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The necessity of mastering the Chinese language, Indonesia's second foreign language, has made it a priority subject among foreign languages in the Department of International Relations (IR) in many universities in Indonesia. The ideal textbook for the subject can boost learning and student competence and achievement in mastering the language. The selection of textbooks has not taken into consideration the background and motivation of students, learning objectives, frequency and length of study and student expectations. This paper discusses the need for a textbook to be used by IR majors in Indonesia. The data collection is populated through the distribution of questionnaires to eight universities that hold Chinese language classes for IR majors. The study concludes that the students expected a textbook to contain appropriate and applicable formal and informal language acquisition materials related to IR. The study looks at the cultural knowledge of the destination, lessons on the writing of Chinese characters and grammar exercises. Regarding the order of topics for learning Chinese by IR students, the students perceived that the right order would be: greetings, self-introduction, letters and numbers, time, names of days and months, daily activities, transportation, public facilities, directions and instructions, professions, international relations, politics and economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It has been shown that the entities in everyday clinical text are often expressed in a way that varies from how they are expressed in the nomenclature. Owing to lots of synonyms, abbreviations, medical jargons or even misspellings in the daily used physician notes in clinical information system (CIS), the terminology without enough synonyms may not be adequately suitable for the task of Chinese clinical term recognition.Methods: This paper demonstrates a validated system to retrieve the Chinese term of clinical finding (CTCF) from CIS and map them to the corresponding concepts of international clinical nomenclature, such as SNOMED CT. The system focuses on the SNOMED CT with Chinese synonyms enrichment (SCCSE). The literal similarity and the diagnosis-related similarity metrics were used for concept mapping. Two CTCF recognition methods, the rule- and terminology-based approach (RTBA) and the conditional random field machine learner (CRF), were adopted to identify the concepts in physician notes. The system was validated against the history of present illness annotated by clinical experts. The RTBA and CRF could be combined to predict new CTCFs besides SCCSE persistently.Results: Around 59,000 CTCF candidates were accepted as valid and 39,000 of them occurred at least once in the history of present illness. 3,729 of them were accordant with the description in referenced Chinese clinical nomenclature, which could cross map to other international nomenclature such as SNOMED CT. With the hybrid similarity metrics, another 7,454 valid CTCFs (synonyms) were succeeded in concept mapping. For CTCF recognition in physician notes, a series of experiments were performed to find out the best CRF feature set, which gained an F-score of 0.887. The RTBA achieved a better F-score of 0.919 by the CTCF dictionary created in this research.Conclusions: This research demonstrated that it is feasible to help the SNOMED CT with Chinese synonyms enrichment based on physician notes in CIS. With continuous maintenance of SCCSE, the CTCFs could be precisely retrieved from free text, and the CTCFs arranged in semantic hierarchy of SNOMED CT could greatly improve the meaningful use of electronic health record in China. The methodology is also useful for clinical synonyms enrichment in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to make sense of a Chinese diplomatic formula—calling or labelling one's counterpartzhōngguó rénmín de lăopéngyóu中国人民的老朋友 (‘an old friend of the Chinese people’)—by unravelling its conceptual basis. It shows that this formula has deep roots in Chinese social practices, and that its use is governed by a web of intrinsically-linked cultural scripts. The paper articulates these scripts in terms of the culture-independent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), unveiling the cultural logic underlying the use of the expression and revealing the culturally distinctive Chinese way of categorizing and conceptualizing ‘friend’, which is different from the Anglophone way. On the one hand, the paper shows the crucial role that language plays in managing interpersonal relationships by Chinese speakers; on the other, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the conceptual foundations of Chinese diplomatic style, illustrating how formulaic language in diplomacy highlights aspects of social cognition that are fundamental to the speakers of a community, and therefore deserving more attention than has hitherto been the case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What are intentions and how should states decipher them? For scholars, the debate about uncertainty and intentions lies at the heart of international relations. And yet there are theoretical and empirical issues with how scholars have defined, measured, and operationalized intentions to date in the context of understanding China's rise. This article reviews the English and Chinese language literature on intentions and revisionism and presents five propositions that should drive research moving forward. First, a theory of intentions requires a definition distinct from aspirations, motives, preferences, objectives, goals, and grand strategy. Second, states' intentions about ends should be analyzed independently from those about means. Third, assessments of whether a country's intentions are good or bad are subjective and vary based on from which country's perspective the analysis is undertaken. Fourth, states' intentions vary not only by issue area, but also within a particular issue area, just as international institutions, or territorial disputes. And lastly, while there may be uncertainty about intentions, that does not make them unknowable. Embracing these five propositions allow for a more productive research agenda and policy recommendations based on data-driven research instead of wishful thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral communicative competence is the core ability for second language learners to conduct daily communication. In order to get close to the current situation of spoken Chinese teaching in the classrooms of indigenous Kazakhstan people, this survey takes the Chinese classroom of the International Kazakh-Chinese Language College as a case study. Mainly using interviews and naturalistic observation of classroom, this study examined not only the teaching practices but also the concepts and attitudes of the teachers and students in the school regarding the teaching of spoken Chinese and the development of oral communicative competence. The paper discussed several defects of the spoken Chinese teaching in the school in four dimensions: teacher quality, textbook resources, teaching methods, as well as testing and assessment. According to the general situation of Chinese language teaching in Kazakhstan, the reasons for these problems are analyzed in the context and suggestions for improvement are put forward.

Soft power has become China’s new diplomatic tool to spread its influence in today’s changing international landscape. The establishment of Confucius Institutes (CIs) since 2004 to promote the understanding of Chinese language and culture is a striking example of how the government promotes soft power through cultural means. Through the macro- and micro-level analysis of CIs, this study shows that CIs fail to increase the soft power of China because many countries regard CIs as a propaganda tool and a threat to academic freedom and the local community. It shows that China’s soft power is not so attractive in the eyes of receivers. In fact, China’s aggressive cultural initiatives through the establishment of CIs have triggered another version of the ‘China threat’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the scholar in Southeast Asia, Chinese nationalists in Malaysia and Chinese language.

The Internet is without a doubt one of the most remarkable developments in this era; it also appears to be growing more powerful. The Internet came into vogue worldwide in the mid-1990s; now, within a few short years, by the end of the century it will essentially catch all the nations and regions of the world in one dragnet. There is no doubt that its emergence and development have an enormous impact on the process of globalization. The Chinese network began in North America. This was a new attempt to promote the computerization, automation, and networking of Chinese-language information.