Saturday, February 16, 2013

KATHERINE~Weeek 4 reaction~


Yesterday’s lecture was really inspiring! We watched short films introducing China and Japan, then through directing our own “films” we compared the schools and workplaces in high as well as low power distance.

As for the short films, I saw many similarities between China and Japan, especially the so-called modern cities in the two countries. That reminds me of the tradeoff between traditional culture and economic development of a state. It is common in some cities in China that old buildings have been used for commercial purposes, causing serious damages to those buildings. From my point of view, governments should carry out policies regulating the business in historical buildings, for example catering is definitely not a proper choice. It will be even better, if the current owner of that building could put some introduction of its history in that particular buliding, so that those old buildings can be used for business and also memorized by the people.

Concerning low as well as high power distance, US obviously belongs to low power distance and China is a country with a pretty high power distance. However, I found it interesting that reformers in China really prefer the western low power distance style. Take the recent education reform in secondary school as an example, though the core value didn’t change much, policies like adding students’ participation as one of the grading assessments, letting students choose courses they like as free electives and creating more dynamic lectures can be regarded as efforts trying to move towards a lower power distance in the field of education.

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