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This paper aims to examine the attractiveness of the Tong Ren Tang (TRT) as a Chinese corporate heritage tourism brand and consider the significance of TRT for Chinese national identity. The study considers the saliency of Balmer’s augmented role identity notion vis-à-vis corporate heritage institutions/corporate brands. Insights are made from and for corporate heritage, heritage tourism and national identity literature.

A conceptual model comprising five hypotheses was developed and this informed a survey-based questionnaire administered to domestic tourists/customers visiting Tong Ren Tang’s flagship shop in Beijing.

The attractiveness to domestic Chinese tourists/customers of the TRT corporate heritage tourism brand was found to be attributable to its multiple role identities: national, corporate, temporal, familial and imperial. As such, this study lends credence to Balmer’s augmented role identity notion. Chinese domestic tourists/customers – as members of an ethnic Chinese community – in visiting TRT not only consume an extant corporate heritage by tangible and intangible means but can also be seen to express, and reaffirm, their sense of Chinese national identity.

For TRT’s managers, there should be an appreciation that the attractiveness of TRT as a corporate heritage tourism brand rests not only on what it sells but also in what it symbolises in national and cultural terms. This finding is applicable to the managers of many other corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brands.

Adopting a primordial perspective, the TRT pharmacy was found to be of singular significance to China’s national identity. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Confucian and Daoist religious/philosophical and China’s erstwhile Imperial polity are significant and enduring precepts of Chinese national identity. As such the TRT flagship shop/brand is of singular importance, as China has eviscerated much of its cultural heritage – particularly in relation to its corporate heritage brands.

This is the first empirical study to focus on corporate heritage tourism brands and one of the first studies to examine a Chinese corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brand. Also significant in focussing on the TRT corporate heritage brand. Established in 1669, TRT’s history spans five centuries: a corporate provenance which is exceptional within the People’s Republic of China. The study links the corporate brand notion with the nascent corporate heritage brand domain and the established area of heritage tourism.

While education policymakers in Asian polities find it difficult to resist the English language which has attained a new status in “late capitalism”, prevailing policy-level perceptions also suggest that a ruthless adoption of English may undermine national languages, identities and cultures. Despite the heightened commercialisation of English as a global language this policy dilemma raises some critical questions. For example, how can individual entrepreneurs also acting as “language policy actors” effectively promote for-profit English teaching ventures without being accused of compromising national interests, identities and traditions? This article makes a modest attempt towards addressing these questions by conducting a critical analysis of Li Yang’s English teaching venture called “Crazy English” in China and its underlying discourses.

From a sample of English teaching resources available on its official website, this paper identifies and discusses four major discourses on the relationship between English and individual entrepreneurship in English on the one hand and Chinese and China’s national values and interests on the other.

This paper argues that collectively these discourses represent a model of “edu-business” in English language teaching that reconciles the dichotomies between nationalism and post-nationalism, individualism and collectivism and public and private interests in a neoliberal world.

With the onset of globalisation and its impact on all aspects of life including the economy, education and communication, there have been on-going debates on the emerging tensions between the nation-state and the forces of trans/post-nationalism, the latter being underpinned by neo-liberalism. These tensions have also been observed in the fields of English and English language education. While research has examined how macro-level policymakers respond to globalisation through their English language policies, there has been limited work on how individual language policy actors engaged in the commercialisation of English reconcile the apparently irreconcilable forces of nationalism and post-nationalism. The contribution of the present article lies in illustrating a case that seeks to reconcile these forces through discourses and discursive strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.

The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.

A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.

The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.

The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses.

After the handing over of Hong Kong sovereignty from 1997 and under the “one country two systems” model, the Special Administrative Region's Government initiated new policies of civic education and amended or ignored the old ones. However, it was not until May 2011 that the complete new policy paper was introduced for consultation and then it was passed and issued as national education in April 2012. This article aims to analyze the civic education policy of Hong Kong in the transfer of power after the handing over in the following 15 years.

This policy analysis describes the preparations for Hong Kong’s future citizens and masters. Theories of citizenship education are adopted for this analysis. Moreover, theories of the state are also applied for more in‐depth understanding. These concepts are helpful to operationalize the contents of the study. It was a historical and comparative method to help to understand and explain the civic education policy of the HKSAR's governance.

Basically, it can be seen that the policies are anticipatory and responsive. The historical context of Hong Kong helped to make the correspondence with how the government expected to mold its future citizens in order to facilitate and implement their administration and governance.

This paper explores the role of the Hong Kong Government in the initiation and implementation of civic education.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate red tourism in China and, in doing so, shed light on the complex relationships between tourism, heritage and identity politics.

Mixed methods – literature review, document analysis, interviews with government officials, travel agents and tourists.

Red tourism is an initiative to preserve, promote and pass down China’s communist past that is underpinned by political purposes. It has resulted in an imbalance between the government’s designation of communist heritage sites all over the country and the concentration of visitors in a small number of popular destinations. Red tourism fosters allegiance to the Communist Party of China. At the same time, it is expected to bring economic opportunities to remote locations through tourism spending and the branding opportunities that it provides. However, a different emphasis can be discerned at the national and local levels, whereby the former emphasizes political cohesion and the latter stresses local economic development.

Four sites are investigated in detail out of the hundreds that might have been explored.

Recommendations are made to: diversify the product, increase stakeholder involvement, enhance heritage conservation plans, improve interpretation.

Many implications for relationships between governments at all levels and the Chinese population. Also implications for the economic well-being of places and people adjacent to red tourism sites.

One of very few papers in either English or Chinese that addresses the red tourism policy in detail and with substantial empirical materials.

This case study provides an example of a local community development partnership between a housing association and a Chinese community association, involving housing for older people, a community centre and retail/business space.

Workplace well-being is key to improving health and therefore productivity. Although the Chinese population and their influence on business in the UK are growing rapidly, little is known about the attitudes of Chinese employers and employees towards workplace well-being. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors conducted a qualitative study to explore the views of Chinese employees and employers in London and interviewed occupational health and workplace well-being experts.

Employers’ understanding of workplace well-being was limited, their approach was reactive rather than proactive. Contextual factors hampered most efforts towards workplace well-being. Employees reported that working conditions were generally poor with likely implications for employees’ physical and mental health. Generational and migratory changes further complicate the scenario but potentially usher in positive change.

This study was conducted in a London area with a high density of Chinese businesses. The study nevertheless covered only a limited selection of business sectors. Caution may therefore be necessary in assuming the transferability of these findings to other parts of the UK.

Chinese businesses are agreeable to being informed about and considering the business case for workplace well-being. Chinese workers need better working conditions, easier access to health services preferably delivered through Chinese-based networks of community and business associations which are trusted by both employers and employees.

This study offers novel evidence on the attitude of Chinese employers and employees towards workplace well-being by comparing views from both groups. Chinese people face considerable health and mental health problems through their work environment, in contrast with conclusions from the Health Survey for England and Labour Force Survey.

The recent wave of immigration to North American society from new source countries challenges old theories of acculturation that were based on European immigration streams that assumed that ethnic retention was generationally conditioned. For Caucasian immigrants, it was assumed that assimilation was linear and that by the third generation, all traces of ethnic origin would be absent, save for a nostalgic interest in quaint and ephemeral aspects of an ethnic past labeled symbolic ethnicity (Child, 1943; Gans, 1979; Rumbaut, 1997; Waters, 1990). Since 1965 in the United States, and 1967 in Canada, changes in immigration policy suggest that alternative assimilation patterns may exist. Whereas previous immigration policy had discouraged non-Caucasian immigration, the new policy brought with it large-scale immigration from Asia in particular which introduced a different element of race into assimilation expectations. For these new immigrants, race continues to be a marker whereby prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination produce assumptions of “foreignness” regardless of generational status (Neckerman, Carter & Lee, 1999; Tuan, 1999).

This chapter documents the process of conducting research as an anthropological expert witness to provide evidentiary proof of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “race” among Chinese Indonesian asylum seekers in the United States. The research employed detailed oral history interviews supplemented by ethnographic information on names, kinship terminologies, and rituals honoring the dead to reconcile the dilemma of verifying cultural identity without essentializing Chinese culture. It also employed the theory of racialization to account for persecution based on “race” according to the 1951 Refugee Convention while recognizing the social science convention of viewing “race” as socially constructed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of incorporating Chinese elements in global brands on consumer purchase likelihood.

Six global brand products from three categories that utilized Chinese elements are used to test hypotheses. The Total Effect Moderation Model is used to analyze by combining moderation and mediation under a general analytical framework.

The results show that cultural compatibility has direct positive effect, in addition to an indirect effect (through local iconness) on purchase likelihood. Meanwhile, consumer cultural identity is found to moderate the impact of brand local iconness on purchase likelihood.

Evaluation and improvement of cultural compatibility in a global brand that incorporates Chinese elements is recommended for multinational marketers entering Chinese consumer markets. Meanwhile, marketers should pay attention to consumer cultural identity in the market segmentation process.

This paper takes a unique perspective to investigate whether and how global brands can succeed when adding local cultural elements to the product design, packaging and promotion in emerging markets like China.