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This paper aims to focus on the rise and decline of the Qing dynasty in Chinese history, and tries to explain the evolutionary phenomenon that when a dynasty became strong, it replaced the former established but deteriorating one, and then at the end of its development, it disappeared eventually by using interest models developed herein.

Systemic interest models are introduced to the study of Chinese history quantitatively. First, by briefly going over the history of Qing, the reasons for its rise and fall are analyzed qualitatively. Second, the concept of interest is generalized under some proper assumptions so that several interest models are established. At the end, intriguing conclusions are drawn by analyzing the numerical solutions of these interest models.

Comparing this paper's results of numerical solutions with the Qing's history, we can see that the stability of a country was essentially an external appearance of the conflict of interests between the ruling and ruled classes. Usually, the eventual social turbulence happened when the balance of interests deteriorated and was tilted excessively to one social class, and ended when the imbalance reached another state of equilibrium. Moreover, the stability of a country always appeared to be a cycle of “turbulence→peace→turbulence→ċ” which is similar to the evolutionary characteristics of general systems indicated by the systemic yoyo model. Furthermore, the cycle can be found in all the feudal dynasties throughout Chinese history.

The interest models presented in this article can be applied to the study of other social problems, such as corporation governance, the analysis of the national economic relationships, and others.

The concept of interest is generalized in this paper, and the relevant interest models provide good conclusions in our analysis of social and historical phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze long-term institutional causes and consequences of preference falsification by studying the evolution of China’s patriarchal clan system.

The historic study shows that although the clan system was abolished in the Qin dynasty, it re-emerged among high-standing families in the Han dynasty and spread to common people after the Tang dynasty.

The author submits that the clan system was an institutional response to the preference falsification problem that arose due to the dictatorial political institutions first established in the Qin dynasty. It helped people to take collective action by themselves and also opened a back door to influence government decisions. A piece of clear evidence is the co-evolution of the clan system and government personnel system.

In this sense, the clan system probably also helped to prolong the political institutions for 2,000 years.

This is the first institutional study on the clan system in China.

According to the unique style and historical significance, Chinese ancient architecture which has a long history, plays an important role in world architecture. Most of Chinese ancient architecture uses wooden frame as a load-bearing system, however, a unique combination of components has emerged in its development. Due to the well-preserved ancient buildings and a long historical and cultural background of Qijiang ancient town, the paper takes the Qijiang ancient town as an example through field measurement and investigation. The composition of the external environment of the building, architectural characteristics and building monomer composition were analyzed and studied. The unique architectural art charm of Qijiang ancient town was showed. Moreover, the delimitation of the protection scope mainly includes the scope of protected areas and the scope of the construction control zone. Among them, the protected areas are generally divided into key protected areas and general protected areas; the construction control zones are generally divided into Type I of construction control zone and Type II of construction control zones. Ancient buildings are the most existing heritage types in China and are an important part of the immovable cultural relics in China. The group layout of ancient buildings is an important feature in the layout of ancient buildings in China, which is conducive to the realization of the overall protection of heritage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the task design and assignment of full-text generation on mass Chinese historical archives (CHAs) by crowdsourcing, with special attention paid to how to best divide full-text generation tasks into smaller ones assigned to crowdsourced volunteers and to improve the digitization of mass CHAs and the data-oriented processing of the digital humanities.

This paper starts from the complexities of character recognition of mass CHAs, takes Sheng Xuanhuai archives crowdsourcing project of Shanghai Library as a case study, and makes use of the theories of archival science, including diplomatics of Chinese archival documents, and the historical approach of Chinese archival traditions as the theoretical basis and analysis methods. The results are generated through the comprehensive research.

This paper points out that volunteer tasks of full-text generation include transcription, punctuation, proofreading, metadata description, segmentation, and attribute annotation in digital humanities and provides a metadata element set for volunteers to use in creating or revising metadata descriptions and also provides an attribute tag set. The two sets can be used across the humanities to construct overall observations about texts and the archives of which they are a part. Along these lines, this paper presents significant insights for application in outlining the principles, methods, activities, and procedures of crowdsourced full-text generation for mass CHAs.

This study is the first to explore and identify the effective design and allocation of tasks for crowdsourced volunteers completing full-text generation on CHAs in digital humanities.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical review of China’s anti-corruption efforts, from the ancient period of Chinese slavery societies to the late 1970s before China launched its profound economic reform, under the current status of the harsh crusade against corruption that the Chinese new leadership initiated.

This paper is mainly based on a great deal of historical literature and empirical findings, with relevant comparative analysis on policies and regulations between various periods of China.

The phenomenon of corruption has existed in Chinese history for thousands of years, throughout Chinese slavery societies, feudal societies, republic period and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Anti-corruption laws formed an important part of ancient Chinese legal system, and each dynasty has made continuous and commendable progress on fighting such misconduct. Innumerable initiatives have also been taken by the ruling party Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the founding of the PRC. The PRC government created various specially designed government organizations and a series of updated regulations for preventing economic crimes. They have realized that periodic movements against corruption would no longer be helpful, and the paramount issue nowadays is indeed how bold the leaders are in striking out those unhealthy tendencies.

This paper fills in the blanks in the Western world with a comprehensive description of, and comments on, the historical efforts on China’s corruption and economic crime prevention. It also, in various ways, provides meaningful information that links to China’s current furious war against corruption.

This paper aims to construct a spatio-temporal emotional framework (STEF) for digital humanities from a quantitative perspective, applying knowledge extraction and mining technology to promote innovation of humanities research paradigm and method.

The proposed STEF uses methods of information extraction, sentiment analysis and geographic information system to achieve knowledge extraction and mining. STEF integrates time, space and emotional elements to visualize the spatial and temporal evolution of emotions, which thus enriches the analytical paradigm in digital humanities.

The case study shows that STEF can effectively extract knowledge from unstructured texts in the field of Chinese Qing Dynasty novels. First, STEF introduces the knowledge extraction tools – MARKUS and DocuSky – to profile character entities and perform plots extraction. Second, STEF extracts the characters' emotional evolutionary trajectory from the temporal and spatial perspective. Finally, the study draws a spatio-temporal emotional path figure of the leading characters and integrates the corresponding plots to analyze the causes of emotion fluctuations.

The STEF is constructed based on the “spatio-temporal narrative theory” and “emotional narrative theory”. It is the first framework to integrate elements of time, space and emotion to analyze the emotional evolution trajectories of characters in novels. The execuability and operability of the framework is also verified with a case novel to suggest a new path for quantitative analysis of other novels.

This study examines the causes of flood disasters in Jianghan Plain, China and provides practical solutions to mitigate them. Results from this study indicate that both historical archives and more recent recorded data point to an increasing frequency in flood disasters since 1961. Furthermore, damage and losses from flood disasters have also increased significantly in the region. By analyzing the physical geographic factors and human activities, this study found that the main causative factors contributing to increasing flood disasters are landform/topography, climate elements, reduced drainage capacity of rivers in contrast to increased flood discharge, and human activities. Finally, the study examines various practical solutions to mitigate flood disasters in the Jianghan Plain.

This essay focuses on the Chinese-Japanese Library of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and examines how the Library collected and transported Chinese rare books to the United States during the 1930 and 1940s. It considers Harvard's rationale for its collection of Chinese books and tensions between Chinese scholars and the Harvard-Yenching Institute leaders and librarians over the purchase and “export” of Chinese books.

This research is a historical study based on archival research at Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Harvard-Yenching Library, as well as careful readings of published primary and secondary sources.

By examining the debates that surrounded the ownership of Chinese books, and the historical circumstances that enabled or hindered the cross-national movement of books, this essay uncovers a complex and interwoven historical discourse of academic nationalism, internationalism and imperialism.

Drawing upon the unexamined primary sources and published second sources, this essay uncovers a complex and interwoven historical discourse of academic nationalism, internationalism and imperialism.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of Confucianism on auditor changes by highlighting the role of the cultural embeddedness mechanism in audit contracts from the perspective of credit governance.

Using a unique sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2018, this study uses logit regression as the baseline methodology while controlling for macro-level factors and firm-level characteristics, as well as industry and year fixed effects. This study also conducts different mediation/channel analyses, endogeneity tests (using two-stage least squares and difference-in-differences techniques) and robustness checks.

The findings show that the embeddedness of Confucianism in a corporation reduces auditor changes. Furthermore, the channel analyses (using moral self-discipline, social trust, professional ethics and the quality of accounting information as four potential channels) reveal that Confucianism can improve moral credit and consolidate the cultural foundation of credit governance. Specifically, the stronger the embeddedness of Confucianism, the more stable the auditing contract. Finally, Confucianism in formal and informal systems can be mutually substituted.

There is limited research on how culture affects auditing contracts. This study offers new contributions and extends the literature on the connection between cultural embeddedness and contract stability. Confucianism has the potential to strengthen the efficiency of credit governance and maintain the stability of contracts. This study offers a thoughtful orientation toward duly using Confucianism vis-à-vis credit governance.

Many studies on witch killings in Africa suggest that “witchcraft is the dark side of kinship.” But in Chinese history, where patriarchal clan system has been emphasized as the foundation of the society, there have been few occurrences of witch-hunting except a large-scale one in the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The purpose of this paper is to explain the above two paradoxes.

Theoretical analysis based on preference falsification problem with regard to the effect of social structure on witch-hunting is carried out.

There is a “bright side of kinship” due to two factors: first, it would be more difficult to pick out a person as qualitatively different in Chinese culture; second, the hierarchical trust structure embedded in the Chinese culture can help mitigate the preference falsification problem, which acts as the leverage for witch-hunting. In this sense, an important factor for the Cultural Revolution is the decline of traditional social institutions and social values after 1949.

This paper is the first to advance the two paradoxes and offer an explanation from the perspective of social structure.