COVID-19 and the Wuhan Diary –how does the overseas Chinese community react to group criticism?

We conduct an online survey to explore how Chinese people living in Germany perceive and react to group criticism in the context of the debate on the Wuhan Diary, a chronicle about life during the lockdown in Wuhan. We find that the majority rating of the book is a lukewarm “neither like nor dislike.” Most participants are open to criticism in principle and do not agree that the book only spreads so-called “negative-energy”. However, many participants were skeptical about the objectivity of the book and concerned about its potential use by so-called anti-China forces, even though the degree of blind patriotism is relatively low in our sample. The factors influencing the book’s evaluation are intriguing: perceived Western sentiment, media exposure and uncritical patriotism all affect COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs, which in turn lead to a more negative evaluation of the book. A cluster analysis reveals two groups which differ in terms of properties like blind patriotism, belief in certain conspiracies, and also demographic parameters. Our results shed light on identity politics, motivated beliefs, and collective narcissism.

Analysis on the Development Mode of Home Based Pension Real Estate

With the growth of the proportion of the ageing population, the problem of population ageing in China has become increasingly prominent because the implementation of family planning policy intensifies the speed of ageing development in China. The restructuring of family structure caused by social reasons, "421" and "422" have become the current family structure mode. With the vigorous development of the economy, the traditional mode and way of the traditional mode and way of providing for the aged cannot meet the spiritual and life needs of the elderly. Most of the institutions only develop the projects to provide for the aged, but not combined with the traditional way of providing for the aged in China. Based on the two-way needs of the young and the elderly, this paper combines the traditional culture with China's current national conditions and constructs the most suitable pension mode for China's traditional pension mode and Chinese people.

Yan Fu's Unfaithful Translation of Thomas Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics'

This paper analyses Yan Fu’s translation of the title and the key terms in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and shows that his unfaithfulness was mainly due to his personal intention to inspire the Chinese people to fight against foreign enemies and the feudal system in late nineteenth-century China. In his famous The Heavenly Theory of Evolution, the translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu added the traditional Chinese value of ‘heaven’ by translating ‘evolution’ as ‘heavenly evolution’ in order to make Darwin’s theory more acceptable and easier to understand by target readers. When he translated terms such as ‘competition’ and ‘natural selection’, Yan Fu borrowed the slogan of the Westernizing reform to explain the relationship linking evolution, competition and selection. Yan Fu wanted to arouse people’s attention to the theory of evolution and hoped they would use evolutionary thought as a theoretical weapon to save themselves and the country from a national crisis. His unfaithful translation appealed to the scholars to make them spread the theory through their social influence.

A Culturally Adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Group: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Objective This study aimed to evaluate a culturally adapted cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) group for Chinese people with depression that aimed to alter participants’ negative beliefs of themselves, which were influenced by traditional Chinese cultural values. Method In this randomized controlled trial, 43 participants diagnosed with depression were randomly allocated to a 10-session culturally adapted CBT group or treatment as usual (TAU). A research assistant, who was blinded to the group allocation process, used the Chinese Beck Depression Inventory-II to assess participants’ depressive symptoms during the pre-treatment and post-treatment periods. Results The results of the mixed linear model for repeated measures showed that the CBT group had significantly greater improvement in depressive symptoms than treatment as usual, with a medium effect size. Conclusion This study supports the efficacy and effectiveness of the culturally adapted CBT group in facilitating clinically significant improvement in Chinese people with depression.

Overcoming awkwardness

As Chinese people engaged with the Australian cultural scene in recent years, two posts about its humour attracted considerable attention from netizens in the People’s Republic of China. The post authors believed that their firsthand accounts of events demonstrated how Australians used humour to overcome awkward situations and regarded this as an essential national characteristic. In each case, other interpretations were possible if cultural factors had been taken into account, including the contemporary culture of China, Putonghua language usage and the Anglo-centrism that is common to cross-cultural studies. This exploratory generalist textual study concludes that the authors’ interpretations were largely determined by their cultural bias and by traditional regard for ‘face’ and politeness, and reflect the fact that, ultimately, the extent of cross-cultural communication is governed by international politics.

From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping: China towards a New Era

China is a large socialist developing country, and the CPC is the core force chosen by the Chinese people to lead it. Mao Zedong was the creator of the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China. He led the Chinese people to complete the cause of liberation, carried out socialist construction and began to march toward modernization, forming the great Mao Zedong Thought. Xi Jinping inherited Mao Zedong Thought. He put forward the strategic vision of realizing the Chinese Dream, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. In the new international environment and under the new historical conditions, Xi Jinping has formed a series of highly relevant and continuous theoretical thoughts. His theoretical thoughts have become the guiding ideology for China to become prosperous and strong and make greater global contributions. This paper Outlines the historical process of China from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping and discusses Xi Jinping's main theoretical ideas.

A Sudden Turnaround: The Pro-Han Immigration Policy in Manchuria and Its Abrupt Abrogation in Early Qing Era

For most of Qing domination over China, the Manchu rulers strictly controlled or even prohibited migration of Chinese people to the dynasty’s Motherland (long xing zhi di 龍興之地). Only two brief phases are an exception, namely the mid Shunzhi to early Kangxi and Yongzheng periods. During the former, in 1653, a “Regulation for the repopulation and land reclamation of Liaodong” was promulgated, establishing alluring incentives for whoever managed to move a hundred or more people to the region east of the Liao river. Only fifteen years later, when the maneuver had just started to produce some results, the Qing court abolished it. In the long term, such a change of direction appears perfectly normal, considering that later on most of the lands would be assigned to the Eight Banners and the state would have striven to keep the Chinese out. Nevertheless, in the short term, the decision seemed to come out of the blue. An interesting debate on what might have determined the turnabout began in the early twentieth century, and some most recent contributions have been published in the 2000s; yet none of the thesis proposed so far is fully convincing. On the basis of sources that have not yet been taken into account, this paper further investigates into the matter and aims at demonstrating that the concerns which compelled the rulers to officially oppose immigration in the following decades already existed in the very first years of Kangxi reign.