Search

Based on the basic position of comprehensively building a socialist modernized country, Xi Jinping puts forward the major theoretical propositions of “creating a new form of human civilization with Chinese path to modernization” and “building the modern civilization of the Chinese nation”, emphasizing the continuous development of Chinese civilization in the “two combinations”, especially “ the second combination”, so as to provide a broader and deeper cultural space and a solid foundation of civilization for Chinese path to modernization. The existing literature on the internal relationship between Chinese path to modernization and Chinese civilization is still in its infancy, and there is a lack of systematic and rational interpretation of the specific connotation and significant value of Chinese path to modernization in inheriting and developing Chinese civilization. This paper adopts the method of literature research and systematic analysis, and on the basis of systematically combing Xi Jinping's important statements on Chinese path to modernization, Chinese civilization, modern civilization of the Chinese nation, and new forms of human civilization, summarizes Xi Jinping's core views on the internal relationship between Chinese path to modernization and Chinese civilization, excavates the specific connotation of Chinese path to modernization to inherit and develop Chinese civilization, and systematically and scientifically explains its significant value. Compared with the previous literature, this paper has made extensions in the following three aspects: first, from the theoretical, historical and practical aspects, it expounds the logical way of Chinese path to modernization to inherit and develop Chinese civilization. This paper argues that the continuous development of Chinese civilization in the construction of Chinese path to modernization benefits from Marxism's correct understanding of the interaction between modernization and civilization development, the CPC's high awareness of creating modern civilization of the Chinese nation and promoting cultural innovation, and the practical needs of building a solid foundation of civilization for the socialist path with Chinese characteristics in the new era. Second, it reveals the profound connotation of Chinese path to modernization in inheriting and developing Chinese civilization from three aspects: the logical starting point, overall layout and value pursuit of Chinese path to modernization. This paper believes that the logical starting point of "people supremacy" in Chinese path to modernization has inherited and developed the people-oriented ideology of Chinese civilization, the Five-sphere Integrated Plan has inherited and developed the cultural genes of Chinese civilization, such as benefiting the people and providing them with stability and prosperity, and following the rules of nature, and the pursuit of universal values has inherited and developed the cultural concepts of Chinese civilization, such as peaceful development, staying open and inclusive, embracing the world with a global vision. Thirdly, it systematically explains the great value of Chinese path to modernization in inheriting and developing the Chinese civilization from three aspects: endowing Chinese path to modernization with a deep foundation of civilization, breaking the western civilization myth of "modernization = westernization", and constructing the discourse system of the modern civilization of the Chinese nation led by the CPC. From the perspective of "the second combination", this research systematically explains the logical way, specific connotation and value implication of the continuous development of Chinese civilization in Chinese path to modernization, deepens the discussion on the internal relationship between Chinese path to modernization and Chinese civilization to a certain extent, and is conducive to guiding all sectors of society to strengthen the inheritance of civilization in the construction of Chinese path to modernization, realizing the creative transformation and innovative development of Chinese excellent traditional culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing growing contemporary crises, many scholars turn to ancient eastern religions and goddess civilizations as a means of culture root-seeking. As one of the origins of Chinese civilization, Taoist female worship (道教女性崇拜) shows profound eastern wisdom and feminine philosophy on human–nature, human–human, and human–self relationships. From feminist perspectives, this paper traces the origin and development of Taoist female worship and elaborates its classical principles—Qiwu (齊物) theory, Zhuyin (主陰), and Xujing (虛靜). On this basis, this paper discusses the contemporary practices of Taoist female worship's classical principles—thingness re-enchantment (物性復魅), harmony world (和諧世界), and self-cultivation (修身養性)—and illuminates their realistic significance: rethinking ethical relationships, establishing efficient ethics, and helping people to resolve crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophies in the East and West have favored wisdom in their search for truths. The Chinese civilization has sought holistic wisdom in its long history of absorbing the Abrahamic faiths since the seventh century. This paper aims to investigate how the Abrahamic faiths have interacted with ancient Chinese culture. In particular, this paper will examine the earliest written records in Chinese of the Luminous Religion (or Jingjiao), the earliest Jews in Kaifeng, and the earliest Muslims in China. By analyzing their theology of creation with reference to the Holy Spirit and qi (wind/breath/pneuma), this paper attempts a constructive Chinese natural theology based on a sympathetic and critical assessment of Alister McGrath's natural theology but makes up for his spirit deficit. This paper argues that the holistic wisdom achieved in the early integration process of the Abrahamic faiths with the Chinese culture is closely intertwined with the Spirit and qi, which provides a fruitful ground to construct a Chinese natural theology. The contribution of this paper lies in its original research into the earliest written records of the three Abrahamic faiths in China from the perspective of the doctrine of creation and its relationship with the Spirit and qi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This transition from gathering to cultivation is a significant aspect of studying early agricultural practices. Fruit trees are an essential component of food resources and have played a vital role in both ancient and modern agricultural production systems. The jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.), with its long history of cultivation in northern China, holds great importance in uncovering the diet of prehistoric humans and understanding the origins of Chinese agricultural civilization. This paper focuses on the domestication of jujube by analyzing the morphology of jujube stones found in three Neolithic sites in northern China's Qi River basin, Zhujia, Wangzhuang, and Dalaidian. The measurements of these jujube kernels are compared with those found in other areas of northern China, as well as modern jujube kernels that were collected. The measurements revealed that the length-to-diameter (L/D) ratio of sour jujube kernels ranged from 1.36 to 1.78, whereas the L/D ratio of cultivated jujube stones varied between 1.96 and 4.23. Furthermore, jujube stones obtained from Zhujia and Wangzhuang sites exhibit pointed ends and possess an elongated oval or narrow oval shape overall, which is indicative of clearly artificial domestication traits. Therefore, this study suggests that jujube was selected and cultivated as an important food supplement in the Qi River basin no later than around 6200 BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is closely linked with individual historical figures, who become a key focus for cultural tourism. Confucianism laid the foundation for much of Chinese civilization, and Confucius and Mencius have been studied extensively and have been influential in many parts of the world. Zhu Xi, the founder and master of Neo-Confucianism (an important part of the Mount Wuyi world cultural heritage), has received less research attention. With the big bang of the metaverse, research on the immersive cultural heritage digital documentation and information service for historical figures has become a new perspective. This paper presents a metaverse-based digital documentation framework for historical figures. This framework addresses the digitization of multimodal data for cultural heritage and adapts to the needs of metaverse presentations. For cultural research and cultural preservation, the paper has explored a combined contactless virtual and real cultural heritage experience system. For tourists, we intend to develop an immersive and holistic cultural tourism information service before, during and after the tour. In particular, we have also developed the Zhu Xi metaverse system. This is a step forward in the construction of a metaverse of historical figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Chinese murals have a long history and a large number of types. They are witnesses to the development of ancient Chinese civilization. They still have important historical, artistic, and scientific values, as well as other values such as cultural relics, economy, and missionary education. Yet, the clear and smooth images of earlier have been damaged and covered by fog after the ancient murals were destroyed by human being and the nature. Therefore, the ancient murals that exist till now have been bothered by different damages and sickness. Protection and prevention are needed the most. In recent years, the application of scientific and technological means has played a role in the protection of ancient murals, making the work methods of cultural relics protection more scientific and diverse. In the context of the increasingly rich digital protection of cultural relics, the protection of murals requires more innovative work. However, at present, the resolution of ancient murals is low and the texture details are ambiguous, which leads to the problems of insufficient viewing and low research value. This paper focuses on ancient Chinese murals and conducts exploration on the phenomenon of mural damage and blurred colors. The deep learning intelligent laser scanning technology is used to extract the damaged ancient mural images. In this thesis, the images of murals have been restored using the new-super resolution technology to achieve the optimal mural images so that the mural images are more beautiful and artistic, which provides new ideas for the protection of murals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Yeonam group, led by Bak Ji-won (1737-1805), collected and compiled Korean literature written in classical Chinese during the mid-18th and early 19th centuries. The Yeonam group attempted to prove how well Korean intellectuals had adopted and developed Chinese culture. Korean history, culture, and literature rapidly garnered the attention of Silhak (Practical Learning) intellectuals during this era. Previous studies, which tend to reflect the perspective of modern nationalism, have understood this academic trend as an early form of Korean nationalism. However, the Yeonam group held the opinion that Korean literature written in classical Chinese served as an indicator of the writer's degree of embodying Chinese culture, which was understood by the Yeonam group as the epitome of cultural advancement. For this reason, the Yeonam group explored and compiled a series of Korean literary works written in classical Chinese, the ideal language according to the group. This paper demonstrates that the Yeonam group's interest in Korean literature written in classical Chinese stemmed from the idea that Joseon was a sophisticated dynasty endowed with Chinese civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will show how the Yeonam Group's perception of the Han Chinese influenced the development of Northern Learning. Previous studies have noted this influence but did not adequately examine its cause. Conservative intellectuals in Joseon regarded the Qing and its subjects as barbaric, even repugnant. The queue hairstyle which the Qing insisted every adult male wear became a focal point for this disdain. The Yeonam Group also made the queue a focal point, but rather than seeing it as shameful, they tried to view it as an indication that the Han Chinese were acting in accordance with Confucian virtues, foremost of which was the loyalty a subject owed his sovereign. The Yeonam Group believed the Qing to be a worthy inheritor of the Mandate of Heaven and that the queue could be seen as a legitimate institution of the new dynasty. This belief did not cause them to abandon the Ming. By focusing on loyalty, the Yeonam Group found a Confucian virtue that allowed them to accept the advances made by the Qing without forsaking their fidelity to the Ming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this symposium, guest editor Shoaib Ahmed Malik brings together five papers from a conference hosted by Leiden University in July 2021. The strength of the collection is that it brings together Shi i and Sunni voices, with some perspectives on Islam and evolution, such as an Ismaili Shi i one, being published in English for the first time. Shoaib Ahmed Malik, Hamza Karamali, and Moamer Yahia Ali Khalayleh look at "intelligent design" (ID) and the design discourse in the Qur an from a Sunni kalamic framework - Ash arism and Maturidism; they expose an important difference between the two and argue that critiquing ID does not undermine the design discourse of the Qur an. [Extracted from the article]

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The work of Theravāda Buddhist monks is often understood as being focused on two different areas or “burdens”: the burden of books and the burden of insight. In other words, monks (and novices) are supposed to be either studying or meditating. While no one can deny that monks do in fact engage in these activities, this paper argues that these activities comprise only a small portion of the work performed by monastics, a fact that scholars have tended to ignore. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in a Theravāda community in Southwest China, in this paper I argue that we need to have an expanded view of what we should think of as appropriate monastic labor, to include activities that are not usually or necessarily seen as religious. It is only by seeing this wider variety of activities that we can begin to fully understand monks as social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The construction of ecological civilization has become necessary to ensure that emerging industrialized countries can achieve healthy and sustainable development under the background of tightening resource constraints, serious environmental pollution, and the deterioration of the ecological environment. In the case of China, one representative emerging industrialized economy, this paper builds an ecological civilization performance evaluation system to measure the efficiency of ecological civilization in 30 provinces and municipalities in China by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) game cross-efficiency model. From the perspective of the "five-in-one" approach, and by taking full account of the three main bodies of government, enterprises and residents, this paper selects nine explanatory variables, namely industrial structure and degree of marketization (Economic perspective), government environmental risk awareness and government green actions (Political perspective), residents' happiness and corporate environmental responsibility (Social perspective), culture education investment (Cultural perspective), and green travel and ecological construction (Ecological perspective). Geographically Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) is used to analyze determinants of the Chinese ecological civilization performance. The results show that China's ecological civilization performance is low, and the efficiency ranking of most provinces fluctuates greatly. The regional development of China's ecological civilization performance presents a spatial distribution pattern that was high in the east and low in the west. The impact of various influencing factors on the China's ecological civilization performance is largely positive, and indicates regional characteristics. These results not only contribute to advancing the existing literature on ecological civilization performance evaluation, but also merit particular attention from policy makers in emerging industrialized countries. • A new indicator is built to assess ecological civilization performance. • Vertical and horizontal scatter degree, DEA game cross-efficiency, GTWR are employed. • ECP measured by CCR and Game Cross have significant differences. • ECP in China is low, fluctuating greatly in ranking and obvious east-west differentiation. • The same influencing factors exert different impacts in different regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are obvious ecological benefits of a hybrid energy system (HES) with its advantages of energy resources cascade utilization and multi-energy supply. With the increasing attention to ecological civilization (EC) construction in China, the HES has attracted more and more attention. Constructing HES projects that meet the requirements of EC is meaningful to government policy implementation and corporate social responsibility performance. There are a lot of studies on the benefit evaluation of HES, but all of them lack pertinence to EC construction, and the research results are insufficient to promote EC construction. Therefore, this paper evaluates the comprehensive benefits of HES in close combination with EC construction. Firstly, the connotations of EC and HES and their relationship are analyzed, and the evaluation criteria system of HES based on EC is established. Secondly, the group fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (GFAHP) is introduced to calculate the criteria weights and find out the important indicators. Thirdly, an improved model combining fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) and the cloud model is introduced for the calculation of the EC comprehensive benefits of HES. Finally, the feasibility of the GFAHP–Cloud–FSE model in this paper is verified through a case study. The focuses of general HES projects and the case study are confirmed. This work provides suggestions for the government to evaluate and supervise HES projects for better EC construction, and it is helpful for enterprises to meet the government requirements for EC and fulfill social responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the increasingly serious ecological and environmental crisis, China has upgraded its national strategy from environmental protection to ecological civilization. China has carried out comprehensive publicity and education on ecological civilization. Many universities also arrange ecological civilization courses for students, or infuse ecological civilization into traditional courses. This paper investigates Chinese university students' ecological civilization cognition and behavior. Based on the 13404 questionnaires of 152 universities and using the multinomial logit regression model, the authors explored the relationship between Chinese university students' cognition and behavior. This paper divides the students' ecological civilization cognition into two parts, one being the common-sense cognition that comes from China's long-term public ecological and environmental education and the other one being the cognition of national ecological civilization strategy that comes from the recent intensive and comprehensive political publicity. This paper finds that university students with the latter cognition show a stronger willingness to implement ecological civilization behavior. This result reveals the role of China's political publicity on ecological civilization in terms of influencing its citizens' behavior, and provides inspiration for other countries to publicize environmental politics and promote public environmental protection via mass media. • The multinomial logit regression model is used to analyze the factors of ECB. • ECC is divided into common-sense and national strategy cognition. • China's political publicity has played a certain role in influencing ECB. • Courses involving ecological civilization knowledge can promote ECB. • Personal characteristics should be taken into account for educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the place of Chinese food, identity, and everyday religion in the Canadian rural Midwest. Through a discussion of an annual grave custom to honor the earliest Chinese Canadian settlers in a small community, it develops the argument that Chinese cafes signify complex and efficacious public and private identities. Intersecting cafes both connect and attract Chinese people from hundreds of miles away to celebrate public festivals, rites of passage, and private achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature in the field of archaeological predictive models has grown in the last years, looking for new factors the most effective methods to introduce. However, where predictive models are used for archaeological heritage management, they could benefit from using a more speedy and consequently useful methods including some well-consolidated factors studied in the literature. In this paper, an operative archaeological predictive model is developed, validated and discussed, in order to test its effectiveness. It is applied to Yangshao period (5000–3000 BC) in the Songshan area, where Chinese civilization emerged and developed, and uses 563 known settlement sites. The satisfactory results herein achieved clearly suggest that the model herein proposed can be reliably used to predict the geographical location of unknown settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]