This paper takes an initial but significant step toward penetrating the intricate historiography of the renowned siyin half seal, which appears on 199 surviving or now-lost canonical Chinese paintings and calligraphies. Through a forensic tracking of the siyin art pieces, Ming dynasty court diaries, legal statutes, and other official seals ending in the words si and yin, I refute the dominant twentieth-century theory by arguing that this seal could not have originated from the eunuch-run Dianli jicha si in 1373–84, nor (...) could it have been used by the Ming general Xu Da on the Yuan palace collection as previously hypothesized. The alleged Dianli jicha si characters do not match the siyin seal strokes. New evidence suggests that the siyin seal came into existence after 1385, by which time the Directorate of Ceremonial had superseded the shuttered Dianli jicha si office. Instead of simply dividing the various siyin seal impressions into binary genuine/forged categories as past studies have done, I demonstrate that three types of siyin seals can be considered authentic, all of which were used by different branches of the jingli si. The fact that a half seal was employed suggests that the jingli si registry office followed the kanhe inventory system, which imposed an official seal on the seam of both an inventorying object and its complementary ledger. By deconstructing the siyin historiography, this paper raises new socio-political questions about ownership, censorship, and imperial competition over the siyin-marked art pieces. It also builds a foundation for the further investigation of the role inventory systems played in mapping, defining, and legitimizing the royal power of the Ming dynasty. (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)

《东西均》是明清之际哲学家方以智的著作,在本书中他提出并论证了“公因反因”这一重要学说。作者详加注释并阐明了书中抉发的哲学奥理,对研究和认识方以智的哲学思想和哲学地位,均有极高的参考价值。.

Electroencephalography is the measurement of neuronal activity in different areas of the brain through the use of electrodes. As EEG signal technology has matured over the years, it has been applied in various methods to EEG emotion recognition, most significantly including the use of convolutional neural network. However, these methods are still not ideal, and shortcomings have been found in the results of some models of EEG feature extraction and classification. In this study, two CNN models were selected for the (...) extraction and classification of preprocessed data, namely, common spatial patterns- CNN and wavelet transform- CNN. Using the CSP-CNN, we first used the common space model to reduce dimensionality and then applied the CNN directly to extract and classify the features of the EEG; while, with the WT-CNN model, we used the wavelet transform to extract EEG features, thereafter applying the CNN for classification. The EEG classification results of these two classification models were subsequently analyzed and compared, with the average classification accuracy of the CSP-CNN model found to be 80.56%, and the average classification accuracy of the WT-CNN model measured to 86.90%. Thus, the findings of this study show that the average classification accuracy of the WT-CNN model was 6.34% higher than that of the CSP-CNN. (shrink)

The electroencephalogram is the most common method used to study emotions and capture electrical brain activity changes. Long short-term memory processes the temporal characteristics of data and is mostly used for emotional text and speech recognition. Since an EEG involves a time series signal, this article mainly studied the introduction of LSTM for emotional EEG recognition. First, an ALL-LSTM model with a four-layered LSTM network was established in which the average accuracy rate for emotional classification reached 86.48%. Second, four EEG (...) characteristics were extracted via the wavelet transform using the LSTM-based sentiment classification network. The experimental results showed that the best average classification accuracy of these four features was 73.48%. This was 13% lower than in the ALL-LSTM model, indicating that inappropriate feature extraction methods could destroy the timing of EEG signals. LSTM can be used to thoroughly examine EEG signal timing and preprocessed EEG data. The accuracy and stability of the ALL-LSTM model are significantly superior to those of the WT-LSTM model. The result showed that the process of emotion generation based on EEG is sequential. Compared with EEG emotion extraction using WT, the raw EEG signal’s timing is more suitable for the LSTM network. (shrink)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

Summary Proposed by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) in 1935, the entangled state has played a central part in exploring the foundation of quantum mechanics. At the end of the twentieth century, however, some physicists and mathematicians set aside the epistemological debates associated with EPR and turned it from a philosophical puzzle into practical resources for information processing. This paper examines the origin of what is known as quantum information. Scientists had considered making quantum computers and employing entanglement in communications (...) for a long time. But the real breakthrough only occurred in the 1980s when they shifted focus from general-purpose systems such as Turing machines to algorithms and protocols that solved particular problems, including quantum factorization, quantum search, superdense code, and teleportation. Key to their development was two groups of mathematical manipulations and deformations of entanglement—quantum parallelism and ‘feedback EPR’—that served as conceptual templates. The early success of quantum parallelism and feedback EPR was owed to the idealized formalism of entanglement researchers had prepared for philosophical discussions. Yet, such idealization is difficult to hold when the physical implementation of quantum information processors is at stake. A major challenge for today's quantum information scientists and engineers is thus to move from Einstein et al.'s well-defined scenarios into realistic models. (shrink)

This paper reports part of a longitudinal research project, which sought to capture students’ conceptualization of caring practice as they progressed to different levels of study in a nursing diploma programme in Hong Kong. Model emulation was found to be an effective means of focusing students’ learning processes on the moral aspects of nursing practice. The theory of model emulation from a Chinese perspective and how it is applied to create a learning context to allow students to acquire a moral (...) sense of nursing are discussed. The participating students are invited to be sincere enquirers in the pursuit of the good embedded in practice through introspective self-examination and dialogue. They are asked to describe and share their experience of positive and negative examples of nursing in written accounts. Van Kaam’s phenomenological method was adopted to explicate the good and bad constituents of nursing from these examples, with the students assuming an active role in the explication process. The explication reveals that the students were able to articulate the good and bad practices in a variety of patient care situations. (shrink)

This paper focuses on neural learning from adaptive neural control for a class of flexible joint manipulator under the output tracking constraint. To facilitate the design, a new transformed function is introduced to convert the constrained tracking error into unconstrained error variable. Then, a novel adaptive neural dynamic surface control scheme is proposed by combining the neural universal approximation. The proposed control scheme not only decreases the dimension of neural inputs but also reduces the number of neural approximators. Moreover, it (...) can be verified that all the closed-loop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded and the constrained tracking error converges to a small neighborhood around zero in a finite time. Particularly, the reduction of the number of neural input variables simplifies the verification of persistent excitation condition for neural networks. Subsequently, the proposed ANC scheme is verified recursively to be capable of acquiring and storing knowledge of unknown system dynamics in constant neural weights. By reusing the stored knowledge, a neural learning controller is developed for better control performance. Simulation results on a single-link flexible joint manipulator and experiment results on Baxter robot are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (shrink)

In Chinese philosophy’s encounter with modernity and feminist discourse, Neo-Confucianism often suffered the most brutal attacks and criticisms. In “Neo-Confucians and Zhu Xi on Family and Woman: Challenges and Potentials,” Ann A. Pang-White investigates Song Neo-Confucians’ views (in particular, that of Zhu Xi) on women by examining the Classifi ed Conversations of Zhu Xi (Zhuzi Yulei), the Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi Lu), Further Reflections on Things at Hand (Xu Jinsi Lu), and other texts. Pang-White also takes (...) a close look at the Song law regarding women’s property rights and the Song educational system. Surprisingly,Zhu exhibited a level of flexibility, though still limited, on these subjects. He was particularly adamant about the importance of women’s education. In addition, even though he opposed the social practice and women’s ownership of dowry (seeing it as a form of commercializing marriage), he did not absolutely oppose women’s property rights. However, his normative and philosophical view on the male/yang and female/yin relationship was less satisfactory. At one place, he used it to illustrate gender equity; at another place, he defended female subordination. Zhu’s social-political teaching on women’s role could benefit from a more consistent development of his metaphysics of li-qi and yin-yang, which can bring new insight to the contemporary feminist “essentialist versus non-essentialist” debate on sex and gender. (shrink)

How would feminist concerns fare in the debate between Confucian role ethics and virtue ethics? Ann Pang-White sketches the contours of a non-dichotomous, role-based virtue ethics that is illuminated by a Confucian feminist account as one possible answer to this query. By reimagining the virtues of chastity and filiality that are indispensable to Confucian contexts, Pang-White seeks to develop a reading that can be useful in defending feminist values and replacing outdated understandings of gender roles in societies informed (...) by Confucian thought today. In continuing the conversation with her, Stephen Angle asks whether a modernized, relational, role-based virtue ethics can really suffice to respond to feminist concerns. Sarah Mattice proposes that Pang-White center intersectional perspectives on feminism for the latter’s project, while Lily Zhang invites her to analyze how certain ethical conflicts that arise within the framework of Confucian ethics between roles and virtues can be resolved from Pang-White’s perspective. Pang-White’s reply to the panel reiterates different aspects of her relational role-based virtue ethical reading of Confucian feminism to argue that a better appreciation of the situatedness and imperfections of morality is needed to understand the imperfections that come in with it. _ _. (shrink)

In Chinese philosophy’s encounter with modernity and feminist discourse, Neo-Confucianism often suffered the most brutal attacks and criticisms. In “Neo-Confucians and Zhu Xi on Family and Woman: Challenges and Potentials,” Ann A. Pang-White investigates Song Neo-Confucians’ views (in particular, that of Zhu Xi) on women by examining the Classified Conversations of Zhu Xi (Zhuzi Yulei),the Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi Lu), Further Reflections on Things at Hand (Xu Jinsi Lu), and other texts. Pang-White also takes a close (...) look at the Song law regarding women’s property rights and the Song educational system. Surprisingly, Zhu exhibited a level of flexibility, though still limited, on these subjects. He was particularly adamant about the importance of women’s education. In addition,even though he opposed the social practice and women’s ownership of dowry (seeing it as a form of commercializing marriage), he did not absolutely oppose women’s property rights. However, his normative and philosophical view on the male/yang and female/yin relationship was less satisfactory. At one place, he used it to illustrate gender equity; at another place, he defended female subordination. Zhu’s social-political teaching on women’s role could benefit from a more consistent development of his metaphysics of li-qi and yin-yang , which can bring new insight to the contemporary feminist “essentialist versus non-essentialist” debate on sex and gender. (shrink)

This paper examines Augustine’s analysis of the possible causes of akrasia and suggests that an implicit two-phased consent process takes place in an akratic decision. This two-phased consent theory revolves around Augustine’s theory of the two wills, one carnal and the other spiritual. Without the help of grace, the fallen will dominated by the carnal will can only choose to sin. After exploration of this two-phased consent theory, the paper turns to examine the accusation made by Julian of Eclanum, a (...) fifth-century Pelagian, and J. Van Oort, a contemporary Augustinian scholar, that Augustine’s doctrine of the two wills and concupiscence led the Church into a Manichaean position. The paper concludes that this accusation fails to hold up, especially when one considers the more nuanced view on the human body and concupiscence in Augustine’s later works. (shrink)

This is a study of the semiotics of counterfeit products. Beginning with an analysis of a number of piracy-related activities taking place in China, I look at how and why China is understood by the world as a pirate nation. Through a careful reading of the counterfeit product as a material object, my study aims at demythologizing the relation between China and piracy, and I relate the logic of the counterfeit to the logic of capitalism. I argue that piracy is (...) a result of global capitalism rather than to do with the character of a particular people, and I demonstrate the urgent need to establish a politics of mimetic reading, which refuses to be shut down by capitalist discourse, such as that produced by the intellectual property rights regime. (shrink)

While the movement to ensure patient’s rights to information and informed consent spreads throughout the world, patient rights of this kind have yet to be introduced in mainland China. Nonetheless, China is no different from other parts of the world in that nurses are expected to shoulder the responsibility of safeguarding patients’ best interests and at the same time to uphold their right to information. This paper expounds on the principle of protectiveness grounded in traditional Chinese medical ethics concerning the (...) practice of informed consent. Nurses in China have a moral obligation to treat patients with sincerity. This notion carries a strong sense of parental protectiveness. As far as information-giving is concerned, nurses in China are ambivalent about the notion of truthfulness. The findings of an empirical study undertaken in seven Chinese cities reveal that nurses in China experience similar difficulties related to the disclosure of information as their counterparts in other parts of the world. A nurse’s narrative, the Chan case, is used to illustrate the typical difficult situation that nurses in China often encounter in looking after vulnerable patients who would like to learn more about their therapeutic regimens. The moral tension embedded in nursing practice is analysed. It is found that most nurses would prefer to tell the truth to patients, but their primary ethical justification is not that of respect for patients’ autonomy or safeguarding patients’ right to self-determination. Rather, it is basically beneficent in nature; that is, they base their decision to reveal the truth on whether or not patients will receive more relevant treatment and better nursing care. (shrink)