CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background
The emergence and popularization of the e-commerce has made great transformation to the international economic and social landscape within a few decades. (Shu-Chun Ho, Robert J. Kauffman & Ting-Peng Liang, 2006). E-commerce is about using computer networks to conduct business like buying, selling, exchanging products, services and information (McKay and Marshall, 2004). The nature of e-commerce makes trade on the internet become more convenient and efficient. The immense benefits e-commerce brings make an increasing number of enterprises expect to get more benefits from this ocean of fortune. Of course, Chinese e-commerce businesses are no exception to this trend (Ramakrishnan Ramanathan, Usha Ramanathan & Hsieh-Ling Hsiao, 2012).
After the financial crisis hit in 2008, the traditional foreign trade industry has suffered a constant downturn. Meanwhile, with the RMB appreciation and rising labor cost, the import and export growth fell significantly, leading to the closing down of many small and medium enterprises. On the contrary, electronic commerce offers unprecedented opportunities to both developing and developed countries (Nuray Terzia, 2011). As on-line channels are becoming increasingly convenient and available for business worldwide, more and more consumers choose to purchase on cross-border e-commerce platforms, the cross-border e-commerce has maintained good development momentum because of the advantages like low cost and high profit margins. More and more overseas business is transacted with Chinese companies on the cross-border e-commerce platforms.
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1.2 Rationale
As mentioned above, as an emerging industry in China, the e-commerce industry reveals many problems that need to be improved in order to keep up with the international standard, in which mission statement is a critical part. Meanwhile, the significance of mission statement has raised many enterprises’ concern about the quality of the mission statement. Since most of the researches on mission statement are conducted from the perspective of economics and management, it would a beneficiary taking to conduct a comparative study on the mission statement by combining the management theory and the genre analysis theory in order to provide some implication to improve the quality of the mission statement writing. That’s what motivates the author to choose this research topic. This research has both theoretical and practical significance. The author will illustrate as follows:
Theoretically, the thesis will make contribution to the range broadening of the genre study. The current study on linguistics has extended the study of genre beyond the literary domain, for example, more and more research targets have transferred into the business field. The busy international trade makes the use of En
