year (Harvey 2007: 140). And a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences points out that in order to alleviate poverty in rural areas the government needs to relocate “500 million rural dwellers to cities and to facilitate the movement of 600 million city dwellers into the suburbs” (Dicken 2007:227).

Rural migration from hinterland regions to cities in coastal provinces has long alleviated rural poverty in China. The differences in development between the coastal and hinterland region are primarily due to the concentration of Township and Village Enterprises (hereafter TVEs). More than 80% of gross rural income in China comes from non-agricultural activities, and close to 60% derives from rural industry alone (Ash 2009). However, these TVEs are mostly concentrated in coastal provinces. In the northwestern region, the industrial manufacturing sector contributes only slightly over 5% of gross rural income (Du et al 2005). This lack of industrial development has resulted in massive rural underemployment in the Chinese Northwest. In 2004, it was estimated that rural surplus labor levels in Gansu and Ningxia stood at 61.6% and 58% respectively (Ash 2009). The geographical concentration of the underemployed in the countryside creates “contextual inequality” in which the life chances of individual peasants are constrained by the lack of economic opportunities regardless of personal traits (Wilson 2006). In 2004, the average personal income in the northwestern region was less than 48% of that in coastal provinces (Ash 2009). This pattern of social stratification is even more profound when rural areas are included in the comparison. In 2004, net rural income in eastern China was 91% higher than that of western China (Du et al 2005).

Migration, Capital, and Poverty Alleviation

The connections among local migration policy, migrants’ remittances, expansion of social networks, and the development of local economies affect patterns of migration within migrant sending communities (Du et al 2005). In Northwestern China, pressures of population on limited arable land and the increasing arid climate push the local ecological system to critical thresholds. Perplexingly, numerous surveys since 2000 indicate that the northwestern region has the lowest percentage of rural to urban migration compared with other provinces in China, even though western development policies have drastically improved infrastructure. Existing literature on migration and stratification often involves close examination of capital available to people living in different social contexts. According to Bourdieu (1986), capital can be viewed as resources accessible to individuals to facilitate social action (241). Different forms of capital are interconnected and are translatable into each other. Possession of one form of capital facilitates and enhances the acquisition of other types of capital. Social stratification among different sectors therefore cannot be alleviated simply by increasing the human capital of the bottom while opportunity hoarding and disparity in political power remain. As the state bureaucrats and rogue capitalists consolidate political representation, the increasing rural-urban divide and disparate regional development have become pressing issues in regards to the stability of the Chinese neoliberal system in Northwestern China.

To alleviate the severe poverty and to ameliorate regional disparity, in 2004, the Ministry of Agriculture initiated the “Sunshine Project” to provide job training programs to potential rural migrants in the Northwestern region. In some poor counties designated as models for migration of surplus labor, the county governments go beyond providing information for employment opportunities or job training. They are responsible for directing potential migrants to specific industries and establishing national “brand awareness” for their migrant workers. Government-sponsored job training can be conceptualized as a form of social capital that generates human capital in each migrant worker. This poverty alleviation measure is a good example of the top-down mobilization often employed by developmental states in the neoliberal system. Therefore, it is interesting to examine how intervention by the state into the labor market affects patterns of migration and social stratification 10 years after the initialization of the western development policies.

Data

We used data from the 2009 Western China Migration and Labor Resources Survey (CMLRS) to examine the effects the western development policies exerted on migration patterns and rural economies in Northwestern China. The CMLRS covered three western provinces: Sichuan, Gansu, and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It was conducted from April to July 2009 and sampled 741 households and more than 3,400 individuals in these provinces. For the purpose of this study, we conducted bi-variate correlation analyses on data from Gansu and Ningxia. We hypothesized that:

Those who received more education and government-sponsored job training were more likely to migrate. We wanted to explore whether the infusion of resources via top-down mobilization of the neoliberal state actually increased human capital and provided chances of employment for each migrant worker. In other words, can interventionist measures lessen the rural-urban divide, which has long inhibited the formation of a unified labor market in China?

Migrants with higher education or those receiving government training were more likely to have higher personal income and send more remittances to their households. We wanted to study whether investment in human capital through from top-down mobilization actually benefited individual workers and migrants originated from rural villages in Northwestern China.
Individuals from ethnic minority counties were more likely to migrate and to rely on personal networks to obtain information on employment. Given the unique ethnic situation in Northwest China, we wanted to find out whether the migrant labor regime was embedded differently in the ethnic context from that of the Han community and how this difference might influence patterns of migration.
Discussion

Results from the bi-variate analyses are somewhat consistent with our hypotheses. As expected in Gansu and Ningxia, individuals between the ages of 14 and 60 are more likely to be associated with migration. Notably, government-sponsored job training is significantly associated with migration. In fact, government-sponsored job training appears to be the most important variable in the preliminary analyses. From the cumulative causation theoretical perspective, government-sponsored training can be treated as a form of social capital which facilitates migration. The training, network, and organization provided by the county government, significantly increased the human and social capital of individual migrants. The state’s policy consequently represents a major source of capital influencing migration patterns in China. According to Zai et al (2008), the effect of migrant social capital on migration is not necessarily uniform across settings and may be shaped by public policies in the sending or receiving community contexts. The clear division in our data in migration patterns between counties with and without officially sponsored migration policies clearly supports the literature

Table I. Kendall’s Tau b Coefficients

** Coefficient is significant at .01 levels (2 tailed). (n = 2,351)

A negative association between government-sponsored training and income and remittance is slightly perplexing. A negative association between education and migration is also unexpected. It appears that government-sponsored job training and education were significant only when it comes to the decision to migrate. The association between government-sponsored job training and migration is the strongest in the binary analyses. As soon as individuals migrate, education and government-sponsored job training seem to have weak or no relation to income or remittance. The data therefore support hypothesis one but reject hypothesis two. The great majority of people in rural areas are not able to finish high school (Wu and Trieman 2007). They often become migrant workers after junior high or attend vocational schools with questionable learning environments (Fan 2008:97). Wu and Trieman (2007) state that contrary to past research indicating high upward mobility in Chinese society, there is actually a strong downward mobility in the rural sector. The limited upward mobility in rural areas is only available to those who scored high in college entrance exams and have the means to attend universities to switch their hukou to urban status

Table II. Kendall’s Tau b Coefficients of Migrants

** Coefficient is significant at .01 levels (2 tailed). (n = 2,351)

Due to the underdevelopment in the rural economy in the region, limited career options are available to individuals with rural hukou. Government-sponsored job training becomes an attractive alternative to individuals who do not have the opportunity to obtain a high school education and beyond (Knight and Tueh 2009). However, government-sponsored job training and government-organized migration typically are focused in construction, manufacturing, and low-end service sector jobs (Snyder and Chern 2009). These jobs provide little upward mobility in the emerging “hourglass” economy and generate little return on investment in human capital such as education and job training (Wilson 1997:224). Fan and Stark (2008) further state that without regulation, a government’s effort to increase educational expenditure and thereby the number of skilled workers may result in decreased wage rates in both rural and urban areas. Our findings reflect the literature on the low return of investments in migrants’ human capital (Snyder and Chern 2009).

Meanwhile, the literature suggests that individuals who remain in their place of origin generally come from backgrounds with household incomes considerably higher or lower than the poverty line (Du et al 2005). Those who remain and have the access to work in non-agricultural jobs such as in local TVEs and the retail sector tend to have higher net incomes than migrant workers (Snyder and Chern 2009). Our findings support this pattern as well. In addition to the effects of the hukou system, the negative association between education and migration can be preliminarily attributed to the economic and employment patterns on the local level. The different outcomes in income between individuals may be related to whether individuals have the means to attend high school or are constrained to government-sponsored training. Even when migrants received government-sponsored job training, the aforementioned correlations suggest that they are more likely to be associated with lower incomes and remittances. Interestingly, the negative association between training and income is stronger among those who stayed (b=-.916**, r=-.925**) than those who migrated (b=-.304**, r=-.406). In other words, those who received government-sponsored training and failed to migrate may have the lowest income compared to migrant workers and people who attended high school and stayed. Thus, the data indicate that there is a strong difference in upward mobility between those who have the opportunity to attend high school and those who are directed to the vocation training track.

Our findings on gender corroborate with the latest literature on migration and stratification in China. According to Fan (2008), young males and females in rural areas tend to migrate at a similar rate even thought they tend to go into different employment sectors (47). Since the loosening of the hukou policy, there is also an emerging trend of married couples migrating to the same destination within a short period of time (He et al 2008). Contrary to the literature, our analyses find no significant association between distance to a major city and migration. County governments’ involvement in organizing migrant labor may be a factor as many of the organized seasonal migrant workers in Ningxia and Gansu are sent to petroleum production sites and cotton fields in Xinjiang and in Qinghai (Interview Notes). We are surprised to find that there is no significant association between migration and ethnicity and ethnic networks and employment opportunities. We speculate that lineage and local networks may be stronger social capital than ethnicity in social organization in the Chinese rural society.

Conclusion

The data show how government-sponsored job training is highly associated with the decision to migrate. Interestingly, the analyses show education is negatively associated with migration, which can be attributed to the skewing effect of the hukou system and patterns of job allocation in the local political economy. We find that once individuals migrate, education and government-sponsored job training seem to have weak or no relation with income or remittance. This result suggests that migration propelled by government-sponsored job training can be a short-term solution for surplus labor in rural areas of the northwestern region; however, it produces little progress in the long term development of the local economy. Therefore, we believe that the migrant labor regime within the neoliberal framework does little to alleviate poverty in Northwestern China. Job creation and investment in TVEs in the rural area may be a better approach to poverty reduction in the region. However, given the fragile condition of the region’s ecology, industrial development will likely lead to further desertification and pollution and therefore limit the human and social capital available to local residents.

Based on our findings, we believe that development driven by unconstrained GDP growth as typified by the migrant labor regime is detrimental to the long term stability of the region. The unique ecology and ethnic diversity of Northwest China cannot sustain the external and social cost often associated with neoliberal policies in developing countries. In addition, the post-socialist institutional transformation in the region is severely behind the coastal provinces. The regional economy is dominated by state-owned enterprises. Private enterprises are weak and congregate in the service sector. This uneven distribution of resources and market opportunities inhibit innovation and tend to encourage rent-seeking behaviors from high level managers and bureaucrats who, as invested actors, are likely to continue the track of unsustainable development.

One alternative is to have the state provide tutelage and support for a circular economy by encouraging government R&D investment and providing tax incentives to the renewable sector in Northwestern China. Instead of the continued reliance on resource extraction and on energy/labor intensive industries as streams of revenue, regional governments should gradually shift their development strategy to green industries at the township level by utilizing land resources and surplus labor from rural areas. To increase capital accumulation in rural areas, the state should further lessen hukou registration by encouraging urbanization as the township level. Currently, to transfer a hukou from rural to urban status, one has to give up the right to lease farm land in one’s original village. The circulatory nature of migration is often interrupted and consequently remittances dwindle as migrants opt to stay and spend their income in cities where they are employed. The exodus of working age people creates a vicious cycle of poverty as people who stay behind cannot gain income from migrants’ consumption and the rural areas lose the opportunity to accumulate capital. The government can consider allowing recently urbanized peasants to keep their land-lease rights, thus encouraging migrants to work and stay in adjacent townships and stimulating capital flow toward surrounding villages. Lastly, given that sustainable development has become a major theme with the 12th Five Year Plan, the central government in Beijing needs to reduce differences in policy implementation for the central, regional, and local levels to avoid the agency issue in governance, which has long exacerbated social stratification and polluted local environments in China.

References:

The post The Neoliberal Sunshine in Northwestern China: A Case Study of Government Sponsored Job Training Programs, Migration, and Poverty Alleviation in Gansu and Ningxia Provinces appeared first on China Research Center.

Degrees of willingness to communicate vary from culture to culture, even in online customer interactions involving the same product. The communication literature suggests that members of different cultures have different communication predispositions and preferences based on how they utilize context as a source of information.

In general, western cultures, in which individualism is highly valued and members are taught to vocalize their desires, privilege personal over collective goals. People from these cultures tend to utilize low-context communication through which “the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code.” A low-context culture favors a communication style in which information is incorporated into the message and detailed background is provided in the course of interactions. Said simply, people within this culture are more likely to be explicit, direct, factual, and provide sufficient evidence. On the other hand, Asian cultures, greatly influenced by Confucianism and collectivism that emphasize developing and maintaining harmony within interpersonal relationships and society, tend to utilize high-context communication in which “most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message.” In other words, a high-context culture such as the Chinese culture has a communication style in which most of the information is derived from the context, leaving very little information transmitted explicitly. Additionally, in conflict situations, people in high-context cultures tend to use more abstract, indirect and avoiding styles to let others make inferences from the context so that they can protect interpersonal relationships from embarrassment or disagreement.

The above mentioned differences between low-context cultures and high-context cultures in terms of communication style can be used to develop hypotheses about how groups in American culture and Chinese culture differ in their online engagements and to provide the rationale for such differences since, as Rubin (1998) pointed out, culture plays a critical role in shaping individuals’ emotional experiences and the ways they express themselves.

Within a low-context culture, people are more likely to be explicit, direct, factual, and provide sufficient evidence, as is the case western cultures (e.g., American culture). In this type of culture, members tend to speak out, expressing positive and negative emotions, and are more likely to show a high level of willingness to deliver sufficient information and support their opinions.

However, in a high-context culture where the underlying values differ from Western cultures, the behaviors and interactional patterns of online discussions are very likely to be different. Chinese culture, for example, has communication styles in which most of the information is shared by people in society, leaving very little information in the explicit transmitted part of the message, as opposed to the low-context Western cultures. Therefore, members in this type of culture prefer to use indirect messages and deliver them in an abstract, implicit manner. By employing this community style, they can preserve others’ face and avoid confrontation.

In an effort to gain a better understanding of the impact of culture on the willingness to communicate, we examined online customer interactions regarding Amazon and Taobao products. Amazon and Taobao are among the largest E-commerce trading platforms in the U.S. and China respectively. In addition, they have similar and active online customer-to-customer posting communities. The study investigated potential culturally related differences in online reviews of the same product, Apple Corp.’s iPad, by Amazon and Taobao customers. Linguistic features of online reviews were analyzed by using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program.

Based on previous research examining communication styles in different cultures, we hypothesize that behavior in relation to the willingness to communicate and the interactional patterns of online discussions is very different between low- and high-context groups. Since Americans from a low-context culture tend to speak out, regardless of positive or negative emotions, and Chinese from a high-context culture are more likely to employ an implicit and avoiding style to communicate, we further predict that American customers will demonstrate a higher level of willingness to deliver sufficient information to support their opinions than their high-context Chinese counterparts. Specially, low-context Americans are expected to be more willing to express their opinions toward iPad, even their critical negative thoughts, compared to Chinese customers. On the contrary, Chinese customers are hypothesized to demonstrate a lower level of willingness to express their opinions toward iPad, and in particular, to express negative thoughts because they are more indirect and more sensitive to interpersonal relationships. From a linguistic perspective, we hypothesize that low-context Americans, driven by the underlying culture of individualism, are more likely to utilize first-person, singular pronouns than high-context Chinese counterparts, who are highly influenced by the philosophy of collectivism, which can be used as further evidence of their greater willingness to speak out during online interactions.

Data Collection

The data for this study are customer reviews for the iPad G found on the Amazon website http://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPad-MB292LL-Tablet-16GB and the Taobao website http://site.taobao.com/1101/site-100256024-0-0-0-updown-8.htm. The reviews on Taobao were available only in Chinese and were translated into English. Considering the possibility of bias occurring during the translation, the Chinese version was used as a secondary reference.

Next, randomly selected online postings were analyzed using Pennebaker et al.’s (2001) Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC). The LIWC tracked and counted the number of words fitting the definition of several meaningful dimensions. For example, the number of times a customer wrote us or our was counted and categorized as the customer using social words. Those linguistic categories that resulted in significant differences in willingness to express themselves by American customers and Chinese customers are reported in the data analysis section.

Lastly, the online postings on both the Amazon and the Taotao websites were coded for Applause and Criticism functions in order to gain a greater understanding of the difference between these two groups in terms of the impact of culture on the willingness to express oneself on the Web.

Data Analysis

Apple’s iPad has attention in international markets as well as in the United States. Even before its release in China, growing numbers of authentic iPads were distributed in the country through all kinds of channels, including individual online retailers, friends, relatives or online American stores. In this regard, American and Chinese users have had a great opportunity to share their experience in using iPad and to comment on such issues as price, features and problems. Accordingly, comments or reviews on iPad by American and Chinese customers were available on both Amazon and Taobao websites. Overall, on these two websites, some customers gave supportive reviews while others displayed negative ones.

In the U.S., 139 customers participated in online reviews, 75 (around 54.0%) of whom wrote very supportive comments with ratings greater than 3 points. Seventeen posted neutral comments that equaled 3 points in ranking, and 47 (roughly 33.7%) expressed a very negative opinion toward iPad by giving ratings lower than 3 points. Conversely, the Chinese data from Taobao have a total of 228 customer reviews, in which 167 (about 73.2%) left very positive reviews with ratings greater than 3 points, 44 (around 19.3%) gave neutral comments that are equal to 3 points, and 17 (roughly 7.5%) provided very critical reviews with ratings lower than 3 points.

On all three levels of ratings, Amazon customers used more first person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, my) and social words (e.g., we, us) compared to Taobao customers. Interestingly, among 1-point, very negative reviews, Taobao customers used more social words than Amazon customers.

In order to understand the difference in communication by Amazon customers and Taobao customers, all the online postings were coded for two major functions: Applause and Criticism. Representative words associated with these two pragmatic functions were listed as follows:

Applause: Customers give positive comments on iPad in terms of its significance in the history of the tablet PC, style, quality, performance, etc.

• American Amazon: a tremendous leap in the right direction…/ very fast/ impressive/ absolutely gorgeous/ easy/ the least bit sorry to have bought one/ iPad isn’t just making history, it’s making an impact on the future of media reading on a whole new level…/ delight/ far easier and better to use than I had expected/ web browsing experience/
• Chinese Taobao: epoch-making product/ more powerful hardware specifications bring outstanding performance/ color quality/ although not the first tablet PC, definitely now the number one. It is a stunner…/ performance/ admire the design/ not a bad choice/ stylish/ very portable/ stylish and very attractive/ the future of tablet PC/

The above data of applause function demonstrate that Amazon customers gave credit to iPad because it is “impressive”, “superb”, “gorgeous”, and “a delight” from their personal perspective and experience. In contrast, Chinese Taobao customers approached iPad’s advantages mainly from others’ points of view because it looks “stylish”, “fashionable”, “attractive”, and was “a stunner.” One possible explanation for this finding is that Americans as individualists focused more on whether the product satisfied their own needs. Conversely, Chinese affected by collectivism put their emphasis on whether iPad can bring others’ attention or give them “face.”

Criticism: Customers express one kind of disapproval usually by pointing out faults or shortcomings of product, displaying emotions about iPad’s price, configuration, and other aspects such as screen, apps, performance, and so on.

Criticism on Price: Both American and Chinese customers showed their disappointment with the high price but they approached it in different ways: Americans directly criticized the price without any reservations; Chinese shied away from sharp criticism in depth by using “little bit” or relatively neutral tones.

• American Amazon: overpriced/ price/ How much money do I have to have so I can enjoy this thing…/ nice device, but high price…/ will I get one? Probably, but not at this price…/ Price tag too high for what it does…/ For $600 you can buy a netbook and a Kindle and have WAY more capability…/ price
• Chinese Taobao: It is for a profligate…/ bit expensive/ / without any logic/ if the price is a little bit more affordable for ordinary people, more people would choose to buy it/ it’s not affordable

Criticism on Configuration: Both American and Chinese customers criticized the iPad for its configuration. American customers listed clear and detailed factual evidence in order to support their opinions whereas Chinese made similar criticism without providing too many details.

• American Amazon: brainless browsing board/ if Apple manages to put a CPU into this, I’ll be the first to buy one…/ Photoshop, no memory card reader means useless for photographers…/ Even if you could, you still would not be able to compress or decompress zip files or transfer any files in or out of the device via USB, there is no USB…
• Chinese Taobao: The configuration is too low/ USB/ hardware.

Criticism of Other features: Both groups made negative comments on other functions, including screen, connections as well as lack of printing support.

• American Amazon: The screen resolution for movies really sucks, you need to see it…/ serious connectivity problems with the iPad, for which there are no fixes…/ iPad only runs a few truly useful applications, the other 300,000 apps are gimmicks of dubious value…/ it’s really fantastic for all the reasons everyone else wrote but it doesn’t have flash that’s the only stupid thing to me…/ one major flaw – no external video for viewing iPad screen or movies…/ iPad is NO replacement for a netbook, in fact, I don’t know what it is at all…/ [printing] is a potentially huge flaw, especially for people who want to use the iPad for editing office documents…/ to hold without a case.
• Chinese Taobao: WiFi is not good/ connection/ It doesn’t support multiple-task processing/ camera/ compatibility/ to transfer the data or file.

Criticism based on Holistic Negative Feeling:

• American Amazon: Now I am disappointed because my idealist expectations have not been lived up to…/ I bought one, tested for a week and then resold. And guess what: I don’t miss it at all…/ Not bad, but seriously limited…/ I’m frustrated with iPad.
• Chinese Taobao: Overall it is not very good because there are so many accessories that you need to purchase additionally…/ what do we do with this iPad? Probably we can only use it until China is as developed as the U.S.

Data in Criticism show that American customers use more factual information collected from their first-hand experience to support their comments, while Chinese customers employed more implicit and conclusions without providing sufficient factual details to back up their negative thoughts. The differences in the use of factual information showed American customers’ full engagement while the prevalence of abstract words demonstrated the Chinese customers’ detachment especially from negative comments. As we know, American culture endorses individualism and encourages members to express themselves overtly, emphasizing independence from groups by highlighting individual accomplishment and personal goals. So speech acts such as criticizing sharply or refusing directly are acceptable. Conversely, culture is known for its implicit and face-oriented way of communication driven by collectivism. With the purpose of maintaining harmony with others or society, speech acts such as making negative comments or refusals are considered face-threatening, and members often utilize implicitness or abstractness to help mitigate the potential possible damage to interpersonal relationships caused by full confrontation. In addition, research has shown that the degree of context and the amount of information in a culture effectively differentiate the communication styles between communications in Eastern as opposed to Western cultures. High-context Chinese customers are more likely to employ an implicit abstract manner to communicate than their low-context U.S. counterparts.

Discussion

The present study utilized Hall’s (1976) concepts of high- and low-context- cultures and major cultural factors identified in previous research, such as individualism-collectivism, to examine how cultural aspects relevant to these two components may influence in willingness to express one’s opinion in online interactions by American customers on Amazon and Chinese customers on Taobao about the iPad. As hypothesized, the analysis presented in this article demonstrated that these two groups’ willingness to speak out differed in several ways. First, customers appeared to be more direct and more willing to speak out, regardless of positive and negative opinions, whereas Chinese counterparts developed indirect means of communicating, making a greater use of implicit and information. In the Chinese culture, openness and frankness can at times be considered positive, but they can also be viewed as negative, especially when dealing with negative emotions, which explains why Chinese customers expressed themselves in a more avoiding, abstract style. Another aspect of the impact of culture on the willingness to express oneself is the heavy use of first person singular pronouns and references to the self by American customers in the American data, compared with their Chinese counterparts. According to Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards’ notion (2003), the use of the first person singular pronouns is a method of declaring ownership of a statement, which might be explained by the individualist nature of American people in which the self-value is relatively emphasized versus the group or society. American customers emphasize me in order to have their individual accomplishments, thoughts, and abilities recognized by others or society.

Limitations

One limitation of this study is that a convenience sample was used. Another is the sample size. Specifically, the data analysis was solely based on online reviews of one product, iPad. The third limitation rests with the fact that only the impact of cultural dimensions related to low/high contexts and individualism-collectivism were explored in the study. Differences in willingness to speak out by American and Chinese groups might also result from other factors such as individual differences (e.g., age, gender, education, etc.). Thus caution should be exercised in interpreting the findings. The fourth limitation of this study is that a small number of randomly selected reviews were chosen using the Pennebaker et al.’s (2001) LIWC. Ideally, mean differences should be sought by using a large sample. Therefore, the generalization of the results is limited. Finally, online reviews of iPad by Chinese users might have been affected by the fact that the iPad had not been officially released into the Chinese market at the time of this study. However, the study’s findings provide directions for future research. Although the assumption that the U.S. and China are considered to be lower and higher context cultures, respectively, has been widely accepted, there are few studies in which this assumption was tested in the context of online reviews. The imitativeness and findings of the present study should be considered valuable in this regard. Additionally, the current study attempted to integrate cross-cultural communication with asymmetric online discussion in a business setting. It would be interesting to see whether the findings also apply to face-to-face communication. In sum, this small-sample study lends support to the validity of the hypotheses proposed, which can be further tested with a well-designed, large sample study in the future.

References:

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While some underground and independent Chinese films acquire their popularity abroad by being openly subversive of China’s state authority, the films of Jia Zhangke are of a different nature. Even though Jia’s films are politically very significant, he does not posit himself as a dissident opposing the Chinese state. Nor does he center his films on political criticism. His films aim to reach beyond ordinary politics and portray the encompassing reality of Chinese people and society⁴. Jia also is not interested in melodramatic treatment of historical traumas and national allegories, as are his predecessors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, two Fifth-generation filmmakers who made Chinese films known overseas in the 1980s by centering on these themes. Viewing the films of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others prompted Jia to make films because, he said, “I still haven’t seen a single Chinese film that had anything to do with the Chinese reality that I knew.”⁵

The reality that Jia knew is the massive transformation–rapid social changes, economic forces, and cultural shifts-that resulted from the Open Door policy and the Four Modernizations initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. All of Jia’s films illustrate this great transformation that China is going through in the “here and now” (dangxia), with its internal contradictions and its victims-underclass, rural, marginal people (xiao renwu) who not only do not benefit from the promise and hope of the sweeping economic and societal development but have become alienated from and lost in it.

Two films of Jia Zhangke that best capture the power, ironies, problems, and contradictions embedded in China’s economic reform and social transformation are Platform (Zhantai, 2000) and Still Life (Shanxia haoren, 2006). Platform, considered as Jia’s most ambitious film, is set in the director’s birthplace, Fengyang, a small hinterland city in the poverty-stricken Shanxi province in northern China. The narrative of Platform traces the evolution of the lives of members of a “performing arts troupe” (wengongtuan) as they experience and negotiate the difficult and constantly changing reality under Deng’s market reforms. The protagonists are two couples; all four of them are members of the performing arts troupe. They are young and idealistic. As the performing arts troupe changes from a government sponsored work unit to a private band, their idealism is confronted with the cruelty of reality. One couple suddenly breaks up as the other couple goes through long estrangement until a final union at the end of the film. It is important to note that Jia’s interest is not so much in the plot development of the characters. Rather, he is interested in the subtle human effects of economic and social change.

In the opening scene, we see a group of people in the theater waiting to see the play “The Last Train to Shaoshan,” being put on by the performing arts troupe. In the background is a big diagram labeled “Diagram for New Rural Development.” It is 1979, shortly after Deng Xiaoping achieved political dominance and announced the new economic policies in the Third Plenum in December 1978. The opening scene signifies change. The members of the performing arts troupe are low-status, young, rural cultural people who work for a government-sponsored cultural unit. The “new rural development” introduced capitalist economics to China’s countryside and left groups like the film’s performing arts troupe without any choice but to become privatized. It is ironic that the train, a symbol of industrialization, prosperity, and China’s future, is only heading for Shaoshan in the fictional play. Shaoshan is Chairman Mao Zedong’s birthplace and one of the holy places in socialist China. For the characters of Platform, living under Deng’s market reforms, the destination of the symbolic train is not socialism but a peculiar kind of capitalism called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” whose nature is dynamic and unruly and whose social consequences are unpredictable and somehow unsettling.

In the span of 12 years (1979 to 1991, the time during which the film is set), we see China’s radical transformation through the transformation of the performing arts troupe. Platform presents a Chinese reality that focuses on the marginal and the quotidian. As Jia expresses, “What I really want to focus on is, over the course of this transformation, who is paying the price? What kinds of people are paying the price?”⁶ In this film, through many small, ordinary moments, we see the members of the performing arts troupe as marginal people who struggle in the increasingly commercialized rural economy. They are cultural workers who are not very skilled or clever and who live in Fengyang, geographically distant from the centers of reform. Their marginality makes them vulnerable in this fast-changing society.

One scene in particular conveys the sorrow and status of their struggle. Toward the end of the film, in a scene set in the middle of the dusty road connecting Fengyang to its neighboring cities, two of the performers dance on the open bed of their transport truck while cars and trucks swiftly pass by. The name of the troupe at this time has been changed from Fengyang County Rural Cultural Work Team to Shenzhen All-stars Rock and Break-dance Electronic Band. The new name reveals the awkwardness of the place in which the troupe finds itself in the new world: their dream of being the stars of Shenzhen, a special economic zone that booms and modernizes under Deng Xiaoping’s economic policies, is a stark contrast to their reality. The social results of market reform for the members of the performing arts troupe are a lost past, a fictional present, and an unknown future. They are the people who pay the price during the course of great transformation.

Still Life, like Platform, focuses on the reality of the marginal and the quotidian as it manifests the consequences of China’s economic and social transformation. It is set in the ancient town of Fengjie, known for its rich ancient culture and magnificent scenery that inspired beautiful verses from Tang poets Li Bai and Du Fu. Today, Fengjie has also become known as a site of China’s controversial Three Gorges Dam project, one of the largest man-made projects in human history, and one that has caused immense human destruction, including the relocation of 1.4 million people as well as large-scale ecological destruction. Jia Zhangke estimates that by the time the shooting of Still Life began in 2005, two-thirds of Fengjie, with many of its archeological and historic sites, had been submerged under water.

It is characteristic of Jia Zhangke not to dwell on the controversial subject of the Three Gorges Dam. Instead, he uses ordinary, rural, marginal people (xiao renwu) and their everyday lives to represent the reality of Fengjie. In contrast to the Chinese state’s claim that the Three Gorges Dam is a great social and economic success, what Still Life directs viewers to see in the film is ruins upon ruins. This prompted the famous film scholar and critic Cui Weipin to declare that ruins are the real protagonist in the film ⁷ .

Ruin is a recurring motif in Jia’s films. In Still Life, ruin has a multilayer of meanings. Jia uses the journey of the protagonist Han Sanming, a migrant worker who left his coal-mining job in Shanxi to become a demolition worker in Fengjie to search for his runaway wife whom he purchased illegally 16 years earlier, to illustrate the meanings of ruin. First, Han’s demolition job leads us to witness physical ruin everywhere: demolished factories and buildings, abandoned houses, concrete blocks, broken bricks, and scrap metal. There also is the ruin of communities. Fengjie is a lost community: the house of Han’s ex-wife under water, like the houses of many others in Fengjie, and, as a result, she has to leave town and work as a bonded slave on a boat. A group of demolition workers also decides to leave town because they are paid only RMB 50-60 a day for demolition jobs in Fengjie, while coal miners in Shanxi are paid RMB 200 a day. Nature, too, is ruined. A powerful scene illustrates the ruins of nature when Han lifts up a RMB 10 bill and compares the printed picture of Kuimen on it against the actual renowned landscape. The water on the actual landscape is significantly higher than the picture on the RMB 10 bill!

In Jia’s films, China’s market reforms and its grand state projects such as the Three Gorges Dam have affected the marginal, powerless rural people and their everyday lives. The troupe’s traveling and changing status in Platform and Han Sanming’s journey to Fengjie in Still Life can be seen as metaphors for China in transformation. The social and cultural consequences of this transformation are ruins everywhere: ruins of nature, ruins of human habitations, ruins of communities and relationships. Jia uses predominately non-professional actors, naturalistic filming environments, long takes, wide-angle compositions, and synchronized recording without noise filtering to depict the ordinary, powerless rural people who are left behind by China’s economic development. To borrow from Colin MacCabe’s discussion of realism, Jia’s visual depiction of China’s reality is not just a rendering of reality but the rendering of a reality that is made more real by the use of aesthetic device.⁸ The true merit of Jia’s films, even more than the use of aesthetic device, is his genuine, humanistic concern and affection for his characters: the xiao renwu of China. His love for his characters is the essence of his films and the source of his art, and it is what makes him the poet of China’s underground and independent cinema.⁹

References:

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