Promoting Traditional Chinese Winter Sport Participation: Cultural Capital and Demands of Bingxi

As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games approach, promoting the winter sport participation in China is essential and important. However, most of winter sports participants are one-time player, and it could be due to the lack of winter sports culture in the Chinese public. So, developing and promoting the traditional Chinese winter sports may help managers to build a endogenous winter sport culture. Bingxi is a series of ice sport event in ancient China, which is the one of the most representative traditional Chinese sports, which is unique in Chinese history. The present study applied a historical method to explore the three forms of cultural capital in Bingxi. And developed a Demands Scale for Cultural Capital in Bingxi (DSCCB) to measure the participation demands in Bingxi of different group people. Residents (n=621) of Shenyang (capital city in Qing Dynasty) participated in this study. Discussions are centered on the target group of the three forms of cultural capital in Bingxi, and offer a proposal for promoting Bingxi in the future.

Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China, Reviewed by Peter C. Perdue

Ian M. Miller's important book follows the impact of the Chinese state and economy on the forests of southern China, from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries. Besides providing a new narrative of forest history, based on the scouring of official sources, his helpful comparisons to Europe and Japan ask us to rethink how we periodize Chinese history and evaluate the success of the imperial state.

A General Survey of Ancient Chinese History

The author reviews the first six chapters of the monograph by John S. Major and Constance Cook “Ancient China: A History” (New York, London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017. 300 p.). The authors of the book made an attempt to briefly review the history of ancient China on the basis of a compilation of factual data from the works of the most prominent researchers of these periods in Europe and the United States. It is shown that the authors of the compilation mainly follow the Chinese historical tradition, repeating the basic information from the classical Confucian treatises of the early Imperial time. It is particularly significant that the authors make mistakes that indicate the formation of their own tradition of writing the history of China in the United States.

Few-Shot Relation Extraction on Ancient Chinese Documents

Traditional humanity scholars’ inefficient method of utilizing numerous unstructured data has hampered studies on ancient Chinese writings for several years. In this work, we aim to develop a relation extractor for ancient Chinese documents to automatically extract the relations by using unstructured data. To achieve this goal, we proposed a tiny ancient Chinese document relation classification (TinyACD-RC) dataset annotated by historians and contains 32 types of general relations in ShihChi (a famous Chinese history book). We also explored several methods and proposed a novel model that works well on sufficient and insufficient data scenarios, the proposed sentence encoder can simultaneously capture local and global features for a certain period. The paired attention network enhances and extracts relations between support and query instances. Experimental results show that our model achieved promising performance with scarce corpus. We also examined our model on the FewRel dataset and found that outperformed the state-of-the-art no pretraining-based models by 2.27%.

New Zealand Medical Missions in South China – Ko Tong Hospital in the Kirk Years, 1896-1917

<p>During the rainy season of 1909, the first hospital of Western medicine opened to the public in the bustling market town of Ko Tong, Upper Panyu, China. Po Wai Yiyuen, or ‘The Hospital of Universal Love’, was a medical missionary endeavour of the Canton Villages Mission (CVM) of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, the only mission to China from any New Zealand church. This thesis presents the first in-depth biographical and institutional study of the CVM’s medical mission, from its conception in 1898 until the closure of its first temporary hospital at Ko Tong in 1917. The thesis argues that the trajectory of the CVM’s medical mission closely followed that of earlier medical missions in a crucial era for the presence and development of Western medicine in China. It also shows how local Cantonese responses to the medical mission in Ko Tong were complex and highly pragmatic. The study highlights the importance of relationships between returned New Zealand Chinese miners and medical missionaries. It argues that, despite numerous setbacks, the CVM’s medical mission under the leadership of Dr. John Kirk achieved a level of stability and purpose it would struggle to find again. Unlike much scholarship in New Zealand Chinese history, this research does not focus on the Chinese in New Zealand. Rather, it analyses the work and interactions of Western medical missionaries of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church active in China. A study of this kind draws on and contributes to histories of missions, medicine in China, and New Zealand-China interactions. The thesis’ three chapters contextualise the medical mission within the pre-existing Protestant missionary movement and medical missionary movement in China, consider how local Cantonese in Ko Tong viewed the ‘foreign doctor’ in their midst, and finally, analyse the influence and leadership of Dr. John Kirk, the hospital’s main superintendent. It does this by examining mission policy, the hospital’s medical care standards, and Kirk’s involvement in medical education. This research utilises primary sources from the Presbyterian Church Archives of New Zealand, highlighting an immensely rich and varied body of archival resources, which has remained largely untapped by historians.</p>

New Zealand Medical Missions in South China – Ko Tong Hospital in the Kirk Years, 1896-1917

<p>During the rainy season of 1909, the first hospital of Western medicine opened to the public in the bustling market town of Ko Tong, Upper Panyu, China. Po Wai Yiyuen, or ‘The Hospital of Universal Love’, was a medical missionary endeavour of the Canton Villages Mission (CVM) of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, the only mission to China from any New Zealand church. This thesis presents the first in-depth biographical and institutional study of the CVM’s medical mission, from its conception in 1898 until the closure of its first temporary hospital at Ko Tong in 1917. The thesis argues that the trajectory of the CVM’s medical mission closely followed that of earlier medical missions in a crucial era for the presence and development of Western medicine in China. It also shows how local Cantonese responses to the medical mission in Ko Tong were complex and highly pragmatic. The study highlights the importance of relationships between returned New Zealand Chinese miners and medical missionaries. It argues that, despite numerous setbacks, the CVM’s medical mission under the leadership of Dr. John Kirk achieved a level of stability and purpose it would struggle to find again. Unlike much scholarship in New Zealand Chinese history, this research does not focus on the Chinese in New Zealand. Rather, it analyses the work and interactions of Western medical missionaries of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church active in China. A study of this kind draws on and contributes to histories of missions, medicine in China, and New Zealand-China interactions. The thesis’ three chapters contextualise the medical mission within the pre-existing Protestant missionary movement and medical missionary movement in China, consider how local Cantonese in Ko Tong viewed the ‘foreign doctor’ in their midst, and finally, analyse the influence and leadership of Dr. John Kirk, the hospital’s main superintendent. It does this by examining mission policy, the hospital’s medical care standards, and Kirk’s involvement in medical education. This research utilises primary sources from the Presbyterian Church Archives of New Zealand, highlighting an immensely rich and varied body of archival resources, which has remained largely untapped by historians.</p>

The True North Strong and Free? Casting Shadows on Whose History Students Learn in Canadian Universities

Race-based discrimination in Canada exists at the institutional and structural level. While acknowledging its existence is a crucial first step in eradicating this particular form of discrimination, an essential second step includes implementing structural changes at the institutional level in Canadian universities. In an effort to disrupt the Eurocentricity of knowledge production this commentary argues that the Canadian government’s official historical narrative that depicts Canada as being born of the pioneering spirit of British and French white settlers fails to capture the actual history of the country. Rather, it fosters the continuation of the supremacy of whiteness thereby causing significant harm through the perpetuation of racial bias. We argue that the history and contributions of Indigenous, Black, and Chinese Canadians, all of whom were in this country prior to confederation, should be told in a mandatory university course. Our findings indicate that while a number of universities have individual courses, usually electives and some graduate degrees on Indigenous, Black, and Chinese history, there is little offered from the Canadian context and certainly nothing that is a mandatory course requirement. In addition, we suggest compulsory university staff-wide anti-racism training; the ongoing hiring of professors and sessional instructors who are racially representative of the population of Canada; and community outreach, mentorship, and counselling programs that are designed to help students who are underrepresented in Canadian universities. In our opinion, we believe that these changes have the potential to provide a lens to disrupt settler colonial spaces, mobilize race in academic curricula, and encourage social justice actions that can offer a more inclusive learning environment.