Filming the Margin of Society——Chengdu through the lens of independent filmmaker Chen Zhong

Regarded as the first independent filmmaker in Sichuan, Chen Zhong madeh is debut movie “Love Poems“ in his hometown, soon after receiving his MFA on film from Temple University in the United States. The love story, set in Chengdu, perfectly captures the lifestyle of urban poor in the margins of Chinese society.     

Making Sense of the Online Forum Posts of Two Books on Zheng He’s Voyages

This paper studies the online forum posts at the websites of Amazon and Goodreads of two books on Zheng He’s voyages. The findings are threefold: First, most of the online forum participants play their due roles and satisfy the six conditions of Dahlberg’s model of an ideal online public sphere. Second, the emerged themes match the six conditions of Dahlberg’s model. The readers’ reviews at the two Western social media websites are mostly positive and rational. Implications of the study are also discussed.     

Amalfitans in the Caliphate of Cordoba – Or Not?

This article concerns itself with the references in Ibn ?ayyān's Muqtabis, Book V, to an Amalfitan presence at the court of Cordoba in the middle of the fourth/tenth century. It will be argued that these isolated references to a precociously early, Italian, mercantile presence in Spain, taken largely at face value by the text's editor and all but neglected in Amalfitan historiography, need to be interrogated to determine whether they fit the fourth/tenth-century context of Amalfitan–Muslim relations, or should be read against their fifth/eleventh-century context as evidence for a golden age of the Caliphate which, by Ibn ?ayyān's day, was already passing into memory and myth. Using contemporary, comparative evidence from Barcelona, the article examines the possibility of communications between Italy and Spain in the earlier period, and concludes that the conditions were probably right for an Amalfitan arrival, but rapidly changed by Ibn ?ayyān's day to exclude them from further contacts.     

Light of Buddhism——The Exhibition of Xinjiang＇s Achievements on the Protection of Historic Documents and Ancient Books Held in the National Library of China

<正>Xinjiang has long been a region with coexistence of different ethnic groups and cultures. The spread and development of various religions have had profound i...     

English-Spanish Cognates and the Pura Belpré Children's Award Books: Reading the Word and the World

English-Spanish cognates are an important subset of words in both the English and Spanish languages. Cognates are words that possess identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings in both languages as a result of being derived from Latin and Greek. Of major importance is the fact that many of the more than 20,000 cognates in English are academic vocabulary words, terms essential for comprehending school texts.

?The Pura Belpré Children's Book Award has been given since 1996 to outstanding children's and young adult literature that represents, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience. The books are judged for their literary and artistic quality.

?There are many English-Spanish cognates in each of the Pura Belpré picture books. The purpose of this article is to introduce the Pura Belpré Cognate Database, which lists all of the English-Spanish cognates for each of the children's picture books that have won the award or have been designated as honor books. Ideas for vocabulary, spelling, and morphology lessons or mini-lessons are also presented.     

Sitting on the dock of the bay: 1 partial views of change – Singapore,Tokyo and Hong Kong

Abstract

Cities embody the political projects of elites; the spaces that are made frame the lives of their inhabitants; it is within these spaces that ordinary people make their lives. Cities seem dense, resistant and hard but they are always in flux; their transience marks their elites’ responses to the shifting demands/opportunities of changing circumstances; change has its benefits and its costs; these are not borne equally; all these matters can be accessed in many ways, here the route is though the accumulation of ethnographic detail; partial recollection; cities illuminated through the small scale; it is the way in which we all grasp the cities in which we live.     

Unsettled “structure of feeling” of Chinese migrant workers – cases from the service sector of Shanghai

The suffering, struggling status and controversial political identity of Chinese internal migrant workers have put them in the academic spotlight for decades. An abundance of literature has analysed the problems faced by Chinese migrant workers from mainly three theoretical perspectives. However, not enough attention has been paid to migrant workers’ subjective understandings and feelings about their work and lives. The current article tries to illuminate the ambivalent feelings of migrant workers of the service sector in Shanghai, based on a brief comparison between migrant workers of three Asian countries, and the interviews with 16 Chinese migrant workers, two government officers and two local citizens in Yan community attached to Po district of Shanghai. It is argued that the migrant workers share an unsettled “structure of feeling” in everyday practices. They simultaneously feel bewildered and sanguine, depressed in a sombre mood and happy, passionate and indifferent. The unsettlement of the structure of feeling constitutes a political passivity for migrant workers. It is urgent to find ways to break up such a stalemate of consciousness.     

Social adjustment and dynamics of segregation in higher education – Scrutinising the role of open-mindedness and empathy

Earlier research has suggested that ethnic minority students have a significantly lower chance of attaining academic success compared to their peers without an ethnic minority background. Numerous research has also illustrated the importance of social capital for being academically successful. In two studies we examine the particular role of interethnic interactions in the social and academic adjustment of students in higher education. We use a Flemish university as a case study. Study 1 (N = 1549) uses mediation analysis, and Study 2 (N = 2479) replicates the first study using SEM (structural equation modelling). We first found that social adjustment is necessary for adjusting academically, and that it has a small, but positive effect on study success. While adjusting socially by interacting with students from other ethnic groups is of little benefit to native Flemish students, the opposite is true for students with a migration background. Furthermore, the more open-minded native students are, the less socially adjusted they tend to be, and they seem to benefit from a more close-minded stance than from open-mindedness in terms of adjusting to the social (and academic) context of a university.     

The eloquence of the taciturn: an essay on Hou Hsiao‐Hsien

Abstract

Dust in the Wind, a color film set in the verdant mountains of Taiwan, includes two scenes almost identical to the black‐and‐white and silent films by the Lumières, shot at the end of the nineteenth century: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and Passage Through a Railway Tunnel. As Hou’s mise‐en‐scène consists of the fixed camera angle with its long takes, it is the means of transportation that brings motion to the film, controlling dramatic elements of each work. The luxury cars, which appear in his first three romantic comedies, symbolize the rich and the motorbike the common people. The drivers are all young women, but an automobile cannot be a setting for love. In Daughter of the Nile and Goodbye South, Goodbye, the cars offer no protection to men trying to escape. Compared with the thematic negativity that the automobile possess in Hou’s universe, the motion of the passing trains, taken from many angles, offers rich and profound significations. When the camera is inside the train, the protagonists are taciturn, such as the two adolescents in Dust in the Wind who show their intimacy with each other without saying words. When the camera is next to the tracks or on the platform, the situation changes. In A Time to Live, A Time to Die, Hou depicts the grandmother sitting next to her grandson at a shop by the train and sipping sweet ice while behind them passes a freight train that emphasizes the anxious solitude of the old woman exiled from her homeland. A sublime depiction of the sense of powerlessness of both the deaf‐mute photographer and his family before a passing train is the scene on the deserted platform in A City of Sadness. In Café Lumière, the young woman and her friend in the passing train recognize how valuable they are to each other without saying words. This taciturnity suggests a certain kind of love that needs no sexual language.     

“Don't clone my indie game,bro”: Informal cultures of videogame regulation in the independent sector

In the contemporary games sector, independent developers feel there is an inadequate level of protection for their intellectual property, particularly with regards to game clones. There is also a sense that neither players nor policy-makers completely understand the specificities of how IP may be creatively, if not legally infringed. As a result, there has increasingly been a shift towards the construction of a culture of self-regulation for indie developers, attempting to publicly shame cloners via social media, directly impacting infringers' reputation and sales and bypassing formal regulation.This article uses interviews and workshop discussions with developers to examine the manner in which this informal culture of regulation has been perpetuated in relation to current videogame copyright legislation, and suggests how the interrelation between producers and policy-makers may help to inform the direction of future policy decisions. Examining the way appropriate practice is informally managed in independent gaming, the article considers the soundness of policy in the contemporary videogames industry.     

Homesickness in an Idealist＇s Brushwork--Review on the Chinese Paintings of Jing libin

In our time, Jing libin is distinguished. As long as one sedates immersing himself into Libin＇s paintings, he＇ll be touched, When the hubbub night-clubs were stirred with star stripdancers, Jing libin＇s small gallery laid quiet in the outskirt, waiting for white-collar gentlemen to come. He agrees with ＂art copies time but beyond＂. In a long continuous advocating of simple lifestyle, he founded his niche in a pure courtyard with no many commercials. All his endeavors are thanksgivings.     

Historic County of Wu’an

County has played an important role in the history of China since it was first established as a basic administrative unit in 00the Qin Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago. Historic counties have not only performed administrative and economic functions but also carried and preserved basic information about culture and traditions of China. Not long ago, the Photographic Exhibition on the Cultural Heritage of Historic Counties of China, organized by China Cultural Relics Protection Foundation in partnership with the Palace Museum and China Institute of Toponymy, was held at the Forbidden City, displaying photographs on the cultures and traditions of the first 16 Historic Counties of China, with an objective to enhance the public’s awareness of the conservation of cultural heritage in these historic counties.Our magazine will cover each of these chosen historic counties in each issue.     

Along The Footprints of an Artist

Amdo Bvamsba is a Tibetan artist of great reputation over eighty years of age. At childhood, he became a sramanera or novice in compliance with the local tradition. When he showed his first talent in painting, he engaged himself fesolutety to learning the art of painting.