GoodBrand

René Girard, the French historian and philosopher, described mimetic desire in 1961* as the human impulse to imitate another, "the model", through focussing on acquiring an object that connects us with the status of the model. Girard says that there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator. The mediator may be the hero in a novel or film. Maybe a celebrity or someone who is viewed as belonging to a higher social status.

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ChinaCSR.com is a website full of news about different ways in which Chinese businesses are engaging in CSR. Recently CSRChina reported on a group of 29 foreign-funded companies from Wuhan who signed up to "a proposal on corporate social responsibility commitment". But what does this exactly mean in the world of top-down driven CSR in China? The report tells us that the "proposal on corporate social responsibility commitment" will include:

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? T. S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from the Rock’. The GoodBrand Community are meeting in Windsor this Friday to discuss wisdom and how we can nurture it in our personal and work lives. We shall be asking ourselves questions like: How would I define wisdom? Why is wisdom important for me in the work I do and aspire to do?

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of the Yuan The grinding message from US and EU politicians and media commentators is that China, by pegging the yuan to the dollar, is putting up a trade barrier. China has the trade surplus, US and the EU have the trade deficit. The US and the EU want China to revalue its currency to make Western imports to China cheaper and Chinese exports to the West more expensive. When the position is stated in such simplistic terms the proposition is laughable.

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I was chatting with a freelance Canadian English teacher in a bar on Saturday whilst watching Wales beat Scotland in the 6 Nations. He told me how he had to hold the line on Oxford English in his lessons as students were picking up American spellings. There is a massive demand for English teachers in China and even the official market results show the market has doubled in the last five years.

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Xin Nian Kuai le
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Happy Chinese New Year!
At midnight last night, Pudong became a cave of echoing thundercracks, the air spitting firehail and sweet smoke as gunpowder did its work for human spirits against the evil spirits.

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I have been looking into wisdom as a leadership virtue and finding that it is closely allied to humility. It is difficult to imagine a respected wise leader as being haughty and arrogant. S/he is more likely to be concerned about the quality of the organisation, its effectiveness and the quality of its relationships internally and with its stakeholders rather than with 'ego-branding'.

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Lu Xun Park is a memorial to the revered Chinese scholar writer Lu Xun (1881-1936). He is celebrated for his powerful diagnoses of China's social and political crisis. The park has a museum which illustrates the massive contribution he made to Chinese literature and thinking.

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Dr Zhao Jin, of Xiamen University's Department of Anthropology, recently conducted his fieldwork in the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture . He stayed in a very remote village in the riverside of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River for two months.

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The Chinese press are now in overdrive attacking the US administration's support for Google over accusations of cyber attacks and controls on internet freedom. Leader and opinion columns explain that China wanted to keep the dispute as a legal matter but now the US is "damaging" relations between the countries.

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