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The ‘novel of the future’ speculates on the ‘temporal’ utopia/dystopia. Its strange fate in modern China reveals much about the relationship between imagination, ideology and modernity in the Chinese mindset. Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. For, in traditional China, history did not have directionality. Two powerful Western ideologies, both ‘progressive’, took turns to dominate modern China. Social Darwinism led to the great explosion of the novel of the future in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, with Marxism becoming the dominant ideology, the novel of the future disappeared completely: when the future was predetermined, no speculation was to be tolerated. In the 1990s, there erupted another spectacular flourishing of novels of future in China, although these works are pessimistic in tone, as belief in the future has been thrown into serious doubt.

The 25 years of the post-Mao era of Chinese fiction is divided into two distinct stages: the pre-1989 period, and the post-1989 period. If this division is true about almost everything else in China, it is especially true with literature. This is because literature had been used as a lethal weapon for political struggle by Mao before and during his regime, and this tradition, though strongly challenged in the post-Mao era, still lingers, though in very different forms now and much watered down. Even the recent trends of art for art's sake, or for the sake of entertainment, or for the sake of religious consciousness, could also be read as political gestures, and are indeed treated as such by Chinese literary officialdom, and also by Western China experts. Despite the fact that Chinese fiction has been highly politicized, this paper will examine, as much as possible, the development of fiction as an art. Only the artistic quality can support my argument that recent novels from China deserve not only more scholarly attention but also more reader appreciation than they have hitherto received around the world.

With the velocity de-projection technique, we derived the averaged 3 dimensional local velocity distribution using only the line-of-sight velocity for the 200,000 FGK type main-sequence stars from the LAMOST DR1 data. Taking the effective temperature as a proxy for age, we investigate the variation of the velocity distribution as a function of Teff and disk height within 100 < |z| < 500 pc. Using the mean velocities of the cool stars, we derive the solar motion of (U⊙, V⊙, W⊙)=(9.58±2.39, 10.52±1.96, 7.01±1.67) kms−1 with respect to the local standard of rest (LSR). Moreover, we find that the stars with Teff > 6000 K show a net asymmetric motion of 〈U〉~2 kms−1 and 〈W〉~3 kms−1 compared to the stars with Teff < 6000 K. And their azimuthal velocity increases when |z| increases. The asymmetric motion in the warmer stars is likely because they are too young and not completely relaxed.

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) project is a Chinese National Big Scientific Project. It has been recently been approved by The National Committee of Science and National Committee of Planning. LAMOST will get funds from our government and will start at the end of 1996. We expect to finish this project within 7 years. Here we describe the LAMOST project briefly.

In recent years there has been rapid progress in the research of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), such as central super-massive black holes (SBH), accretion processes, and their host galaxies. Using data from ROSAT point sources, we found that the soft X-ray spectra of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) and Blazars become harder during X-ray flux increases, while the spectra of broad-line AGNs (BL AGNs) become softer. From ASCA data, we found that NLS1s and BL AGNs follow the same σ−MM BH relation, where σ is the excess variance in the hard X-ray band. With the accretion efficiency of AGNs, we found that most of the radioloud quasars possibly possess a Kerr SBH, while the Seyfert 1 galaxies and radio-quiet quasars possess Schwarzschild SBH. We also studied the relation between the central black holes and their host galaxies. It was found that NLS1s appear to have genuinely lower MBH/bulge mass ratios. And the width of the [O III] line is not a good tracer of host velocity dispersion. NLS1s play a special role in our understanding of the evolution of galaxies and their central SBHs.

We study the cross-correlation between X-rays of different energies for the atoll-type source 4U 1608–52 with RXTE, and find the cross-correlation evolutes along the different branches. The anti-correlation is reported from the Galactic black hole candidates and Z-type luminous sources in their hard states. Our results are a little different from the Z-type sources. Here we provide the first evidence that a similar anti-correlated feature can also be found in atoll-type source, and it is not corresponding to the lowest accretion rate.

During the quiescent phases, the spectra of cataclysmic variables are studied. We model the fluxes by means of the photoionization code CLOUDY, and in the model it is assumed that the geometry of disks is cylindrical. Using this method, we input a series of reasonable parameters and get a spectral library.

We present a study of the observational properties of Millisecond Pulsars (MSPs) by way of their magnetic fields, spin periods and masses. These measurements are derived through the scenario of Accretion Induced Collapse (AIC) of white dwarfs (WDs) in stellar binary systems, in order to provide a greater understanding of the characteristics of MSP populations. In addition, we demonstrate a strong evolutionary connection between neutron stars and WDs with binary companions from a stellar binary evolution perspective via the AIC process., Comment: Proceedings of IAUS 290 "Feeding Compact Objects: Accretion on All Scales" C. M. Zhang, T. Belloni, M. Mendez & S. N. Zhang (eds.), 2 pages, 2 figures. Accepted

We introduced our preliminary results of chromospheric activity of late-type stars based on the stellar spectrum of the pilot survey of the Large Sky Area Multi-object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST, also called Guo Shou Jing telescope). We have found 1151 active M stars from 17471 M samples using the chromospheric active indicator of the Hα line.

The stellar populations of 849 local infrared-selected galaxies from SDSS and IRAS (including 419 star-forming galaxies, 326 composite galaxies, 35 Seyfert 2s, and 69 LINERs in 4 spectral classes) are studied by using STARLIGHT. Among the 4 spectral classes, the importance of young populations decreases from star-forming, composite, Seyfert 2 to LINER; and Seyfert 2 and LINER are more metal-rich; ULIGs (ultra luminous infrared galaxies) & LIGs present the youngest populations among 3 infrared luminosity bins; and normal galaxies are more metal-rich. The dominant contributors to masses are all old populations.