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"Asymmetry in transcultural interaction." In Engaging transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies
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This book chapter maps the potential of the concept of asymmetry as an analytical tool for the study of transcultural interaction. It first presents a theoretical outline, which serves the function of a chain of hypotheses, and then tests these hypotheses with a case study about the development of the Chinese press.
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This article examines why and how persistent political fragmentation existed alongside continued centralization in late Qing and early Republican China. By analyzing new archival material and existing scholarship, the piece argues that external intervention helped preserve the viability of a single Chinese state even as the same phenomenon also spurred ongoing fractionalization. Because major powers' governments generally saw China as an area of secondary strategic import, they tried to avoid armed conflict over the polity and seek accommodation. Since outside powers diverged in their objectives, they settled on sponsoring indigenous partners, notably various militarists as well as the Chinese Nationalists, to sustain a degree of central government rule alongside substantial regional autonomy. In reconsidering the effects of foreign intervention, this article engages the discussion on political consolidation in the late Qing and early Republic, and suggests that overly stressing integration or division tends to present incomplete accounts of the issue.
New media have markedly enhanced individuals' capacity to produce and disseminate original knowledge; however, the literature has not extensively examined the broad effects of such decentralized production processes. This study thus focuses on a unique context—the stock market—in which it is possible to test the aggregate impact of blog-based information production. Using data on 150 top financial bloggers and stock returns from the S&P 500, this study supports the hypothesis that financial blogging activity diminishes harmful information asymmetries between key market investors. This study thus adds to the “media effects” literature, highlights the societal relevance of bloggers, and shows how economic concepts and financial market settings can be employed for powerfully testing communication theories.
The Vietnam and Algerian wars have demonstrated that the overwhelming conventional military superiority of major powers is no guarantee against their defeat in wars against small nations. For external powers such wars are necessarily “limited,” which constrains escalation above certain levels. With no direct survival interest at stake, fighting the war does not take automatic priority over the pursuit of other social, political, and economic objectives. Prosecuting the war consumes resources—economic, human, and political—which are thus not available for the pursuit of these other objectives. In the absence of a quick victory this creates the potential for those political divisions which historically have shifted the balance of forces in the metropolis in favor of withdrawal. For the insurgents, the fact of invasion and occupation generates cohesion, minimizes constraints on mobilization, and maximizes the willingness to incur costs. Precisely the opposite effects tend to characterize the war effort of the external power. A conceptual framework for the analysis of the evolution and outcome of such conflicts is presented and its applications and limitations discussed.
Recent studies have convincingly mapped the literary beginnings of the modern Chinese novel since the 1890s. However, the pivotal role of the Shenbaoguan publishing house and its British owner and manager Ernest Major during the previous two decades in creating the material, market, and cultural conditions for this rise of the modern novel has been neglected, mostly because the label “cultural imperialism” is widely attached to this foreign-owned company. This essay maps the dominant role of Shenbaoguan in publishing Chinese-language novels between 1872 and 1890 (after first opting for translations of Western novels) and the strategies it devised to elevate the cultural standing of the novel from its previous low ranking as a literary genre. These strategies included a prestigious, imperial publishing format with high-quality modern printing technology; careful manuscript selection in often close interaction with an evolving Shenbaoguan community; fixed pricing; a national distribution network, and a rich body of paratexts such as titles written by famous calligraphers, prefaces by prominent men-of-letters, tables of contents, commentaries, lists of dramatis personae, and, last but not least, an aesthetic appreciation in Shenbao announcements and special catalogs that reinforced the novel’s new standing.
In this paper we look at how information in societies is organized and how power relationships arise as a consequence of this organization. We argue that many of the observed information asymmetries are not happenstance and, drawing from a wealth of scholarship from the economics and finance literature, we posit that outcomes are inevitably detrimental. The paper concentrates on the techniques that foster information imbalances, such as media and propaganda, knowledge production, educational systems, legal and organizational structures, exclusive information networks, and surveillance. We conclude that in the absence of greater transparency, the deleterious effects of unequal access to information will continue and deepen.