Although there has been significant work on aesthetic snobbery and its ethical implications, much less work has been done on the aesthetic normie (normie for short). The normie is someone who primarily engages with popular aesthetic items. I argue that the normie is motivated by a drive towards sociality to connect with others and to rely on them given limited resources and time. I argue that the normie who is motivated by this drive will limit their aesthetic range and depth. (...) This makes it harder for them to access new aesthetic experiences, distorts their ability to accurately appraise others, and makes it harder for them to connect with others. Nonetheless, I argue that we can achieve the goods of sociality by being aesthetically open. Expanding our willingness to engage with new aesthetic items and to develop and share more informed aesthetic judgments allows us to access more aesthetic values, appraise each other more accurately, and form valuable aesthetic communities. (shrink)

Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two studies, we observed that the relative emphasis on the desire to protect others as an explanation for compliance was greater in the United States settings associated with cultural ecologies of abstracted independence than in Chinese (...) settings associated with cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. We observed these patterns for explanations of psychological experience of both others and self, and for compliance with mandates for both social distancing and face masks. Discussion of results considers both practical implications for motivating compliance with public health guidance and theoretical implications for denaturalizing prevailing accounts of prosocial motivation. (shrink)

This article analyzes a popular meme that has spread rapidly among Chinese internet users in the last few years, ‘garlic chives’ ( jiucai), as a self-mockery of the bio-economic subject in contemporary China. This metaphor refers to those ordinary Chinese people who are constantly lured to participate in all kinds of economic activities, but whose investments are destined to be consumed by the establishment. Through a close study of this popular meme and the social conditions from which it arises, this (...) article demonstrates two main features of the Chinese economic subject that supports the state’s economic sovereignty: the thriving of self-sufficient and rule-abiding individuals, and the quality of these individuals as hard working and capable of producing wealth on their own. This article offers a critique of PRC’s post-socialist governmentality, and it provides insights about the relation between the biological and the political in our complicated world order. (shrink)

This study explores the connections between time, travel, and creative acts such as painting and poetry, highlighting the similarities that unite these themes. It also focuses on the relationships between the East and the West in regards to these subjects, and posits that travel can be understood as an active form of meditation. The study argues that the meaning of wanderings can be found by learning to make them conscious, and that there has been a deep reflection on time, consciousness, (...) and mobility since ancient times. (shrink)

Status updates on social network sites (SNSs) as a new medium for people to express “what is on your mind” on the Internet can provide much information. In the current study, we statistically analysed survey data to examine whether individuals utilize impression management in their status updates on SNSs, whether their attempts at impression management are successful, and whether users who post these status updates can infer how others view them based on these contents, whether the status updates posted on (...) SNSs reflect information about users’ Big Five personality traits. The findings suggested that the meta–perception and perceivers’ judgments of all five traits are quite accurate, despite users’ aim to create different impression of most traits in their status updates. This study offers new empirical evidence about the model of interpersonal perception on SNSs and shows that status updates on SNSs can provide considerable information about their authors. (shrink)

Augustine of Hippo is often regarded as the champion of the doctrine of weakness of the will. John M. Rist in his 1994 'Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized' draws an interesting analogy between Aristotle's 'akrasia' and Augustine's 'concupiscentia'. However, such an analogy without further qualification is defective and misleading because it implies that Augustine commits himself to the notion that since everyone is perpetually akratic and, thus, always morally blameworthy. I argue that, for Augustine, weakness of the will has equivocal meanings (...) and is manifested in four kinds of case--their scope goes far beyond Aristotle's discussion of 'akrasia' in Book Seven of the 'Nicomachean Ethics'. There are, therefore, considerable differences between Aristotle's and Augustine's account of weakness of the will. Consequently, for Augustine, moral responsibility for the moral agent also varies in each of the four cases. (shrink)

This article examines the rise and decline of the enthusiasm for intelligence testing in early twentieth-century China, focusing on the appeal, the challenges, and the critiques revolving around this psychological instrument. The introduction of intelligence testing reflected not only China’s urgent needs in modernizing its merit system, but also Chinese psychologists’ aspirations for pursuing exactitude and redefining the racial characteristics of their compatriots against foreign interpretations. But despite psychologists’ endeavors, the political and geographical fragmentation of Republican China troubled the epistemic (...) imperative of uniformity demanded by Euro-American psychometrics and therefore undermined the validity of measurement. Subsequently, the legitimacy of intelligence testing began to be questioned by several influential Chinese psychologists in the late 1920s and 30s. The difficulties in standardization and the hostility within the psychology community formed a vicious cycle, impeding the progress of nationwide testing. Through this history, the article demonstrates not only the elevation of measurement to epistemic authority in modern China, but also how its promise was challenged by a diverse and rapidly changing society. (shrink)

The ‘happy fish’ dialogue is one of the best-known and heatedly debated passages of the Zhuangzi. Scholars have constructed different interpretations of the dialogue. Some argue that this dialogue expresses the idea of living at ease and enjoying life as it is; some refer to the idea of anti-anthropocentrism, while others reconstruct the dialogue as certain epistemological debates. This paper examines the connotations of ‘fish’, ‘water’, and ‘river’ in early Chinese political discourses and reads the political connotations in the dialogue (...) between Zhuangzi and Huizi. This can lead to an alternative interpretation, which is that, at its core, this passage is a dialogue between these two men on politics and their political careers. (shrink)

As part of a larger project, this paper serves as an overview that examines how “ai” 愛 as an affective concept made its way into the Chinese vocabulary, how it gained popularity at specific junctures in modern Chinese history, and the ways in which it has been adapted as a marker of modernity and a political discourse in Republican and Communist China in distinct ways. Although literary scholars have noted the significance of the shaping of love as an affective concept (...) for the project of Chinese modernity, they mainly focus on the conceptions and interpretations of love in the literature, and with a time frame from late imperial to Maoist China. The few studies about love in post-Mao era usually attribute the sources of such affect to Christianity. My paper makes a fresh contribution in three aspects. First, I take a longer historical perspective, from the 1910s to the 2010s, and dedicate, secondly, a large part of my study to the decisive impact from revolutionary radicalism to popular religions on the formation of the discourse of state propaganda and everyday politics, rather than manifestations in the literature and sources from Christianity. Third, I study some of the most controversial political figures in modern China, including Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, and Xi Jinping, rather than intellectuals and writers only. (shrink)

This article analyzes the current political predicament of Hong Kong by examining Nightmare Wallpaper, an art project composed of a series of automatic drawings made by local artist Pak Sheung Cheun. He made them while attending the court cases of political activists on trial, and the article further explores his subsequent efforts to transform this work into wallpaper prints, a series of installations, and a book. This political work, which is also very private, vividly and honestly demonstrates the artist’s intense (...) struggles, along with the despair felt by many in the city. The earnest self-reflection shown in the art does not give his audience a way out of the blind alley of the present but invites us to express ourselves and to connect with others. It is both a work of abjection and intersubjectivity, with no naïve expectation to reconcile the tensions between them. It shows, rather, a determination to participate in an uncertain future, combining the artist’s and the city’s capacity of meaning production and imagination. The Nightmare Wallpaper project also reveals how this artist, as part of a protest community, struggles to overcome binary thinking through an affirmation of becoming. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units (...) affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)

Background: The work engagement of police officers pertains to social stability and security, as well as to the orderly operation of the political-economic environment. Although there are many studies on work engagement at present, few studies focus on the influencing factors of police officers’ work engagement. According to the job demands-resources model and the conservation of resources theory, organizational job resources (e.g., perceived organizational support) and personal resources (e.g., regulatory emotional self-efficacy) are important factors influencing work engagement. We assume a (...) moderated mediation model in which job satisfaction plays a mediating role in the relationship between perceived organizational support and work engagement, regulatory emotional self-efficacy moderates not only the relationship between perceived organizational support and job satisfaction but also the relationship between job satisfaction and work engagement. Objective and Method: This study explores the drivers of work engagement through perceived organizational support and regulatory emotional self-efficacy among Chinese police officers using a convenient sampling method to administer a questionnaire to 744 Chinese police officers. A mediated model is proposed to investigate the mediating role of job satisfaction and the regulating role of regulatory emotional self-efficacy. Results: Job satisfaction mediated a positive relationship between organizational support and work engagement, and the perceived organizational support-job satisfaction and the job satisfaction-work engagement relationships were positively moderated by regulatory emotional self-efficacy, such that these relationships were stronger at higher levels of regulatory emotional self-efficacy. These findings, have a practical significance for Chinese police officers’ work engagement advancement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:206 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Pang Laikwan Identity Politics and Democracy in Hong Kong’s Social Unrest Hong Kong’s anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement began with legislation proposed in February 2019 to allow the transfer of fugitives to jurisdictions with which the city lacks formal extradition treaties. The law quickly attracted a tremendous amount of criticism and generated enormous anxiety because (...) mainland China was one of those jurisdictions.1 In fact, many believe that this bill was proposed to allow the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to transfer wanted persons of any nationality from Hong Kong to China, subject to a legal process that many view as highly dubious. A large-scale anti-government movement exploded in June 2019 when pro-establishment legislators in Hong Kong insisted on passing it, and millions of people took to the streets. The government waited three months to withdraw the bill, only doing so after some of the most violent confrontations between civilians and the police in Hong Kong’s history. With Beijing’s 1. The law was originally proposed after a Hong Kong man, who killed his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan, could not be extradited back to Taiwan to stand trial for the murder due to the lack of formal extradition laws. The proposed law, which would be applied to Hong Kong citizens, foreign residents, and even people passing through on business or as tourists, is being opposed due to the fear that it would be used to extradite Hong Kong political/civil rights activists and dissidents to China, where they would be harshly punished. Pang Laikwan 207 support, the Hong Kong government has doggedly resisted negotiating with the protestors over other demands, such as setting up an independent inquiry into police misconduct. As people have become completely disillusioned with the government and their own futures, tensions have increased. Collapsing many of the city’s socioeconomic problems into one cause, the anti-ELAB movement is primarily an anti-authoritarian impulse motivated by the unifying power of the term “Hongkongers.” As the movement unfolds, one of the most popular slogans, “Add Oil, Hongkongers!” (meaning “Keep going, Hongkongers!”) gradually transformed into “Rebel, Hongkongers!” and “Revenge, Hongkongers!” showing the protestors ’ anger about unrestrained police violence and the Beijing regime behind it. The militarization associated with these protests is both worrisome and symptomatic. This short essay analyzes this movement and uses it as a vehicle to disentangle social and political identity. My concern is about how a large-scale political movement can realign identities to generate power from the bottom. I use an Arendtian approach to ground my theoretical orientation, asking: How can political actions be understood as the pursuit of freedom to transcend one’s biological and social identity? From an intersectional feminist angle, if we are aware that social discrimination operates within a complex network of simultaneous discriminations, real social change can only be envisioned using a broad political canvas. Hong Kong’s anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement provides such a setting. Division and Inclusion “The people” might be the emptiest, but also the most powerful, phrase in the modern political lexicon. It can be used by politicians to justify groundless proposals or criticisms, but it is also the foundation and source of legitimacy for all modern political institutions. Indeed, the most basic meaning of democracy is “rule of the people,” which is impossible to avoid in any democratic imagination. As has been widely seen throughout the world, however, “the people” is often attached to various degrees of xenophobia—hatred of outsiders in the name of in-group solidarity. While the Hong Kong protestors’ courageous demands for the PRC to honor its promise to grant the city a high degree of autonomy have gained widespread international sympathy, thorny social divisions persist within the movement. 208 Pang Laikwan While Hong Kong has never been a united society, the anti-ELAB protests—like most social movements—have been highly divisive, splitting Hong Kong people apart. Most obviously, “the people” are divided by their political identifications, forming a primary antagonism between those who support the protests and those who do not, usually described... (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to perform the translation and adaption of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire into Chinese and assess the reliability of the Chinese version.Materials and MethodsThe Chinese version of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire was created from a standard forward-backward translation. A total of 371 volunteers, aged between 20 and 89 years, participated in this survey. Participants were divided into three age-groups, and subgroup differences were examined by independent samples t-tests, ANOVA analysis as well as post-hoc (...) analysis. Pearson correlation analysis was applied to test the association between the total scores and each subscore. The internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire were assessed. The test-retest reliability was measured among 40 participants with a 2-week interval using intraclass correlation coefficient.ResultsStrong correlations were observed between the total scores and each subscore. In contrast, it was found low to moderate correlations among three subscores. The internal consistency was acceptable. The intraclass correlation coefficient for total scores of the Chinese version of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire was 0.87.ConclusionThe Chinese version of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire was a potentially reliable and practical tool for evaluating cognitive reserve accumulated through a person's life span. (shrink)

唯识学种子说通过在微分、刹那层面探讨深层心识的构造活动和存在的本质，论证了佛教缘起性空的非本体立场，属于一种“非本体”的本体诠释。但是，由于受到中国固有思维的影响，中国佛学不再侧重强调法性即空性的“非 本体”立场，而是把法性和心性主体结合起来，倾向于设立一种“实体化”的本体，形成了“心性本体论”。由非本体的本体诠释逐渐转向心性本体的本体诠释是印度唯识学在心识哲学层面中国化的基本趋势。.

Nowadays, many countries are promoting entrepreneurial education or the “innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity” education. Entrepreneurial education can enhance a nation’s economic competitiveness and give rise to new business. At the moment, entrepreneurial courses are mostly designed by school teachers; however, while school teachers may possess business experience, they lack in entrepreneurial experience. Hence, entrepreneurial education courses call for experts with entrepreneurial experience to contribute to course designs and assist with course teachings. Entrepreneurial education not only improves a student’s entrepreneurial skills, (...) but also enables each student to explore their personal characteristics in order to advance the collaboration efficacy of the team as a whole. This study asked six experts with entrepreneurial experience in the information industry to work with school teachers in course design as well as teaching collaboration. The course design starts with three talk sessions given by professionals who share with students their thoughts and experiences in entrepreneurial products, team organization, fund raising, and profit calculation. Following that, each student is asked to share their own thoughts on entrepreneurial products and start searching for team members and planning their project. During the course, each team receives six individual advising sessions from the professionals, with topics ranging from product modeling, feasibility, product market estimation, fundraising methods, and profit calculation. The experts also provide each team member with personal trait analysis. Last but not least, the course invites five management-level industry professionals to play the role of venture capital investor and evaluate each team’s product modeling based on their presentation. This study reviews the grades given by the experts as well as the evaluations given by the three industry managers to assess whether the entrepreneurial education course’s student entrepreneur teams satisfy the industry’s expectations. (shrink)

The introduction of corporate mode into universities with the widespread of neoliberalism has posed threats to intellectuals’ academic creativity and political sensitivity. To respond to the threats, I argue that it is high time we talk about educating hope. Moreover, I contend that Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze’s theories on hope can be of great help in understanding the complexity and exquisiteness of hope—non-representational and non-metaphysical, dependent on contingent encounters, transformative and political.

Among the many silk manuscripts excavated from Changsha Mawangdui Tomb 3 in Hunan province in the winter of 1973, one text was named Wu xing [by contemporary scholars]. Twenty years later, in the winter of 1993, there was a text [of itself] titled Wu xing among the many bamboo slip texts excavated from Jingmen Guodian Tomb 1 in Hubei.

In October 1993, a cache of bamboo slips written in the Chu script was excavated from a Warring States period tomb in the village of Guodian in the city of Jingmen in the province of Hubei. After separation and arrangement by experts, the photo plates of the Chu slips and their annotations were published this May by Wenwu Press in the book called Guodian Chu mu zhujian.