Translation of Classics by JX Native Literati of Song Dynasty under Foregrounding Theory

As a symbolic feature of the language forms of literature, foregrounding is closely connected with the theme and aesthetic value of literary works. Through an analysis of some classics by Jiangxi native literati in Song Dynasty, the thesis focuses on the significance of foregrounding theory to literary translation or even to general translation. With a case study of the classics from four aspects of foregrounding theory, namely, phonological deviation, lexical deviation, semantic deviation and graphological deviation, the research would illustrate foregrounding language in literature and its applicability to classics translation in detail

Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100

In the eleventh century, the cities of the Song Empire (960-1279) emerged into writing. Literati in prior centuries had looked away from crowded streets, but literati in the eleventh century found beauty in towering buildings and busy harbors. Their purpose in writing the city was ideological. On the written page, they tried to establish a distinction that eluded them in the avenues and to discern an immanent pattern in the movement of people, goods, and money. By the end of the eleventh century, however, they recognized that they had failed in their efforts. They had lost the Way in the city. Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100 reveals the central place of urban life in the history of the eleventh century. Important developments in literary innovation and monetary policy, in canonical exegesis and civil engineering, in financial reform and public health, converge in this book as they converged in the city

Computing Lens for Exploring the Historical People's Social Network

A typical social research topic is to figure out the influential people's relationship and its weights. It is very tedious for social scientists to solve those problems by studying massive literature. Digital humanities bring a new way to a social subject. In this paper, we propose a framework for social scientists to find out ancient figures' power and their camp. The core of our framework consists of signed graph model and novel group partition algorithm. We validate and verify our solution by China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) dataset. The analytic results on a case study demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, which gets information that consists with the literature's facts and social scientists' viewpoints.Comment: accepted at SoNet 201

Directorate of education (Guo Zi Jian) and the Imperial University (Tai Xue) in the Northern Song (960-1127)-interaction between politics and education in middle period China

The Imperial University played a significant political role in China’s imperial past. When established in the ancient Zhou, its mission was predominantly to nurture prospective officials for eventual service in government. This marks the inseparability of education and politics from the very onset of the University’s founding. Nevertheless, its diminished success in producing officials under subsequent dynasties caused a comparable diminution in the political significance of the metropolitan school. Not until the Northern Song, founded by the Zhao clan, did signs emerge of a resurrection of sorts. Three major educational reforms were attempted in the reigns of Renzong, Shenzong, and Huizong (ca. 1040-1126). In each reform, the emperor and the reform proponents envisioned an expanding role of political significance for the Imperial University. This dissertation focuses on the evolution of the metropolitan educational institutions, namely the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University, in the Northern Song. By investigating the record of conduct and extant writings as pertains to the institutional settings of the Imperial University as well as wide range of biographical sources for Northern Song men, mainly staff, students, and graduates of the Imperial University, the author seeks to gain insights into how Song emperors and policy advocates perceived the Imperial University as a political institution, how the staff and teachers at the University performed their assigned roles, and how students and graduates of the Northern Song Imperial University contributed to the political life. After highlighting the role of the Imperial University in the previous dynasties, reviewing the secondary literatures in connection with education in Song China, as well as illustrating the sources and methodology to be used in the introductory chapter, a comprehensive survey of the development of the metropolitan schools covering the entire Northern Song then follows. This narrative history not only highlights the innovations in the educational institutions per se, but also sheds light on a range of political phenomena during various stages in the Northern Song: how aristocracy evolved into meritocracy; how the reformers and conservatives created myths for political sake; how emperor Shenzong strengthened its autocratic rule by way of a comprehensive regulatory framework; how scholar-officials rebuffed in defending the “genealogy of the way”; and how the scholarly vision in recruiting officials through a countrywide school network was realized. The conclusion contains an analytical discussion of the political role of the Imperial University in late Northern Song: a tool of control and indoctrination, as well as a channel to select morally upright officials. The central issue is how successful could the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University perform these political functions. Through this study, hopefully a fuller picture of this elitist educational institution during one of its most flourishing periods in Imperial China can be restored. It is also envisioned that the political impact could be re-emphasized in future studies of political institutions, a perspective which has often been ignored in recent Chinese and Western scholarships where social history is dominant

From Chengdu to Stockholm: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of Paper Money in East and West

It is widely recognised that monetary paper instruments appeared in China earlier than in the West, paper itself having been invented there during the Han era. However, there have been to date few direct scholarly attempts to place the early-modern Western and pre-modern Chinese formative experiences with paper money in detailed comparison by way of attaining a better understanding of the evolution of money as a whole. This article aims to make a tentative first step toward bridging this scholarly gap. It will survey in particular the extent to which the inception of Chinese paper money in 11th-century Chengdu differed from the circumstances in which European paper money emerged. Whilst some similarity between 17th-century Stockholm and 11th-century Chengdu might arguably be traced back insofar as the emergence of paper money is concerned, British banknote issuance subsequently took on new important functions. These, in turn, ushered in our modern "national-debt" economy

LÜ Benzhong’s A Book for Teaching Children Established the System of the Four Books

In LÜ Benzhong’s A Book for Teaching Children, he had already regarded the “Four Books” which include The Analects of Confucius, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean and The Mencius as a complete system and the teaching material for children. This was before Zhu Xi’s Collected Comments on the Four Confucian Books. Obviously, Zhu Xi was familiar with LÜ Benzhong’s book, A Book for Teaching Children, and his edit of the Four Books was influenced by A Book for Teaching Children. Although Cheng Yi et al had vigorously promoted the Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean, it was LÜ Benzhong’s A Book for Teaching Children that first regarded the Four Books as an independent and comprehensive system and applied them to teaching practice. Therefore, LÜ Benzhong basically finalized the system of the Four Books.

On the View that People and Not Institutions Bear Primary Credit for Success in Governance: Confucian Arguments

This paper explicates the influential Confucian view that “people” and not “institutional rules” are the proper sources of good governance and social order, as well as some notable Confucian objections to this position. It takes Xunzi 荀子, Hu Hong 胡宏, and Zhu Xi 朱熹 as the primary representatives of the “virtue-centered” position, which holds that people’s good character and not institutional rules bear primary credit for successful governance. And it takes Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 as a major advocate for the “institutionalist” position, which holds that institutional rules have some power to effect success independently of improvements in character. Historians have often called attention to this debate but left the major arguments and positions relatively unspecified. As I show, the Confucian virtue-centered view is best captured in two theses: first, that reforming people is far more demanding than reforming institutional rules; second, that once the rules have reached a certain threshold of viability, further improvements in those rules are unlikely to be effective on their own. Once we specify the theses in this way, we can catalogue the different respects and degrees to which the more virtue-centered political thinkers endorse virtue-centrism in governance. Zhu Xi, for example, turns out to endorse a stronger version of virtue-centrism than Hu Hong. I also use this account of the major theses to show that Huang Zongxi, who is sometimes regarded as historical Confucianism’s foremost institutionalist, has more complicated and mixed views about the power of institutional reform than scholars usually assume

GIS, Prosopography, and History

East Asian Languages and Civilization