This thesis examines the operations of the Confucius Institute in contemporary Thailand. By the end of 2012, there were already 400 Confucius Institutes around the world, 13 of which are in Thailand. It took the Confucius Institute less than a decade to rapidly expand around the globe. Despite its putative neutral objective of promoting Chinese culture and language globally, this thesis argues that the Institute is closely affiliated with the Chinese government, and is in fact part of the Chinese government’s broader hegemonic project. I define hegemony as dominance that rests on generally based consent and is established by social forces occupying a dominant role within a state that are projected outward on a world scale. I look at three aspects of hegemony: the negotiation of norms, the conferring of common interests and mutual benefits to members, and the lived social experience through selective and dominant cultural symbols. This thesis presents empirical data that was collected during three months of field research in Thailand in 2012. It shows that the Confucius Institute attempts to create a norm of international harmony which has its roots in the Chinese government’s domestic policy to construct a harmonious society by 2020. Furthermore, this thesis illustrates that students and people who are involved with the Confucius Institute perceive their participation as resulting in mutual benefits that are “real.” Their perceptions are related to international policies that show Thailand as benefiting by subordinating to China’s political and economic dominance. Lastly, cultural public events organized by the Confucius Institute demonstrate how hegemony is a lived social experience for participants. / Graduate / 2019-12-30 / 0615 / 0616

Against the backdrop of successful family planning in China, the aging of the society’s population is increasing. With the increasing number of older adults, the support of the elderly has become a significant issue for society. Filial piety and respect for the elderly are the fundamentals of Chinese society and its long history. One aspect of filial piety focused on the responsibilities of the family in eldercare. It advocates that the elderly need not only material help but also spiritual comfort and emotional support. This culture of filial piety in a traditional Chinese society illustrates a path for responding to problems of the aging population. However, with the advent of an industrialized society, China’s family structure has undergone fundamental changes. There is an increasing trend of families choosing to send the elders to long-term institutional care rather than home or community care. This has led to conflict between traditional filial piety principles and the new model of aging healthcare. As a result, it is important to understand whether the new institutional care in China will meet the material and spiritual needs of the elderly. This paper aims to examine how Chinese values connect with eldercare treatments nowadays with the interplay of filial piety Confucian familism. More specifically, this paper discusses how Confucian values play in the relationship among eldercare locations, accessibility to care, and how filial piety has been expressed in the senior home before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Also, since the available data on service and quality in nursing homes in China is limited, it is important to understand what administrators and caregivers are experiencing as a first step. This paper examines the following issues during the COVID-19 outbreak. 1. To what extent does Filial-piety Confucian familism play a role in young and elder generation’s attitudes regarding elder health care? 2. What challenges do the nursing homes face before and during the pandemic? 3. How was filial-piety expressed in the nursing home before and during the pandemic? Methodology and Methods This project conducted a total of 15 in-depth interviews with selected interviewees, including both selected administrators and caregivers in five nursing homes in Shanghai, China. As the researcher was born and raised in Shanghai, the insights for this research came partially from the real-life experience and a personal understanding of Chinese culture. The researcher conducted this qualitative study in Shanghai during the time when there were restrictions on travel and interaction due to COVID-19. Regarding the location specialty, the researcher was able to conduct interviews in Shanghainese and observe the cultural rituals inherent in the region. The interviews were conducted to observe examples of experiences that administrators and caregivers observed or participated in. As such, the results are based on examples more so that opinions or attitudes. All interviews were recruited through email exchanges and discussions were over WeChat (a Chinese communication app) and phone calls due to the pandemic restrictions. Key Findings This study found that numerous young people in China chose to place their parents in nursing homes due to busy work schedules, house demolitions, and the need for long-term medical care for their parents. However, senior care institutions are still in the stage of exploration and standardization. Inevitably, there are some problems, including a shortage of professional medical staff and a limited level of medical services that can be provided. It was found that this new and flourishing model of elderly care is also facing a series of problems that are prevalent around the world, such as high bed vacancy rate, endless psychological problems of the elderlies, and increased operating costs of nursing homes. This information has led us to question whether the elders are living well and to try to understand views of nursing homes and filial piety. We found that most elders have gradually changed their traditional concept of filial piety to a more modern one. The administrators and caregivers we interviewed said that “filial piety” is a respect from the heart, a mutual emotional exchange and understanding. It possesses equality and democracy between two generations. Their comments suggest that more elderly people living in nursing homes have low attachment to traditional notions of filial piety. In contrast, more children have a solid attachment to traditional filial piety because they struggled mentally before sending their parents to a nursing home. In addition, the study found that filial piety was expressed differently before and during COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, the administrators and caregivers suggested that individuals were more inclined to fulfill practical obligations and compassionate reverence needs. Whereas, during the pandemic, filial piety was expressed less practically and more emotionally due to the closure of institutions. Future Research Further studies should expand the sample size by including more nursing homes in various districts of Shanghai. It would be helpful if researchers can interview the caregivers and administrators in person and visit some of the care homes to gather other information on the unique needs of clients and families. Further studies could seek to discover how filial piety plays a role in the nursing home after the pandemic has passed. The challenges of the aging models can be further analyzed and recognized through exploring public policies and the needs of China’s overall society. For example, China's future pension system might need to respond to how filial piety evolves. A comprehensive pension security system based on current filial views could be established where children might play different roles in the older adults' material life, care, and spiritual comfort. This research offers suggestions to consider in future research relating to finding a role for elderly care homes in society in reducing some of the negative perceptions of these homes, developing a model that meets the needs of elderly and children, and training and developing staff. Firstly, research might seek to understand how to address some of the negative perceptions of the nursing homes and, possibly, change the view that nursing homes do not mean an abandonment of the elderly. Rather, research might seek to illustrate ways that nursing homes might implement a modern version of filial piety which provides a way that elderly can live in a care home as well as participating with their children in their family homes. Secondly, the study might get input into a template or model for designing nursing homes to recognize the evolving changes and pressures on traditional views of filial piety. As needs of children and elderly in a society have changed, so have their expectation of filial piety and, given these changes, how do we develop elderly institutions to respond to the economic needs of children and society at large? Thirdly, the research might investigate the response to the concerns raised from administrators about the shortage of trained staff. This might involve identifying needs of qualified care professional and encouraging their training and developing in colleges, vocational and technical colleges, secondary vocational schools, and county vocational education centers. / Graduate

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How to better integrate urban texture, architecture, and culture organically, and use the architecture as a carrier to transmit more humanistic information? In today's society, people have a variety of ways to explore the culture and understand the culture. However, the most direct experience is a personal experience. As the most important carrier of human activities, architecture cannot be overlooked. From the direct sensory experience and indirect behavioral patterns, architecture is involved in human activities and ways of thinking all the time. Therefore, the combination of culture and architecture organically will give people a better way and angle to understand the culture. The relationship between local culture and local architecture is inextricably linked. However, how to integrate foreign culture into local architecture will be a very difficult problem. Directly transplanting buildings and cultural elements from a foreign culture to a local city will make the building incompatible with the original urban texture. It is not easy for local residents to accept this foreign culture from the aesthetic perspective or psychological perspective. In my thesis, I hope to design a cultural center that can match the texture of the local city and reflect the foreign culture through my thinking about the architecture and the understanding of the foreign culture: design a Chinese cultural center in Chinatown, Washington DC, to find out a reasonable way for cultural communication. / Master of Architecture / With the convenience of information dissemination and the rapid trend of globalization, the distance between people has gradually shortened. However, the way to bring human distance closer together must be the deeper understanding and mutual recognition of each other. As the most important carrier of human activities, architecture's ability to transmit cultural information is obvious. However, designing a foreign cultural center to enhance cultural communication based on the local urban environment requires consideration of more factors. Foreign buildings contain foreign cultures that make them unsuitable for being displayed too directly in the local urban environment. Therefore, how to deal with the relationship between foreign culture and local architecture more reasonably is the crucial part. It is necessary to consider the local architectural environment as well as think about the deep content of the foreign culture both in the design of the building and the site. This project will provide an opportunity to transform this conflict and contradiction to better integrate the site, architecture, and culture.

The intense competition arising from globalisation requires MNCs to manage their HRs globally and strategically to become a source of competitive advantage. Hence, SIHRM acknowledges the need to balance global integration and local responsiveness, together with emphasising the importance of seeking strategic fit between HR policies and business strategy, which in turn leads to superior firm performance. Furthermore, this development also increased awareness and recognition of the role of senior managers and cultural traditions. Therefore, the primary purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between SIHRM effectiveness and firm performance as perceived by senior management coupled with the influence from MNCs' headquarters and Chinese cultural values. Consequently, the researcher selected a case study approach with a triangulation data collection method through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews undertaken in four selected subsidiaries of MNCs. The research findings strengthened the theoretical foundations of several HRM models, together with supporting Analoui's eight-parameter approach (1999) as a functional, coherent and interlinked framework regarding the effectiveness of senior managers. In particular, this research found that quality enhancement of products and service was the preferred and adopted key business strategy amongst the studied MNCs. Whilst they are also seeking to balance globalisation and localisation through reconciling control and adaptation rather than satisfying one at the expense of the other, such that the trend is for Western HR policies to be gradually accepted and internalised by the younger generation of the Chinese managers. Finally, this research made several recommendations to foreign MNCs operating in China.

Animated movies have had a big impact in the film business all over the world. A lot of these films are mainly produced for a younger audience, which leads to a greater responsibility to show a legitimate worldview. Children do not have the same ability of critical thinking as an adult, and that is why it is vital in such movies. In this study, we have examined the movies Kung Fu Panda and Mulan to see how the Chinese culture is represented, having in mind that the relation between East and West have been, and in some ways still are strained. We have examined whether there have been any postcolonial elements such as cultural myths, orientalism, ethnocentrism and stereotypes, originated from the field of cultural studies. Based on a three dimensional analysis, we have looked at the films’ structure, the context and the socio-historical context. The study concluded that the Chinese culture is often represented in a somewhat stereotypical way and with symbols associated with Asia and its culture but the movies also includes certain Western elements.

At large sporting events (LSEs), e.g. football matches and athletics events, the user experience has been shown to be highly variable (Nilsson, 2004; Nilsson et al. 2004). Reported problems include a lack of social interaction with fellow spectators, and insufficient relevant information on the events or the sporting action taking place (Nilsson, 2004; Nilsson et al. 2004; Esbjornsson et al. 2006; Jacucci et al. 2005). A possible solution is personalisation, making the mobile application adapt to the user, ensuring that only relevant information is retrieved and presented in a way that is suitable. This thesis is devoted to studying the user experience related to mobile personalization at LSEs. It aims to investigate how personalized mobile applications at LSEs can render the user experience more active and engaging in a contextually, socially and culturally relevant way. The thesis reviews different theoretical approaches to help to understand the concepts of interest e.g. personalization and user experience (Chapter 2). Research methods are also discussed including the challenge of adapting user-centred methods into the Chinese culture (Chapter 3). This thesis investigates the user experience of mobile personalization at LSEs by following the circle of user-centred research: It starts to consider user requirements and user experience at LSEs and derives the usage patterns that personalized mobile applications could usefully support (Chapter 4). Then it explores the relevant contextual factors at LSEs which could be used to prescribe the behaviour of a personalizable mobile application (Chapter 5). Next, it describes the user-centred process used to design personalizable interfaces for mobile applications used at LSEs. Four key elements of design are considered: content, conceptual, interaction and presentation design (Chapter 6). The final outputs of the design process were two personalized mobile prototypes for Chinese users at LSEs. These included versions based on either (1) user-initiated or (2) system-initiated personalisation. Finally it investigates the impact on user experience of mobile personalization at LSEs in two empirical studies (a field experiment and a lab-based experiment) with these prototypes (Chapters 7 and 8). Mobile personalization is shown to result in an enriched user experience across a range of activities that a spectator would undertake at a large sporting event. The thesis discusses primarily the effective design of mobile personalization, the design implications at LSEs, user experience design, and research methods for Chinese users (Chapter 9). In conclusion (Chapter 10), specific contributions and avenues for future work are highlighted.

Notre étude aborde les relations entre la culture traditionnelle chinoise portée par le confucianisme, le bouddhisme, le taoïsme, et les trois piliers du développement durable que sont le social, l’économie et l’environnement. La culture traditionnelle chinoise s’attache principalement à l'harmonie dans les relations interpersonnelles,dans les relations entre l’homme et la nature. Le développement durable cherche à créer pour le futur un état d’harmonie entre les êtres humains et entre l’homme et la nature. Notre question est la suivante : la culture traditionnelle chinoise ne pourrait elle pas apporter sa contribution au développement durable dans sa façon de communiquer au monde ? Les fondements de la culture traditionnelle chinoise définissent l’harmonie à partir de règles de vie : le confucianisme favorise la communication interpersonnelle, la relation entre l’homme et le social ; le taoïsme met l’accent sur la communication entre la nature et l’homme ; le bouddhisme quant à lui privilégie la communication entre l’esprit et le corps de l’homme. Nous tenterons de montrer à partir d’analyses de discours scientifiques, politiques et d’une enquête en Chine et en France, qu’une meilleure compréhension pour l’occident de la culture chinoise pourrait apporter une contribution significative au projet du développement durable. La réconciliation entre la tradition et la modernité, la combinaison des cultures occidentales et orientales sont les axes majeurs de ce projet. / Our study talks about the traditional chinese culture supported by Confucianism,buddhism,and Taoism as well as by the 3 pillars of social,economic and environmental sustainable development. The traditional chinese culture, puts an emphasis on harmonious human relations and the relations between humans and nature. Sustainable development tries to create an harmonious state between the people and the people and nature.The reconciliation between tradition and modernization ,the combination of oriental and western cultures are the axises of our study .

The aim of this paper is to explore what factors affect the survival of international joint ventures involving Chinese family business. The results show that “Wulun” ， “ Guanxi -based trust”, and communication as the main factors, control, and “Mianzi” could influence on the survival of IJV. Among them, “Wulun,” “Guanxi-based trust,” and “Mianzi” derived from Confucian culture.

There have been only sporadic attempts to highlight Chinese women’s role and influence in art, even though their contribution has been major. This thesis seeks to understand the significance of women’s participation in modern Chinese art history through the narratives and works of Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen, who were professionally active at different political stages of twentieth-century China. Using an interdisciplinary framework, drawing on concepts from theories such as modernism, feminism and postcolonialism, this thesis analyzes a culturally specific field in art history and the interrelationship between various factors that have contributed to it. As artists of a peripheral culture, various factors in the artistic production of Chinese women have been overlooked and often misinterpreted. This thesis argues that the three artists in this study have produced different, individualized responses to the Euro-American model of modernism. To highlight the cultural specificity of China, the introductory chapter will include a short comparative analysis between Chinese modernism and the modernisms of other Asian countries. The adoption of Western art forms by early overseas-trained Chinese artists such as Pan indicates as many intricacies and ambivalences as in the complex relationship of China with Western imperialism. Chapter Two situates the Westernized works of Pan in the context of Chinese modernism, pre-feminism and the semi-colonized state of early twentieth-century China. In relation to the theories of orientalism and provincialism, implications of the ambiguities of Pan’s representations are extended to debates that explore the subjectivity and identity of non-European artists in their quest for modernism. Nie Ou was born into the era when the Chinese Communists had just taken over in 1949. Under the autocratic rule of the Communists, Nie was exiled to the northern countryside during her early adulthood as part of the “re-educating the elite” program. Chapter Three demonstrates how Nie successfully emerged from the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution. During this period of intensified Chinese nationalism, Nie found ways to merge the influences of the restrictive style of Socialist Realism and the poetic Chinese literati painting tradition to create an individualized style of representation. China underwent rapid modernization in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter Four examines the works of contemporary artist Yin Xiuzhen who, with her avant-garde installations, has pushed the boundaries of what constitutes conventional Chinese art. This chapter analyzes Yin’s works in the context of late twentieth-century China, where the nation was no longer a Socialist monolith but a complex amalgam in which old and new, Socialist and capitalist, modern and postmodern co-existed. Yin’s works will be studied in relation to theories of postmodernism, postfeminism and globalism. Chapter Five consolidates the earlier chapters by reflecting on how various conditions throughout the twentieth century have changed and shaped the role of women in Chinese art history. The concluding chapter will consider the influence Chinese women artists may have on the art discourse in China today, and perhaps across other cultures. This chapter will explore the constraints upon them and the potential of their future role, not only in China but also in the broader sense of what it means to be an artist internationally.