An 8-hour elective that uses China's digital ecosystem as a provocative counterpoint to Western assumptions about digitalization. The seminar opens with a critical look at 20 years of digital transformation in the West—and asks why so little real progress has been made. It then shifts to China, examining why Shenzhen has emerged as a new center of innovation and how political, societal, and infrastructural conditions have created a fundamentally different digital landscape.

Students explore the mobile-only paradigm that makes the Chinese internet work completely differently from its Western counterpart, and deep-dive into the platform ecosystem built by WeChat, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance. Key case studies include PDD/Temu, SHEIN, and Ping An, covering everything from social commerce and influencer marketing to AI-first retail strategies.

The core question throughout: which of these ideas are transferable to Western markets, and how? Students work on concrete transfer strategies in breakout sessions and group discussions, learning to respond to rapid change with radical—rather than incremental—thinking.