The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

Drawing on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we examine how managerial opportunity and threat interpretations of external environments affect a technology venture's choice of external knowledge search strategies in an emerging market. Results from a sample of 141 technology ventures in China reveal that opportunity interpretation directly and positively influences both the breadth and depth of external search, whereas threat interpretation directly and negatively influences only external search depth. Furthermore, managerial ties strengthen the positive relationship between opportunity interpretation and external search breadth but weaken the positive relationship on external search depth. Managerial ties weaken the negative relationship between threat interpretation and external search breadth but strengthen the negative relationship on external search depth. Implications for both research and practice are offered.

In August 2018, revelations of the sexual, financial, and administrative misconduct of a high-profile Chinese Buddhist monk named Xuecheng 學誠 were in the spotlight of domestic and international attention. The validity of the allegations and their social and religious impact have been widely debated, and this article focuses on the legal procedures used in handling the allegations and traces their source back to the Republican era (1911–1949). The state's governance of Buddhism and the efficacy of the Buddhist clergy's jurisdictional self-governance operating in Xuecheng's case in China today are significantly older than the People's Republic of China. As early as 1929, ordained Buddhists collectively denounced personal clerical privileges, in exchange for the state law's protection on monastic properties. Then, while protesting against unfavorable articles in the Charter of the Buddhist Association of China (Zhongguo fojiaohui zhang cheng 中國佛教會章程) proposed by the Nationalist government in 1936, the Buddhist clergy lost their legal jurisdiction over adjudicating internal disputes among ordained Buddhists. These two events have come to define the relationship between the state and the Buddhist establishment in contemporary China, where state law is harsh on religion while enforcement through legal practice is lax.

Portions of this essay were previously published in Japanese as 「アジア太平洋戦争のポリティックスと教育―アメリカ合衆国で日本史を教えて」『歴史学研究』942号、2016年3月 (by Jordan Sand and Franziska Seraphim)

In spring 2015, I participated in the drafting and distribution of the statement on the “comfort women” and Japanese war responsibility issued under the title “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan.” That letter took inspiration from a statement issued in Japan by the Historical Science Society (Rekishigaku Kenkyukai) in October 2014 and built on a letter published in March 2015 in the American Historical Association's magazine Perspectives condemning the Japanese government's effort to suppress passages about the comfort women in a US-published world history textbook.

Michael Loewe has repeatedly and as recently as 2021 looked at how Confucius appears in Han sources and has drawn attention to his lack of prominence, at least to the degree one might expect. Here, a preliminary assessment of the sources of opposition to Buddhism in one key sixth-century c.e. collection of polemics further demonstrates that adherence to mingjiao 名教 (Teaching of a Good Name) or to lijiao 禮教 (teaching on ritual) appears there as the main identifiers of opponents; rujiao, the term often later translated as “Confucianism,” is mentioned but once. While the commitment to values such as filial piety promoted by opponents of Buddhism is clear; their institutional coherence and self-awareness as a group does not seem to have been at all on a par with that of the Buddhist community. That situation did not start to shift until the Tang dynasty.

Liubai (留白, literally ‘leaving blankness’) is a unique method of expression in Chinese classical paintings. The core spirit of the technique is inextricably linked to ancient Chinese Taoism and traditional aesthetics, which are prominently featured by simplicity and nationality. This article, taking the real-time interactive electroacoustic Chinese art song ‘Lang Tao Sha’ (浪淘沙), explores the use of the artistic technique of liubai from the perspective of a soprano singer by focusing on the three aspects of lyrics, vocal music and electroacoustic music creation, and singing performance.

This article takes advantage of three new big historical datasets to identify four salient features of the Chinese academe during the Republic of China. First, it was highly international in terms of training. Second, the proportion of female students was unexpectedly large. Third, there was a heavy emphasis on STEM subjects. Finally, the social and spatial origins of China's university students and university faculty members changed from a national population of civil servant families to business and professional families largely from Jiangnan and the Pearl River Delta. The datasets are the China University Student Dataset – Republic of China, which includes almost half of all students to graduate from a Chinese university during the first half of the 20th century; the China University Student Dataset – Overseas, which includes the vast majority of all Chinese students to graduate from a North American, European or Japanese university during this same period; and the China University Employee Dataset, which includes almost all university faculty members in China, 1941–1950.

Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of Taiwan programmes at universities in America and Europe; however, few of these Taiwan programmes have attempted to develop teaching courses. Where Taiwan courses have been introduced, they have tended to be in isolation and not well integrated into existing academic programmes. Among the universities with Taiwan programmes, only two have attempted to create comprehensive teaching programmes through which students can graduate with a degree in Taiwan studies: SOAS University of London and the University of Texas at Austin. The purpose of this paper is to compare the experiences of these two institutions in developing such niche teaching programmes. It begins with a discussion of how these two programmes first emerged and then goes on to review their distinct development trajectories and key features. The paper offers an analysis of how these two programmes were able not only to survive but also to expand their offerings and thrive in an academic environment that should be hostile to such niche programmes. It concludes with a review of the remaining challenges facing these teaching programmes.

The first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contains a text with passages that match medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng Wu 程寤 or Awakening at Cheng, which in turn is said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou Shu 逸周書 or Leftover Zhou Documents. The passages concern one of Chinese literature's earliest interpretations of a dream, and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their sections on dreams. This article discusses the significance of this discovery both for Chinese textual history and for the interpretation of this particular dream. In particular, it shows that trees seen in the dream predict the Zhou conquest of Shang, and the subsequent Shang acquiescence to Zhou rule. It also notes that this discovery simultaneously confirms the antiquity of this text, but also calls into question the dominant traditional interpretation of the dream.

Existing research examining the curvilinear relationship between network centrality and performance tends to focus on the information recipients’ perspective. Focusing on the information providers’ perspective, our study draws upon social exchange theory to demonstrate that the advice-giving centrality-performance relationship for information providers has an inverse U-shape due to decreasing benefits and increasing costs of maintaining more advice-giving ties. We further show that increasing advice-giving centrality increases the likelihood that individuals would become a hindrance to coworkers, as they become bottlenecks impeding efficient workflow. However, our study demonstrates that political skill enables them to overcome the interpersonal challenges associated with high advice-giving centrality. Specifically, individuals with high political skills can better convert advice-giving ties to resources that could assist their cooperation with coworkers, reducing the hindrance they impose. Overall, we provide insights into the trade-off between the benefits and costs of advice-giving ties from a social exchange perspective and examine political skill as an important mitigator of the downsides of large advice-giving networks – a key area that has been hitherto largely unexplored.

In this article, I discuss the Song 宋 Neo-Confucian Cheng Yi's 程頤 (1033–1107) interpretation of two related controversial passages in the Analects, the recorded sayings of Confucius. The term “neo-Confucianism” was coined by Western scholars to refer to the Confucianism of the period from the Song dynasty to the Ming 明 dynasty (and sometimes through the Qing 清 dynasty). Among Chinese scholars, neo-Confucianism is most commonly referred to as the Learning of Principle (li xue 理學). Although before Cheng Yi and his brother Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) there were three other philosophers who are normally also regarded as neo-Confucians— Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–1077), Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073), and Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077)—we can justifiably regard the Cheng brothers as the real founders of neo-Confucianism in the sense that principle becomes the essential philosophical concept for the first time in their works. There is no consensus among scholars as to the relationship between the philosophies of these two brothers. The traditional view regards them as substantially different due to the two different schools of neo-Confucianism that developed from their teachings, the realistic school synthesized by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) from the teachings of Cheng Yi and the idealist school culminating in Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) from the teachings of ChengHao. I, however, tend to think that the philosophical positions of the two brothers are largely similar. Unfortunately, since Cheng Hao did not live as long as Cheng Yi, there is insufficient material to create a systematic picture of his view of the Analects passages with which this article will deal.

Computability theoretic aspects of Polish metric spaces are studied by adapting notions and methods of computable structure theory. In this dissertation, we mainly investigate index sets and classification problems for computably presentable Polish metric spaces. We find the complexity of a number of index sets, isomorphism problems, and embedding problems for computably presentable metric spaces. We also provide several computable structure theory results related to some classical Polish metric spaces such as the Urysohn space $\mathbb {U}$, the Cantor space $2^{\mathbb {N}}$, the Baire space $\mathbb {N}^{\mathbb {N}}$, and spaces of continuous functions.

Abstract prepared by Teerawat Thewmorakot.

E-mail: teerawat.thew@hotmail.com