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Today was the first morning that the Vancouver Sun was delivered to my apartment, after subscribing to it last week at the University’s “Shopping Week”. A student offer of $56.00 for 7 months, how could I turn this down?!

  “Dell to invest $100 billion in China by 2020”. I don’t think any explaining needs to be done as to why that headline caught my eye as I flipped through the Vancouver Sun this Saturday morning. The article talks of how Dell needs to invest in order to support rapid growth, research and development in the region.

 The Chinese economy has been expanding at breakneck speed over the past two decades. It’s GDP has grown from US$357 billion in 1990 to $4.33 trillion in 2008. China has sent an astronaut to the moon, hosted the recent Olympics and presently, the Shanghai Expo (which cost China some US$54 billion). These are just examples as to how China cannot be ignored as a rising power.

 As much as we may or may not like it, the emergence of China as an economic superpower is no longer a question. With a closed political and centralized system, China has the potential to bring financial shock to the world market…

References:

“Dell to invest $100 billion in China by 2020″ Vancouver Sun 18 September 2010: D5. Print.

 “Gross Domestic Product: GDP in current U.S. dollars″. Statistical chart. Google Public Data. Last updated 26 July 2010. ‹http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN&dl=en&hl=en&q=china+gdp+statistics›

The word “limited liability” is linked with corporations. It indicates that no matter how much harm the company did, shareholders could not be required to pay more than the amount they had already put in. This has allowed the corporation to get away with literally anything, including child labour and exploiting those in third-world countries.

One of the most well-known corporations within the past twenty years that is guilty of this, is Nike. Surely, it is unethical for children at the age of 12 to 13 (law states that workers must be at least 18) to be working in factories with heavy machinery and dangerous material for a measly 25 cents a day?

R. Edward Freeman spoke of how businesses must have social responsibility, or they run the “risk of going into decline“. Nike did just that, it took up social responsibility in order to prevent itself from being “synonymous with slave workers, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse” but only AFTER the revealations.

Limited liability has resulted in unethical business practices where people have succumbed to the lure of ascendancy and take the psychopathic path to power and profit and ultimately, it is up to us individuals to remind ourselves of the social responsibilities we have.

I have always attempted to keep a journal of some sort since my days in elementary school but there was just never an incentive for me to have one, given that a journal is something that one wants to hide and not let others see. Years later when the blogosphere exploded into our lives, I did think about having a blog, but you see, blogs are different from journals in a way that we WANT people to read them. We WANT hits and comments on our blog and the fear of having an audience of perhaps my own parents (checking to see what I have been up to) and a couple of friends who I forced to read my posts, made the thought wane.

Comm 101 though, has served as a sudden thrust into this unknown blogging world and who knows what lies ahead! What articles shall I pick? What should I write about? How am I going to link my class notes to what I will be filling this blog with? What do all these confusing buttons do? I will probably grow into this as the weeks go by…