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Conceptualizing Made in China for a Museum Exhibition
Abstract
The Wereldmuseum Rotterdam is planning to hold an exhibition on China in 2023 in which fashion and design are one of the exhibiting categories. In preparation for the event, the museum is proposing to use the cliché Made in China as a provocative title for the exhibition. A workshop with the museum curators was held in 2021 to question the materiality central to the stereotypes associated with the proposed phrase to inform the curatorial direction of the forthcoming exhibition. As a workshop contributor invited to address the inquiry, I have, in this article, examined the phrase itself and China as a place, heritage and concept. The country-of-origin effect of the “made in” label was taken to analyze the phrase. While the negative connotations of Made in China in the exhibition title might have an impact on the perception of the exhibition, two interlocking components—transcultural dynamics and a site of friction—arising from the labeling system constitute a curatorial concept within which Chineseness embedded in the museum fashion and design artifacts are the offspring of the typified multifaceted “China” exchange, connection, and transformation.
Many in Hong Kong voice concerns about the fate of Cantonese, including nativists (“localists”) and the general public. Guangzhou is seen as a harbinger of diminishing Cantonese in Hong Kong. News and commentaries paint a gloomy picture of Cantonese in Guangzhou. Yet rarely do we read about surveys on the range of Cantonese use and identity in Guangzhou. Neither do we see analyses on how the social context differences between Hong Kong and Guangzhou may have contributed to the two cities’ unique language situations. Our study delineates the Guangzhou and Hong Kong language situations, comparing mother tongues, ordinary languages, and language attitudes. Cantonese is unrivalled in Hong Kong and remains vital in Guangzhou. We put the two cities’ different use frequency and proficiency of Cantonese and Putonghua (“Mandarin”) in the sociocultural context of motivation and migration. We conclude that some claims of diminishing Cantonese are unsupported. We also address how likely it is that Cantonese will diminish or even be replaced in Hong Kong.
The force of globalization has greatly challenged people’s conceptualization of national identity. The traditional definition of national identity as being distinct, stable and generated by such internal factors as ethnic, religion, citizenship and so on, has been replaced by the understanding that national identity is invested with more dynamic and complex features and is actually constructed differently in different situations. By following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive perspective in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and drawing on the 47 news reports collected on the websites of People’ s Daily Online and Xinhuanet, this study explores how China’s national identities are negotiated in its news reports of the Sino-US trade war. It is found that China’s news reports have constructed three types of Sino-US relations, namely, antagonistic, negotiatory and cooperative relations. Out of these relations, China has been constructed as victim of the trade war, defender of free trade, driver for negotiations and beneficiary of mutual cooperation. The construction of these identities and relations is realized through constructive, destructive, justification and transformation strategies. It is further found that the diversity of both China’s national identities and Sino-US relations in China’s news reports is the result of the political, social and economic differences between the two countries.
Through the lens of popular music in and from Hong Kong, Sonic Multiplicities examines the material, ideological, and geopolitical implications of music production and consumption. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet draw on rich empirical research and industry experience to trace the worldwide flow of popular culture and the people who produce and consume it. In doing so, the authors make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political and social roles such circulation plays in today's world—and in a city under cultural threat in a country whose prominence is on the rise. Just as important, they clear a new path for the study of popular music.
Since the 1990s, Chinese entrepreneurs in the textile and apparel industry have confronted rapid change and increasing pressure stemming from mature foreign entrants and changing local demand. Facing multiple challenges to differentiate and keep a competitive advantage, they are being transformed into creativity-driven organisations. The transition of the Chinese clothing industry into a fashion-creating system entails a specific environment. Not only is it under construction, but its evolution may impact the global fashion economy.
Although Singapore currently makes it impossible in the male descent line, departing from Chineseness has been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian history. In modern nationalist times the paucity of alternative terms in Southeast Asian and European language has made the overused 'Cina' a problematic label, impossible to detach from a very large northern neighbour and from many cultural stereotypes. Naturally many local-born and culturally hybrid citizens have sought to escape from it. The best documented mass case is the nineteenth century Philippines. Peranakan Indonesians have not found it so easy to shed this inappropriate label even though it has occasionally been wielded as a death threat. ‘Outsider’ status also has its uses. This paper is chiefly concerned with the obstacles for Peranakan in departing from Chineseness. It will argue nevertheless that many Indonesians are quietly succeeding in taking this path.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of trusting beliefs about a store on country‐of‐origin (COO) effects. The paper suggests that three trusting beliefs (ability beliefs, benevolence beliefs and integrity beliefs) about a retail store moderate negative effects of COO on product evaluation and purchase intention. However, under high manufacturer risk conditions, only benevolence beliefs moderate the negative COO effects.
Design/methodology/approach
The toy industry is chosen as the study context. The first three hypotheses are tested with survey data collected from 224 participants. The last hypothesis is tested with data collected from 338 participants. Hierarchical moderated regression was used in the testing of the hypotheses.
Findings
The results show that while only benevolence and integrity beliefs about a store weaken the negative effect of COO on product evaluations, all three trusting beliefs lessen the negative impact of COO on consumers' purchase intentions. However, when manufacturer risk is high, only benevolence beliefs have a significant moderating effect.
Practical implications
The findings show that manufacturers can reverse the negative cycle, or at least minimize their losses, if they choose those retailers that consumers have high trusting beliefs about as their channel members. Similarly, if they can signal that they are benevolent and honest stores, retailers can balance their customers' negative evaluations of products made in certain countries with negative image.
Research limitations/implications
Given the recent product recalls and concerns, the toy industry presents an ideal case to study the effect of trusting beliefs on COO effects. Nonetheless, the focus on a single industry does limit the generalizability of the findings. The authors recommend that future researchers examine these relationships in studies focusing on other product categories.
Originality/value
To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the impact of individuals' trusting beliefs about a store on COO effects.
Chinese policy-makers fear that an RMB appreciation will reduce low technology exports. We investigate this issue using data on China's exports to 30 countries. We find that an appreciation of the RMB would substantially reduce China's exports of clothing, furniture and footwear. We also find that an increase in foreign income, an increase in the Chinese capital stock, and an appreciation among China's competitors would raise China's exports. Because Europe is the second leading exporter of labour-intensive manufactures behind China, these results indicate that the appreciation of the euro relative to the RMB since 2001 has crowded out European exports. Copyright 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
This position paper argues that Covid-19 related anti-Asian racial violence highlights how contemporary problems facing Chinese communities worldwide – and responses to them – cannot be contained within the borders of Chineseness.
The first high fashion show organized in Florence in 1951 represented an important event for the development of the Italian fashion sector, increasing the importance of the fashion industry in international trade. Research in economic business history has identified this period as crucial for the advent of the ‘Made in Italy’ label. The article aims to understand if and how the high fashion shows organized in Florence between 1951 and 1967 influenced the emergence of the Italian fashion industry and the concept of ‘Made in Italy’. Supported by data collected from the historical archive ‘Italian Fashion Archive of Giovanni Battista Giorgini’ and three online archives of digitalized books and newspapers, the analysis sheds light on the perception of the national and international press on the cultural phenomena of Italian fashion and ‘Made in Italy’. Results reveal an increasing trend in the frequency of terms related to the Italian fashion industry coinciding with the years of the Florentine events. The analysis evidences the crucial role of the entrepreneurial activity of Giovanni Battista Giorgini, buyer and organizer of the first Italian high fashion show in Florence, for the emergence of the Italian fashion industry and ‘Made in Italy’.
As the number of COVID-19 cases rose in the US and around the world in early 2020, conservative elites in the US racialized the pandemic, referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese flu” or the “Wuhan virus.” Existing research suggests that this linking of the viral pandemic to a social group will “activate” anti-Asian attitudes in the mass public, helping bring those attitudes to bear on behaviors and attitudes related to COVID-19. Despite anecdotal evidence of a spike in discriminatory behavior targeted at Asians across western countries, little empirical evidence for this “othering” hypothesis exists. Using a large survey (n = 4311) benchmarked to national demographics, we analyze the relationship between attitudes toward Asian Americans, xenophobia, concern about contracting the coronavirus, and a variety of behavioral outcomes and policy attitudes. We find evidence that anti-Asian attitudes are associated with concern about the virus but also with xenophobic behaviors and policy preferences. These relationships are unique to Asian American attitudes, are not related to attitudes toward other outgroups, and do not hold for a variety of placebo outcomes. Together our findings suggest that anti-Asian attitudes were activated and were associated with a variety of COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors in the early stages of the pandemic.
Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships.
With chapters from leading international scholars, Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today’s China. The book also examines fashion’s role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.
Associations between the cheongsam dress and Chinese cultural identity are well known but what are the meanings of the cheongsam for members of the Chinese diaspora? In a study grounded in first-hand accounts of wearing, Cheryl Sim explores the practices and experiences of women in Canada, a major Chinese diaspora, and carries out the first in-depth study of the cheongsam from this critical point of view.
Questions explored over the course of 20 interviews, as well as during personal reflections on the author’s own experiences of wearing, include: is there a desire to re-claim or appropriate the cheongsam? Does this desire risk perpetuating stereotypes of Asian women? Does it undermine one’s identification with one’s host country? Can erased heritage(s) be accessed through dress? And how does wearing the cheongsam interact with the male gaze? Revealing feelings of repulsion and attraction, Sim combines personal stories with an authoritative use of theoretical frameworks such as feminism, post-colonialism and autoethnography.
Covering issues such as heritage, ethnic identity, authenticity, nationalism, patriarchy and assimilation, Sim demonstrates that the meanings of the cheongsam are multifarious. Readable but with strong academic underpinnings, this book is the entry point into discussions of Chinese dress and diaspora.
China Imagined
From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power
Edited by Gregory B. Lee
If ‘China’, as Lee argues, is a product of Westernisation, then the West is itself in the process of becoming China.
Bibliographic Details
Hardback
November 2018 • £15.99
9781787380165 • 208pp
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Description
How did China become China? And where is it leading us? We talk as if it had always existed: eternal China with its 5,000 years of uninterrupted history. But the name ‘China’ was first used by sixteenth-century Europeans, and its Chinese equivalent, Zhongguo, only gained currency in the mid-1800s.
China Imagined is a thoughtful exploration of the idea of China, from the naming and mapping of its territory and peoples to the creation and rise of the modern nation-state. China’s early history describes a multilingual space, ruled by a homogeneous elite with its own minority culture—a far cry from Maoism’s national mass culture, or Xi Jinping’s state-controlled digital society today.
Gregory Lee traces this complex, diverse entity’s evolution since the Opium Wars into a China made in ‘our’ image. Today, it is a great power integral to the global system, whether it comes to climate change, security or inequality. Given this rapid convergence with the West, Xi’s China holds up a mirror to our own nations. Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia and post-Brexit Europe all betray echoes of ’the Chinese Dream’. If China is a product of Westernisation, is it now the West’s turn to become China?
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This book investigates the success story of the fast fashion industry—mainly owned by Chinese migrants—in Prato, Italy. It outlines how Prato has become the center of a value chain stretching from suppliers in China and Turkey all the way to buyers in Europe. Despite this, a policy attacking Chinese entrepreneurship has been devised and implemented in Prato. This volume analyzes said policy against the ensuing crisis of Prato’s textile industry. Based on the author’s 15 years of fieldwork in Prato, the book sheds light on the entangled processes of city making and the restructuring processes linked to capital accumulation by tackling issues of governance, territory, migration, division of labor, labor mobility, housing, and human rights.
According to the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Basic Law, Hong Kong was to exercise a high degree of autonomy under the framework of “one country, two systems” after the British handover of its sovereignty to China in 1997. In the initial post-handover period, Beijing adopted a policy of nonintervention in Hong Kong, but the outbreak of the July 1, 2003 protest triggered a subsequent change of policy. Since then, Beijing has embarked on state-building nationalism, adopting incorporation strategies so as to subject Hong Kong to greater central control over the political, economic, and ideological arenas. Ironically, instead of successfully assimilating Hongkongese into one Chinese nation, Beijing’s incorporation strategies are leading to a rise of peripheral nationalism in the city-state and waves of counter-mobilization. This article analyzes mainland–Hong Kong relations on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover and offers insights from an emerging case study that builds upon the nationalism literature.
The book explains how multi-generational Australian-born Chinese (ABC) negotiate the balance of two cultures. It explores both the philosophical and theoretical levels, focusing on deconstructing and re-evaluating the concept of ‘Chineseness.’ At a social and experiential level, it concentrates on how successive generations of early migrants experience, negotiate and express their Chinese identity. The diasporic literature has taken up the idea of hybrid identity construction largely in relation to first- and second-generation migrants and to the sojourner’s sense of roots in a diasporic setting somewhat lost in the debate over Chinese diasporas and identities are the experiences of long-term migrant communities. Their experiences are usually discussed in terms of the melting-pot concepts of assimilation and integration that assume ethnic identification decreases and eventually disappears over successive generations. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation on multi-generational Australian-born Chinese whose families have resided in Australia from three to six generations, this study reveals a contrasting picture of ethnic identification. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012. All rights reserved.
Until 1950, Italian fashion did not exist: there were able tailors and creative designers, but they were known only as individuals and not as part of a wider movement that identified with a specific Italian style. Despite the existence of advanced skills, with the potential to realize an Italian fashion in its own right, there was neither a cultural identity to bind them together nor an international legitimization that would allow the new form to compete with the dominant haute couture of Paris. The revival of the Renaissance and its invention as an intangible asset was fundamental in resolving this ‘dual’ absence, and it therefore became a key factor in the international success of Italian fashion. From the 1950s to today – the period of increasing international success of the ‘Made in Italy’ label – in the rhetoric of entrepreneurs, managers and marketing experts, the Renaissance has become almost an integral part of the DNA of Italian fashion, itself at times represented as the direct descendant and legitimate heir of the excellence of Renaissance taste. This is a link, now taken for granted, for which a term has even been coined: the ‘Renaissance effect’. The fundamental argument that supports this so-called Renaissance effect is in fact that of the continuity between the craftsmanship of the Renaissance age and today's fashion houses; a continuity, however, that has been elaborated through ‘manipulations’ of history which are in part simplistic and in part distorted.
The article examines the concept of Made in Italy in the context of the long history of Italian fashion and Italian nation building. It wishes to pose some methodological questions: it argues for a more sophisticated understanding of Made in Italy, suggesting that it must be considered in relation to the complexity of the formation of an Italian style that harks back to early modernity when a prolific literature and culture came to the fore and elaborated an Italian taste or sprezzatura that was then exported to the rest of Europe. Second, the article argues that today’s Made in Italy must be examined in the context of both a multilayered identity and a plurality of fashion cities and capitals. Lastly, the article argues that, as is the case with sprezzatura, a study of Made in Italy must be attentive to how Italian style has been, over the years, translated and exported beyond the spatial confines of the nation and the temporal confines of history.
What is the meaning of national fashion in a globalized world Having or not having a national fashion upon which to rely seems to matter more and more for the success of brands operating in the contemporary market. This is so despite and perhaps because of production being increasingly transnational. The following article investigates how the project of a distinctive Italian fashion identity (made in Italy) is produced through discursive formulations and industrial practices in China and in Italy. It explores the meaning of made in Italy based on the perceived reproduction of historical or imagined traditions.
Incl. bibliographical references, index
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the International Conference on “Asia and the Other,” hosted by the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, in June 2007. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Arif Dirlik for his invaluable advice on how to revise the essay. I would also like to thank Nicole Kwoh for her kind assistance. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Marketing scholars' interest in the influence of source countries on product evaluations has intensified during the past twenty-five years. As this research tradition has evolved, the literature has gradually gained more depth and sophistication. Nevertheless, research in this area lacks a common conceptual framework. Furthermore, research priorities with regard to the role of this area of inquiry within the broader field of consumer behavior, marketing and general business decisions have not been made clear. This article rationalizes the buying decision processes within the context of source-country influences and offers a conceptual framework for further development. In addition, it links country-level considerations to firm-level decisionmaking, thus providing a foundation for meaningful managerial decisions.© 1994 JIBS. Journal of International Business Studies (1994) 25, 579–604
This study reports the findings of a research project which focused on the stereotypes of United States purchasing managers have about industrial products manufactured in England, France, Italy and West Germany, as well as the United States. The objective of the research was to determine what stereotypes, if any, exist in the minds of industrial buyers as they consider industrial products from these Western European nations. The findings suggest that stereotypes do exist for industrial products being traded by these nations. Managerial implications for marketing managers are discussed.© 1979 JIBS. Journal of International Business Studies (1979) 10, 81–90
Made in China.” Keynote Presentation Presented at the Workshop, Research Centre for Material Culture
- Song Lim
- Hwee
Discussion in Workshop
- Noord
- Van Willemijn
The China-collections at the Dutch National Museum of world cultures: Chinese painting, calligraphy, and ethnographic material
- Noord
- Van Willemijn
Interview by author. Hong Kong
- Kit-Man
What ‘Chineseness’, Whose ‘Chineseness’? A Preliminary Assessment of ‘Sinicisation’ in the Discussion of Culture and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Singapore
- Siao-See Teng
Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (NMVW) and Wereldmuseum Rotterdam (WMR), Cultural Heritage Project
- Photoconsadmin
Anti-Asian Hate is Flourishing Unchecked in Europe
- Vivian Song