Due to the differences in cultural background, social customs and religious beliefs between China and the United States, the languages of each country show their unique differences. This difference not only comes from the construction and ex-pression of the language itself, but also is deeply influenced by the cultural and historical background behind it, and different languages may produce different perspectives and interpretations when understanding and expressing the same thing. Rhetorical patterns, as an important part of language, can be analysed to explore the Chinese and American cultural differences behind them. Sitcoms were introduced to China in the 1990s and have now become an indispensable cultural form in modern entertainment life, and their dialogue relies on a variety of Figures of Speechs to set it off. This paper compares the two popular comedies Home With Kids and Growing Pains in China and the United States, and analyzes the most frequently used and representative rhetorical patterns, such as metaphor, euphe-mism and hyperbole, from the dialogues of the characters in the comedies, and gives the reasons for the differences behind them. By exploring the obstacles in cross-cultural communication, we can realise the harmonious communication of cross-cultural communication.
Abstract Duration information is essential for understanding and analyzing our world. In textual contexts, duration information is typically conveyed in two formats: numeric (e.g., 1 hour) and verbal (e.g., shortly). To analyze duration information in text, it is crucial to understand how people map duration expressions to corresponding numerical duration. However, the literature has yet to provide lexicons supporting such conversion. Furthermore, existing databases of time-related expressions often lack information about word frequency – a robust predictor of information processing. This article reports an open dataset of 2,101 Chinese duration expressions, each annotated with its corresponding numerical duration. To obtain high-quality data for word frequency, we obtained the frequency of each duration expression from a large-scale corpus of 10 billion Chinese characters (BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) Corpus) and computed an adjusted frequency for each expression. This dataset provides a valuable resource for research on temporal information in Chinese, facilitating studies in natural language processing, psychology, and linguistics.
Colors serve as an important embodied source of perceptual experiences for conceptualizing emotional concepts. This study offers an image-based visual corpus analysis on perceptual (dis)similarities among six basic color terms (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue) and 63 emotion-label words in English. The investigation focuses on two primary questions: (i) whether the six colors are significantly different regarding their contributions in conceptualizing emotional concepts, and (ii) how color-emotion association patterns are shaped by valence and arousal. Empirical analyses were conducted and discussed using the degree of perceptual (dis)similarities between the target color terms and emotion words as an indicator of the strength of color-emotion associations, based on a dataset of 69*100 images collected from Google Image, comprising 63 emotion words and 6 color terms, with 100 images retrieved for each term. The results reveal that (i) significant differences exist among the six colors in their effectiveness at capturing affective (dis)similarities among various emotional concepts, as well as in their association strength with the affective domain, and (ii) the valence and arousal ratings of emotion words are significantly correlated to the strength of their associations with five of the six color terms, with the exception of blue. This study provides an image-based empirical exploration of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for color-emotion mappings, highlighting the essential and distinctive roles of colors in understanding emotional concepts.
Arista Maisyaroh, Eko Prasetya Widianto, Syaifuddin Kurnianto
et al.
Introduction: Chronic renal failure (CRF) is a terminal condition. For decades, hemodialysis has become a chosen treatment for CRF patients to keep alive. Nevertheless. anxiety associated with the disease remains a major concern among this particular population. Therefore, spiritual therapy is given reduce the level of anxiety. This literature review aims to explore the benefits of spiritual therapies: reading and listening to prayers, supportive education, and counseling.
Methods: In this study the authors used the Literature Review method. Data collection methods with electronic databases are carried out through Spinger Link, PubMed, and ProQuest. Data were obtained from January 2022 to May 2022, included articles were full-text primary research, focused on spirituality support in CRF patients with Hemodialysis, within the publication period of 2017-2024. Exclusion criteria details are available in the full manuscript. To address the potential limitations introduced by language bias, only English and Indonesian-language publications were included. Instruments to assess the success of spiritual support in chronic renal failure patients with hemodialysis consist of the Daily Spiritual Experiences Questionnaire (DSES), HADS, CES-D: Epidemiologist Study Center Depression Scale, SWBS (Spirituality Well Being Scale) DUREL, Interview, RSC-brief, Questionnaire and Physical Symptom Distress Scale, PSQI Chinese version, Geriatric Depression Scale and Spiritual Well-Being Scale.
Results: Ten (n= 10) articles were retrieved. Those described the benefits of spiritual therapies: reading and listening to prayers, supportive education and counseling. The level of anxiety among hemodialysis patients decrease after the treatments were given. The single and whole treatment can be applied daily, and no negatives of treatments were reported.
Conclusions: Spiritual support positively reduce anxiety in patients with CRF with hemodialysis. Nurse is highly recommended to include spiritual education, counseling, listening to prayers, and reading prayers in anxiety associated with hemodialysis management in to nursing care plan. Further research examining the effect of spiritual treatment for patients in their early living with hemodialysis and those with long life span is necessary.
The label “Made in China” (MIC) is an essential communication tool in the economic rise of China, marking its increasing prominence in international markets with labor-intensive products and also some knowledge-intensive products. This contrastive study adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to illustrate how the major English-language newspapers in China and the United States represented MIC between 2006 and 2018. By categorizing the high-frequency noun lemmas in the two corpora of articles on MIC, we identify seven main topics that are shared by Chinese and U.S. newspapers, but differ in frequency and in trends across time. Through examining the collocates and concordances, we find that the overall attitude regarding MIC in U.S. newspapers is more negative than that in Chinese newspapers, where the dominant attitude shifts from negativity to positivity in 2013, while negativity dominates throughout in U.S. newspapers. We argue that the ideological differences evidenced in language patterns reflect the two countries' conflicting economic interests. This study makes a contribution to the existing literature on MIC by aligning with the prior findings of a negative portray of MIC around 2007, primarily due to product safety issues, and addresses a gap by examining the repidly evolving representation of MIC in the 2010s, which is characterized by the intensified trade relations between the two countries.
In Buddhism, the fundamental question regarding practice is what practice will allow one to overcome the suffering of samsara. Shinran offered a unique answer to that question based on the transformation of his understanding of Buddhism brought about through his encounter with Hōnen, a Buddhist thinker who advocated exclusively practicing the recitation of the nenbutsu. This paper aims to clarify the significance and originality of Shinran’s grasp of what that practice is through a careful reading of his works.
Shinran holds that his encounter with Hōnen’s teaching led him to shift from the self-power practices of the Path of Sages to the Other Power of the Pure Land tradition. After describing the traditional view of practice laid out in the Path of Sages, which aims to attain enlightenment through severing one’s mental afflictions and developing wisdom through meditative concentration, I discuss Hōnen’s understanding of the nenbutsu as an Other Power practice selected in the Amida’s original vow. From Hōnen’s perspective, people are incapable bringing about the sort of transformation that was sought after through those traditional, self-power practices such as keeping precepts and engaging in mediation. Rather than engaging in such an impossible endeavor, Hōnen advocated reliance on the compassionate action of Amida’s original vow, which promised to bring all who relied on it to ultimate enlightenment.
Then I discuss how Shinran developed Hōnen’s ideas to shift the significance of practice to one entirely based on Other Power faith. Shinran does not focus on the act of vocal recitation of the nenbutsu, but instead emphasizes the importance of the experience of hearing the significance of the name of Amida as explained by awakened predecessors and the arising of faith toward that message. From Shinran’s perspective, the name of Amida represents the virtues of true suchness that have already been fully realized entirely independent of the actions or intentions of the individual practitioner. For Shinran, recognizing and accepting the virtues that are shown to exist through the Amida’s name is the key to being liberated from samsara and is possible in an instant of insight that is available to anyone regardless of their abilities or actions.
Through these considerations, this paper shows how Shinran’s emphasis of Other Power faith is an essential element of his clarification of the True Pure Land Buddhism as the consummation of Mahayana Buddhism.
Early Buddhism was a monastic religion: the Buddha’s disciples were mendicant monks. However, there are many laypeople today who are practising Buddhists, meditating and following the eightfold Buddhist path towards nirvāṇa.This paper investigates how real this apparent inconsistency is. First, it is shown that the Buddha typically did not even speak about his own insights and doctrines to his lay followers; he only preached about general moral principles and gave wise advice, often with a noticeable conservative tinge. Since it is clear that Buddhism was not esoteric (i.e., it did not contain secrets revealed only to the initiated), this state of affairs can be explained only by supposing that the Buddha thought that true Buddhism was useful only for monks. It is never explicitly explained why it was so, but from several hints an answer may be tentatively reconstructed. Buddhist theory was only needed as a basis of Buddhist practice, and in the Buddha’s age and environment, such practice was virtually impossible for laypersons living and toiling in a village, with a family, and taking care of children. One could not find the peace essential for meditation. Furthermore, such worldly life presupposes strong motivations and unavoidably generates desires, whereas Buddhist practice consists of the annihilation of precisely those desires.
Xishen (喜神, the God of Happiness) is one of the folk beliefs widely known and believed by Chinese people. He has no clear image or specific birthday, and there is no place of worship dedicated to Him. Although He has no specific religious space, there are clear directions and time requirements for the worship of Xishen. The task of this article is not to present and explain the belief in Xishen comprehensively, but rather to analyze the practice of folk belief centered on the orientation of Him and people’s cognition formation process of the object of their belief. Taking the spatial study of religions as a standpoint and starting from a broad understanding of dynamic space, we compare and analyze materials from historical documents, folktales, and the practice of sacrificing to Xishen. We consider the relationship between religious, social, and cultural lives and try to prove that such folk beliefs still play an important role in our daily life.
The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism inherited the legacy of the early transmission of Yogācāra teachings through the Dilun and Shelun schools, signifying a scholarly endeavour to synthetise the Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarbha teachings. In contrast to the Indian Yogācāra tradition, which was subsequently introduced to China by the renowned monk and traveller Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664), these arly schools emphasised a kind of actual or pure reality behind the phenomenal world and was not satisfied with the worldview that the world can be traced back to a tainted entity, the ālayavijñāna, the source of all phenomena. This distinctive Chinese viewpoint finds explicit expression in the apocryphal Chinese text theAwakening of Faith Mahāyāna (Dasheng Qixin lun 大乘起信論), which has become one of the most important philosophical treatises in the history of Chinese Buddhism. This text proposes the concept of one-mind, which has the tathatā aspect (zhenru men 真如門) and the saṃsāra aspect (shengmie men 生滅門). Huayan exegetes, who authored commentaries on the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra, the scripture that they regarded as the most perfect teaching of the Buddha, were influenced by the Awakening of Faith and the early Chinese Yogācāra schools in their understanding of this scripture. In this article, we are going to introduce the teachings of Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra that were interpreted as not only the appearance of Yogācāra thought but also as an unequivocal articulation of the concept of one-mind as it was put forward in the Awakening of Faith by Huayan scholars. We will show how this concept was further elaborated in Huayan philosophy and practice.
Abstract Mental health problems are highly prevalent in China; however, China's mental health services lack resources to deliver high-quality care to people in need. Digital mental health is a promising solution to this short-fall in view of the population's digital literacy. In this review, we aim to: (i) investigate the effectiveness, acceptability, usability, and safety of digital health technologies (DHTs) for people with mental health problems in China; (ii) critically appraise the literature; and (iii) make recommendations for future research directions. The databases MEDLINE, PsycINFO, EMBASE, Web of Science, CNKI, WANFANG, and VIP were systemically searched for English and Chinese language articles evaluating DHTs for people with mental health problems in mainland China. Eligible studies were systematically reviewed. The heterogeneity of studies included precluded a meta-analysis. In total, 39 articles were retrieved, reporting on 32 DHTs for various mental health problems. Compared with the digital mental health field in the West, the Chinese studies targeted schizophrenia and substance use disorder more often and investigated social anxiety mediated by shame and culturally specific variants, DHTs were rarely developed in a co-production approach, and methodology quality was less rigorous. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review focused on digital mental health in the Chinese context including studies published in both English and the Chinese language. DHTs were acceptable and usable among Chinese people with mental health problems in general, similar to findings from the West. Due to heterogeneity across studies and a paucity of robust control trial research, conclusions about the efficacy of DHTs are lacking.
This is an interview with Dr. Boping Yuan, Reader in Chinese Language and Linguistics at Cambridge University, UK and professor of linguistics and applied linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. In this interview, Dr. Boping Yuan looks back on his 30 or so years of experience directing the modern Chinese language program at Cambridge University and working in the field of second language acquisition. He describes the changes and the future of Chinese language programs in teaching and researching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) contexts and his viewpoints on CFL teacher development. He also gives a detailed explanation on the issue of interface and feature configuration in second language acquisition, and discusses the transfer effect in third language acquisition. Furthermore, Dr. Boping Yuan offers an outlook on the future of language acquisition research which will become more interdisciplinary and will be combined with modern technologies to advance human well-being. In the end, he provides valuable advice for young researchers on their path to pursing second language acquisition as a profession.
Islam is a great civilization. The contribution of Islam to the history of mankind is especially significant, since under its banners the flowering of education and science took place, humanity soared to the heights of humanism and sanity. The edges, which turned yellow like a dried up steppe, like a dried riverbed, with the advent of Islam turned into meadows with lush and tall grass. Islam began to penetrate into Central Asia, including in the Kazakh lands in the VIII century AD. In the decisive battle between the Chinese troops of the Tan Dynasty and Muslims on the coast of Talas in 751, the victory of Muslims opened the way to Central Asia not only to Islam, but also to the unhindered spread of its culture. Along with the Holy Quran, Islamic civilization came to the Kazakh lands. Science and education revived. Cities were built. They functioned madrassas and research centers. Deeply thinking scholars came out from among the local people who praised humanism in their works – Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Khoja Ahmet Yasawi, Yusuf Balasaguni, Jamal ad-din Said at-Turkistani, Muhammad Khaidar Dulati, Kadyrgali Jalairi and others. They are proud not only the Kazakh people and Central Asia, but also the entire culture of the Muslim East. Their names are given to streets and avenues, universities and research institutes of Kazakhstan. We are proud of them. The valuable heritage left by great scholars is a treasure trove for us and will always inspire great deeds. Our ancestors left a great spiritual legacy. We must not only master them, but also study and read, because Islam is an indestructible part and support of culture and literature, art and moral values of the Kazakh people. Without the traditions of Islam, it is difficult to imagine the Kazakh culture. Islam was at different times and will be the main pillar of our spiritual development. Many different cultural, scientific and spiritual centers functioned on Kazakh soil – Otrar, Sutkent, Turkestan, Syganak, Barshynkent, Kipchak, Arkok, Zhend, Isfijab-Sayram, Taraz, Balasagun. If we talk about only one Otrar, then we can say that he gave the world Abu Nasra al-Farabi and other gifted scientists, who each made their own contribution to world culture. The vast majority of people know one great scientist – Abu Nasra al-Farabi (870-950). Did Otrar give the world only one Abu Nasr? Our studies show that more than 30 scientists, representatives of various branches of science, education, culture and religion were born and raised in only one Otrar. If information about the life and works of some of them has reached our time, then we know only about grains about others. However, they are very expensive for us. The article highlights the life and creative heritage of a medieval thinker, scientific teacher, Islamic scholar, a native of the city of Zernuzh (Zernuk) – [Burkhan ad-din] al-Numan bin Ibrahim bin Khalil Taj ad-din al-Zernuji (1206), author of the religious-pedagogical Arabic-language work “Talim al-mutaallim tarik al-ulum”. He was born in the city of Zernuj (Zernuk) (Farabsky Vilayat), on the banks of the Saykhun River (Syr-Darya) in the middle of the XI century and died in 1206. Until recently, his work as a textbook was used in various madrassas of both the Arab countries and the Ottoman Empire. Key words: Zernuj (Zernuk), Otrar (Farab), Islam, Mavenerennahr, the Holy Quran, ayat, hadith, Taliban, fiqh, Isfijab (Sairam)
Translated into more than thirty languages, the literary works of the Chinese writer, Yu Hua, have become more and more known to the public from China and outside of China, due to the unique way of the writer of expressing his ideas and also, due to the increasing interest of the public for Chinese literature. As it has been declared many times by the Romanian sinologists, we are witnesses to the era of the Chinese novel.
During the last decades, precious works of the important contemporary Chinese writers, including Yu Hua, have been translated into Romanian language, being accessible to Romanian readers, therefore making one step forward in the relationship with the uncountable values that China owns.
Cell communication is central to the integration of cell function required for the development and homeostasis of multicellular animals. Proteins are an important currency of cell communication, acting locally (auto-, juxta-, or paracrine) or systemically (endocrine). The fibroblast growth factor (FGF) family contributes to the regulation of virtually all aspects of development and organogenesis, and after birth to tissue maintenance, as well as particular aspects of organism physiology. In the West, oncology has been the focus of translation of FGF research, whereas in China and to an extent Japan a major focus has been to use FGFs in repair and regeneration settings. These differences have their roots in research history and aims. The Chinese drive into biotechnology and the delivery of engineered clinical grade FGFs by a major Chinese research group were important enablers in this respect. The Chinese language clinical literature is not widely accessible. To put this into context, we provide the essential molecular and functional background to the FGF communication system covering FGF ligands, the heparan sulfate and Klotho co-receptors and FGF receptor (FGFR) tyrosine kinases. We then summarise a selection of clinical reports that demonstrate the efficacy of engineered recombinant FGF ligands in treating a wide range of conditions that require tissue repair/regeneration. Alongside, the functional reasons why application of exogenous FGF ligands does not lead to cancers are described. Together, this highlights that the FGF ligands represent a major opportunity for clinical translation that has been largely overlooked in the West.
Surabhi S Liyanage, Bayzidur Rahman, Zhanhai Gao
et al.
Objectives We aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of human papillomavirus (HPV) as a risk factor for oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) in China, using all eligible studies published in the English and Chinese language literature. Design The random effect model was used to analyse the pooled OR. The I2 and Q tests were included in the subgroup analyses. Setting Literature searches of databases including MEDLINE, PUBMED, EMBASE and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and other available resources were performed to retrieve studies investigating OSCC tissue from Chinese participants for the presence of HPV DNA. Primary outcome measure A collective analysis of OSCC cases and control specimens was carried out from 15 case–control studies (6 in the English language and 9 in the Chinese language) for HPV prevalence. Results Of a total of 1177 OSCC and 1648 oesophageal control samples, 55% (642/1177) of cancer specimens and 27% (445/1648) of control samples were positive for HPV DNA. A positive strong association between HPV DNA and OSCC was observed among the included studies, with a pooled OR of 3.69 (95% CI 2.74 to 4.96). Heterogeneity and publication bias were not observed in the analysis. Subgroup analyses of the included studies also supported the measure of association of causal links between HPV and OSCC. Conclusions This meta-analysis provides the strongest evidence until now of an association between HPV and OSCC in the Chinese population. China has a high burden of OSCC, making this an important research finding. A strength and new contribution of this study is combining data from the English and Chinese language literature to analyse all studies conducted in China. These findings may inform the population level use of prophylactic HPV vaccination to reduce the burden of OSCC in China.