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1. INTRODUCTION

2. related work, 3. methodology, 5. conclusion, 6. discussion, data availability statement, acknowledgements, author contributions, uncovering topics of public cultural activities: evidence from china.

Zixin Zeng is an undergraduate student from Peking University. Her research interests include text summarization, machine translation and knowledge graph.

Bolin Hua received his Ph.D. degree of Information Resource Management in Nanjing University. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Management in Peking University, and has published over 60 papers on the topics of text mining, intelligence analysis based on big data, and big data of public culture service.

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Zixin Zeng , Bolin Hua; Uncovering Topics of Public Cultural Activities: Evidence from China. Data Intelligence 2022; 4 (3): 509–528. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00121

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In this study, we uncover the topics of Chinese public cultural activities in 2020 with a two-step short text clustering (self-taught neural networks and graph-based clustering) and topic modeling approach. The dataset we use for this research is collected from 108 websites of libraries and cultural centers, containing over 17,000 articles. With the novel framework we propose, we derive 3 clusters and 8 topics from 21 provincial-level regions in China. By plotting the topic distribution of each cluster, we are able to shows unique tendencies of local cultural institutes, that is, free lessons and lectures on art and culture, entertainment and service for socially vulnerable groups, and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage respectively. The findings of our study provide decision-making support for cultural institutes, thus promoting public cultural service from a data-driven perspective.

Public cultural activities refer to cultural activities organized by 8 types of public institutes under the supervision of Ministry of Culture and Tourism in China (i.e., libraries, cultural centers, museums, art museums, community art centers, science museums, memorials, and Children's Palaces) that aim at facilitating public welfare [ 1 ]. With the rapid development of big data theory and technology in recent years, a great number of governments and public cultural institutions have attached great importance to big data practice in public culture [ 2 ]. In China, the establishment of the national public culture cloud platform in 2017 served as a catalyst for the development of local public culture digital platforms [ 3 ], which disseminate a variety of information, including available digital resources, upcoming cultural events and cultural services [ 4 ].

The thriving big data practice of public cultural institutes have paved the way for big data research on public culture services. By integrating and mining public cultural big data, it would be possible to gain profound insights of different areas and users, in turn supporting the decision-making process of public cultural institutes [ 5 ]. In this paper, we focus on the topics of public cultural activities, as versatile and attractive activities are crucial for promoting the participation of local citizens and building an inclusive cultural atmosphere. Furthermore, we analyze public cultural activities on the provincial level, which indicates the tendencies of each region, thus aiding cultural institutes in striking a balance between adhering to macroscopic cultural policies, following newest trends and establishing a unique cultural identity.

In this research, we propose a novel framework for modeling topics of public cultural activities with short text clustering ① . Following the work of Xu et al. [ 6 ], we train a self-taught CNN (convolutional neural network) to obtain deep text representations, then employ the K-means algorithm to assign the cultural activity texts to various clusters. The obtained cluster labels are used to compute a graph with nodes as provinces. Subsequently, SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks) [ 7 ] is run on the graph to derive clusters of provinces. Finally, we use LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to extract topic words for each cluster. With this two-step clustering approach, we are able to spot common patterns of public cultural activities at the province level, thus allowing for a fine-grained analysis of the features of public cultural activities across various provinces. Our motivation for extracting features of public cultural activities in each region is twofold. First, compared to qualitative research methods which tend to require tedious manual labor and may be vulnerable to the subjective views, our method based on text clustering and topic modeling leverages open access data resources on the Internet to provide an efficient approach for analyzing current trends in cultural activities. Second, we make our best efforts to collect data from all provinces in China, to form a comprehensive view of how public cultural service has developed across China, and help government officials form actionable insights for future policies.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, we collected over 17,000 articles concerning public cultural activities in 2020 with web crawlers from 108 official websites of public libraries and culture centers in China, and provide a comprehensive report of Chinese public cultural activities based on the data. Results indicate that the outbreak of COVID-19 hampered public cultural activities in spring, and geographical imbalance in public cultural activities can be observed from both the total number and density of cultural activities. Overall, the 21 regions we analyzed fell into 3 clusters (with Gansu as an outlier); and 8 distinct topics were extracted from our dataset. We compare the topic distribution of each cluster, and show the characteristics of each cluster.

The major contributions of this paper are:

This is the first paper to conduct a thorough data-driven analysis with text mining techniques on public cultural activities, based on a self-constructed and comprehensive dataset

We propose a novel framework that integrates 2 clustering algorithms and 1 topic modeling algorithm, which is extensible to corpus with geographic features

With our approach, we delineate characteristics of public cultural activities in each region, thus providing decision-making support for cultural institutes

The remaining paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss prior work on public culture and text clustering. In Section 3, we provide a detailed description of the proposed short text clustering framework. In Section 4 findings from Chinese public cultural activities in 2020 are discussed. Lastly, in Section 5, we present a conclusion and discussion on future directions of this research.

2.1 Big Data Research on Public Cultural Services

In recent years, research of big data on public cultural services has been developing rapidly. Among the public cultural institutes, digital libraries have received much attention, because they are viewed as a place for both social assembly and digital connectivity, as well as one of the most valuable sources of public cultural big data [ 2 , 8 ]. Analytics of library big data (both catalogue data and transactional data) are found to support digital library innovations, providing immeasurable value for librarian, user and services [ 9 ]. Cao, Liang and Li [ 10 ] emphasized the importance of building smart libraries, which could not be achieved without smart technology, namely integrating advanced technology such as data mining and artificial intelligence. Kamupanga and Yang [ 11 ] point out that big data technologies can be used for forecasting user habits more accurately, which helps build better recommendation systems, thereby saving time and improving efficiency of library users. With the advent of public cultural cloud platforms, other cultural institutes, especially local cultural centers, were also analyzed from various perspectives, for example user satisfaction, content and characteristics, and classification systems [ 3 , 4 , 12 ].

Partly due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data from multiple sources, relatively fewer empirical and quantitative research have been conducted on public cultural services compared to theoretical analysis [ 11 , 13 ]. Li and Hua [ 5 ] proposed the overall structure and content of big data research on public cultural services, and emphasized the feasibility and necessity for data-driven research in public cultural services. Bratt and Moodley [ 14 ] analyzed the economic and employment disparities by applying data mining techniques to annual survey results of public libraries in the United States and provided advice for stepping towards data accessibility and transparency. Wei [ 15 ] constructed a multi-layer regression model on survey data to explore the mechanism of cultural participation behavior. Zhang et al. [ 16 ] analyzed spatiotemporal patterns in public cultural service construction in China, which reflected the development of public cultural services in various regions.

Compared to traditional qualitative methods such as questionnaires and reviews, data-driven methods require significantly less human labor and covers a wider range of users of public cultural institutes. Datadriven research on public cultural services pose both challenges and opportunities for researchers and practitioners in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), by providing profound insights of the effects of policies and systems designed for user-centered public cultural services.

2.2 Short Text Clustering

Text clustering is the act of grouping a set of texts so that texts in the same cluster are more similar to each other than those in other clusters. As most clustering algorithms are based on numerical features, transforming texts to vectors is a vital step in text clustering. Traditional approaches are based on shallow representations such as the bag of words model, which views each word as one dimension in the vector space, often weighted by Term-Frequency (TF), or Term-Frequency Inverse-Document Frequency (TF-IDF). However, this approach can be problematic for short texts due to data scarcity problems, which has led to advances in text clustering based on deep learning techniques, namely deep clustering. In recent years, neural networks have become an increasingly popular method for computing text embeddings. Xu et al. used a self-trained convolutional neural network to obtain a denser representation of short texts [ 6 ]. Similarly, Hadifar et al. [ 17 ] proposed a multi-phase self-trained approach which finetunes an autoencoder for optimal embeddings. Other researchers tackled the issue from the neural topic modeling perspective. Wang et al. [ 18 ] applied bidirectional adversarial training based on the Dirichlet prior. Costa and Ortale [ 19 ] train the tasks of text clustering and topic modeling jointly via a Bayesian generative process. Overall, deep clustering (clustering with neural networks) has proved to be more effective than traditional methods given an ample supply of data.

2.3 Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is the task of extracting topics (similar semantic patterns) from a set of documents, and has often been approached computationally as a dimension reduction problem. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) constructs a term occurrence matrix from the corpus and uses a matrix factorization method called singular value decomposition to extract low-dimensional representation of each piece of text [ 20 ]. Because of the matrix factorization procedure, LSA is not scalable on large amounts of text. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is a generative model that uses latent class variables to generate each word in a document [ 21 ]. Unfortunately, PSLA is prone to overfitting when the number of documents is relatively large [ 22 ]. These disadvantages led to the proposal of LDA, a generative probabilistic topic modeling algorithm based on Bayesian statistics. More recent advances in topic modeling include Topic2Vec [ 23 ], which learns distributed topic representations with a mechanism that is similar to Word2Vec [ 24 ], but measured based on distance metrics such as cosine similarity, so topics can be highly correlated and it may be hard to extract meaningful topic words for each topic. Some Transformer-based topic modeling approaches such as BERTopic ② have been proposed, which uses BERT embeddings as the input of class-based TF-IDF (c-TF-IDF) for the extraction of topics. For a more comprehensive summary of topic modeling algorithms, we refer reader to literature reviews [ 22 , 25 ]. In this paper, we use LDA for topic modeling because this algorithm is easy to implement and has been observed to perform robustly in a wide range of real-world applications.

The framework of this study is illustrated in Figure 1 . With this framework, we are able to cluster regions according to the contents of their cultural activities and explain the clustering results by topic modeling.

Text Clustering and Topic Modeling Framework.

3.1 Data Preparation

Our study collects cultural activity articles from 108 official websites of public cultural activities and culture centers from multiple regions in China with Scrapy, a popular web crawling and scraping framework. The aforementioned official websites were selected according to the following criteria:

Out of the 34 provincial-level administrative regions in China, we eliminated the three special administrative regions (Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan)

For the remaining regions, our primary data sources were the provincial-level public libraries and culture center/public cultural cloud platform in that region

In case the provincial-level institutes suffered from data scarcity, we would complement our corpus with public cultural activity articles from the city-level or district-level public cultural institutes in that region

Out of the 108 official websites, 81 were managed by cultural centers (29 were province-level centers, 34 were city-level centers, 18 were district-level centers) and 27 were managed by libraries (17 were province-level libraries and 10 were city-level libraries). It is not unusual for public cultural institutes at a lower administrative level to have more abundant data, for some institutes are demonstrative zones. It is also plausible to complement the corpus with corresponding city-level or district-level data because these institutes are often tightly bounded from an administrative perspective. For more information on these public cultural institutes, please refer to our supplemental materials.

The public cultural articles we used in this study were notices of upcoming activities, and should be differentiated from news articles reporting past activities. See Table 1 for metadata of the cultural activity articles we collected. Note that the availability of some variables about cultural activities, for instance activity type, varies depending on the design of each website and are therefore marked as optional.

For the purpose of this study, we limit the scope of our data to events organized in year 2020, because many public cultural institutes just began posting articles in the past 2 to 3 years, thus it would be more suitable to conduct a cross-sectional study. In fact, only 52 public institutes have public cultural articles before 2019, and the total number of articles on public cultural activities have increased drastically over recent years, as shown in Fig. 2 .

Articles on Cultural Activities each year.

Each activity was assigned to a provincial-level administrative region according to the geographical position of the public culture institute. The distribution of our data is described in Table 2 . Imbalance in the amount of data collected from different regions can be clearly observed, which was primarily because these regions posted few cultural activities at their websites. We eliminated the regions with fewer than 50 articles in our analysis with text clustering and topic modeling due to scarcity of data, resulting in a total of 21 regions. Possible reasons for scarcity of data include:

Overall, the public cultural institutes in that region were not enthusiastic about organizing cultural activities

The public cultural institutes in that region were not accustomed to posting information online

The region established their website recently, so few cultural activity articles have been accumulated

In concordance with quarantine measures of COVID-19, some regions limited the organization of public cultural activities

We use activity name and description to constitute our dataset. In the data preprocessing step, we remove duplicate articles by computing the Levenshtein Distance, and complete word segmentation with jieba package and remove stopwords.

3.2 Neural Short Text Clustering

As can be observed from Fig. 3 , the majority of cultural activity articles are relatively short, with less than 500 characters. For short texts, vectors obtained from the Bag of Words model are extremely sparse, which is potentially problematic when clustering algorithms are applied.

Length of Cultural Activity Articles.

Inspired by the work of Xu et al. [ 6 ], we train a self-taught CNN model to obtain embeddings for each article. We use Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE) ③ , an unsupervised dimensionality reduction method, to produce a denser representation Y of each text; subsequently, the real-valued vectors Y are transformed to binary codes B using the median as threshold, which is used to train CNN. The structure of our CNN model is shown in Fig 4 . Our model used pretrained vectors developed by Li et al. [ 26 ] and dropout with 50% rate was employed for regularization. Afterwards, the classic K-means algorithm is applied to assign each article to a cluster.

Self-Taught CNN model.

We compare self-taught CNN to two baselines: bag of words (BoW) representation with TF-IDF weights and average embedding (AE) with TF-IDF weights using three commonly-used clustering evaluation metrics (namely the Silhouette Score, Calinski-Harabasz Score, and Davies-Bouldin Score). The evaluation results are summarized in Table 3 , which shows that the self-taught CNN produces significantly better clusters compared to baseline methods.

a Number of clusters is 6.

3.3 Graph-Based Clustering

The similarity of cultural activities in two regions is computed with the Jaccard similarity coefficient:

where P x denotes region x, and S x denotes all the cluster labels assigned to cultural activity articles in region x. A simple undirected graph G = < V, E > is defined, with the regions as vertices, and an edge is drawn between two vertices if their Jaccard similarity coefficient exceeds threshold μ.

A graph-based clustering algorithm named SCAN [ 7 ] is employed to cluster the regions. The similarity between two vertices is defined as

where Γ (x) denotes the set including vertex x and all adjacent vertices of x , so the more similar neighbors two vertices have, the higher their similarity. The algorithm starts from core vertices and searches for clusters based on connectivity, and marks two special types of vertices: hubs (vertices that are reachable by more than one cluster) and outliers (vertices that are not reachable by any cluster).

3.4 Topic Modeling

To explain the topics underlying each cluster, we employ LDA, a classic topic modeling algorithm. The LDA algorithm assumes that each article is generated based on a sampling process, where each document has a topic distribution, and each topic has a word distribution:

where w denotes word, d denotes document, and t denotes topic. From the output of the algorithm, we can assign a topic to each document, by defining the topic of an article to be

Each topic t in characterized by the top k words with the highest conditional probability.

4.1 Exploratory Data Analysis

In this subsection, we visualize spatiotemporal features of the cultural activities in our dataset.

The number of cultural activities organized each month is visualized in Figure 5 . As can be seen from Fig. 5 , over 2,500 cultural activities were organized in January 2020, which was around the time of Chinese Spring Festival, one of the most important holidays in China. However, in February, the total number of activities dropped sharply and gradually increased in the following months. The number of cultural activities rose steadily from March to May, and fluctuated mildly from June to November, with a moderate decrease in December. It is very likely that this pattern was related to quarantine policies for COVID-19, for such measures were most rigid in February, and citizens gradually returned to school and work from March to May. The number of cultural activities may have dropped in December due to annual reviews, when many institutes wrap up and reflect on the entire year's work.

Number of Cultural Activities Organized Each Month.

We also analyze the total number of cultural activities in each region. It is possible to divide regions into five categories according to the number of cultural activities, namely regions with dense, frequent, moderate, scarce activities, and regions where such data could not be obtained. Regions with dense cultural activities, such as Guangdong, Hunan and Chongqing, typically have more than 5 cultural activities per day. Regions with frequent cultural activities, like Beijing, Shandong, Jiangsu, Hunan, have approximately 2 cultural activities per day on average. Regions with moderate cultural activities organize 1 cultural activity per day. Finally, regions with sparse cultural activities only organize 1 cultural activity per week. Generally speaking, there are more cultural activities in Southern China and Eastern China.

We define the density of cultural activities in each region as the number of activities divided by the area of each region (in km 2 ). We discover that regions with the highest cultural activity density are the 4 municipalities, namely Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing. As the municipalities represent some of the most economically prosperous regions, it may be the case that cultural activity density is positively correlated to overall economic development. In fact, the Spearman correlation coefficient r of disposal income per capita ④ and cultural activity density was as high as 0.766 (p<0.001).

4.2 Text Clustering and Topic Modeling

In this subsection, we discuss our results of short text clustering and topic modeling. With the two-step clustering approach previously described, we derived 3 clusters (containing 10, 6, 4 regions respectively) and 1 outlier, summarized in Table 4 . In Figure 6 , we visualized the graph we constructed according to the Jaccard coefficient, positioning nodes with Kamada-Kawai layout.

Clustering Results.

From Table 4 and Figure 6 , it can be observed that the provincial-regions in Cluster 1 (except for Zhejiang) are located in the central region of China, and have a moderate level of economic development. It can also be observed that 3 out of the 4 municipalities were assigned to Cluster 2, which may be due to fact that Chongqing has a much larger area than the other 3 municipalities. What's more, the provinces in Cluster 3 all scored relatively high on cultural activity density.

With the LDA algorithm, we estimate the appropriate number of components with a topic coherence measure proposed by Mimno et al. [ 27 ]. The document frequency term in this metric was estimated by sampling 140,000 articles from THUCTC, a large-scale Chinese news dataset. The topic coherence score for each LDA model was computed by averaging across all topics, and the model with the highest topic coherence score was chosen, as shown in Fig. 7 . In this way, 8 topics were extracted from the cultural activity articles and the top 10 keywords for each topic, which is summarized in Table 5 . We can see that the 8 topics do partially overlap with each other, but each of them is unique. For example, topic 1 and topic 8 are both about lectures organized by public cultural institutes, but topic 1 emphasizes the content and place of lectures, while topic 8 emphasizes the audience of lectures.

Topic Coherence Score.

The topic of each cultural activity article is defined as the topic with the highest conditional probability. The topic distribution of the clusters, calculated by counting topic labels for all articles in each cluster, is shown in Fig. 8 . It can be observed from Fig. 8 that for cluster 1, 2 and 3, the most frequent topic is topic 1, namely lectures on various forms of art and zeitgeist at local libraries. This shows that local libraries play an extremely important role in the organization of public cultural activities.

Topic Distribution of Each Cluster.

For regions in cluster 1, other popular topics are free art and music lessons at culture centers, intangible cultural heritage (especially those of ethnic minorities) and lectures for children. This shows that public institutes from regions in Cluster 1 focus on public libraries, with a special highlight on reading and learning. For example, the Library of Zhejiang has invested much in its electronic resources, and offers a variety of both academic and popular databases to the public, including KUKE (a database featuring digital music) and Scopus. These rich resources provide great opportunities for local citizens to learn new knowledge at local libraries.

For regions in cluster 2, its public cultural institutes often organize activities with the topic of cultural shows for rural residents and students, followed by voluntary service at community centers (especially for the elderly). Cultural institutes belonging to cluster 2 place great emphasis on promoting cultural services for special social groups, which may serve to improve social equality from a public cultural perspective.

For instance, as a provincial area with over 25 ethnic minorities, Yunnan has strived to preserve the arts of its residents. The Cultural Center of Yunnan has a program that introduces intangible cultural heritage to the public, including the knife dance of Yi, knitting techniques of Wa, and wall paintings of Dai. The Library of Yunnan also has a multimedia database that contains records of the 15 ethnic minority groups that are unique to Yunnan.

For regions in cluster 3, its public cultural institutes emphasize the importance of intangible cultural heritage, followed by free art and music lessons at culture centers for public welfare. Public cultural institutes in these regions are enthusiastic about preserving cultural traditions. For example, the culture center of Guangdong hosts lectures on traditional Chinese medicine each month, which helps citizens gain a better understanding of traditional medical practices that have flourished in China for thousands of years.

Last but not least, Gansu's public cultural activities all shared the topic of free art and music lessons at culture centers for public welfare, and it may be the case that Gansu has more monotonous topics compared to other regions. As a matter of fact, Gansu is one of the economically underdeveloped regions in China, and it is not surprising that Gansu has lagged behind other regions in terms of cultural activities. At present, cultural institutes in Gansu are encouraging more citizens develop reading habits by hosting reading activities regularly.

In this study, we collect over 17,000 articles from 108 official websites of public libraries and culture centers across China. Analysis of the spatiotemporal features of our dataset reveal that there were fewer public cultural activities in spring, possibly due to the outbreak of COVID-19, and as the quarantine measures relaxed, more cultural activities were organized across all regions. The total number and density of public cultural activities are imbalanced across regions, with more cultural activities in Eastern and Southern China (especially in Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta), as well as the highest cultural activity density in the four municipalities (Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and Beijing), which shows that the number and cultural activities may be related to the level of economic development, informatization and the population density in that region. Also, regions with many ethnic minorities, like Yunnan, also have rich cultural activities.

We further uncover the topics of cultural activities with a two-step text clustering and topic modeling approach. A self-taught CNN is trained for embeddings of each article, on which the classic K-Means algorithm is applied to obtain cluster labels. Afterwards, we compute an undirected graph based on the Jaccard similarity coefficient of cluster labels of articles from each pair of regions. A graph-based clustering algorithm called SCAN is employed to derive clusters of regions. To explain the clustering result, we use LDA, a topic modeling algorithm, to derive various topics, which are characterized by the most important keywords in each topic. By plotting the topic distribution of each cluster, we are able to uncover unique tendencies of local cultural institutes when organizing cultural activities.

Overall, most regions organized lectures on art and zeitgeist at local libraries. Public cultural institutes play an important role in knowledge dissemination and art popularization. Local libraries are enthusiastic promoters of knowledge dissemination, and often host reading activities and educational lectures. Cultural centers focus more on art popularization, by organizing art performances in underdeveloped areas as well as building databases and archives for intangible cultural heritage.

Our clustering and topic modeling results show that different regions vary as to their focus on public cultural activities. Some regions have strived to provide rich educational resources for its residents, while other regions focus on promoting public cultural services for special social groups (e.g. rural residents and ethnic minorities), and still other regions place great emphasis on preserving cultural traditions. Our study also reveals that cultural activities in Gansu lack diversity, which may have negative influence on participation.

The crucial aim of providing public cultural service is to promote public welfare by satisfying the cultural needs of citizens, such as the need to receive education, the need to preserve traditional culture, and enjoying cultural works are a form of entertainment, etc. Essentially, providing better public cultural service is about understanding the needs of citizens and allocating resources of public cultural service institutes efficiently to provide these services. Many government officials and scholars have proposed different theories and roadmaps for improving the quality of public cultural service, including providing equal and accessible public cultural service for all society members [ 28 , 29 ], extending providers of public cultural service [ 30 , 31 ], emphasizing regional characteristics [ 32 , 33 ]. Despite the relative abundance of theoretical frameworks on public cultural service, there have been few papers focusing analyzing public cultural service using empirical data, and prior work often rely heavily on qualitative methods such as field surveys and are limited in scope (i.e., they are often written in the form of case studies). Data-driven methods such as text mining techniques proves to be a promising way for understanding both the cultural needs of citizens and public cultural services currently provided by public cultural citizens.

In this paper, we focus on understanding the trends of public cultural activities (an important component of public cultural service). To this end, we propose a text clustering and topic modeling framework for providing fine-grained analysis on the characteristics of public cultural activities in China and assess trends of public cultural activities in 2020 based on a self-constructed dataset. Compared to traditional methods such as surveys or fieldwork, our approach provides satisfactory analysis results despite requiring significantly less manual labor. Our paper is also the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of public cultural service from a national perspective, which we hope can provide insights for the formulation of future policies. While public cultural service has been organized relatively independently by regional cultural institutes in the past, with the recent advent of the National Public Cloud Platform ( https://www.culturedc.cn/ ) we observe the feasibility and necessity of assessing public cultural service from a more holistic perspective. We hope that our findings will help government officials gain actionable insights from current trends in public cultural service, and serve as the basis for the formulation of future cultural policies.

The public cultural activity dataset we constructed provides detailed and authentic information on the content and characteristics of public cultural services in various regions. Despite the extensive efforts we made in our data collection process, we observed imbalance in the amount of available data for different regions, and articles from several regions were eliminated due to data scarcity. With the informatization of public cultural institutes, we are optimistic that richer data on public culture will be available in the near future. We would also like to mention that textual data collected from public cultural institutes are highly unstructured, so further investigation on information extraction algorithms may be helpful for understanding various aspects of public cultural activities, such as organizers, presenters and the overall scale of activities.

In order to uncover the topics of public cultural activities in different regions, we used short text clustering (self-trained CNN), graph clustering (SCAN) and topic modeling (LDA) algorithms jointly. While we are confident that this framework is suitable for the purpose of this paper, recent advances in natural language processing technologies have also provided us with several alternative approaches. For example, it is possible to encode texts via Transformer models such as BERT, fuse both structural and semantic information via graph convolutional networks, and use more recent topic modeling algorithms such as BERTTopic2. These NLP algorithms can be further explored in future text mining research on public cultural service. The topic modeling algorithm (i.e., LDA) we used in this study is based on the bag of words model and conditional independence assumption, so semantic information was lost in the analyzing process. It may be more ideal if we could mine the topics of cultural activities from a more integral level, perhaps with multi-text summarization techniques. What's more, it is quite difficult to evaluate the quality of clustering and topic modeling, even though we have used unsupervised metrics such as Silhouette Score and Topic Coherence Score to guide the choice of hyperparameters in our paper. Further examination by public cultural experts may help validate our findings.

At the end of this paper, we would like to highlight some directions for future research on public cultural service. First of all, our paper only focuses on leveraging text mining techniques to understand public cultural activities. In the future, it is possible to collect empirical data to study the cultural needs of citizens, as well as other aspects of public cultural service, which will help government officials and public cultural institutes gain a better understanding of trends and challenges of public cultural services in China from a data-driven perspective. Besides, summarizing and presenting the findings of data mining research is also an important research direction. For example, our text clustering and topic modeling results can be integrated in a visualization system for public cultural service. Such a visualization system may incorporate various aspects of public cultural service, such as the geographic locations of public cultural institutes, the number of citizens actively participating in cultural activities, topic distributions of cultural activities and so on to help citizens and officials gain a better understanding of public cultural service. Last but not least, we believe it is meaningful to study the temporal evolution of trends in public cultural service over a longer period of time, which will become feasible as more data accumulates on the official websites of public cultural institutes. By understanding how public cultural service changes over time, we will be able to gain a better understanding of the consistency and future directions for providing public cultural service.

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the ScienceDB repository: https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.j00104.00107 . To reuse the data, please cite the data as: Zeng, Z., & Hua, B.: Public Cultural Activities in 2020. Data Intelligence 4(3), (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.j00104.00107 .

This article is an outcome of the key laboratory project “Research on the Wisdom Mode Clustering and Dynamic Display System of Public Culture” (No. 2020008) supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People's Republic of China.

Code is available at: https://github.com/zixinzeng-jennifer/public-culture-activity/

https://github.com/MaartenGr/BERTopic/

This algorithm was chosen according to evaluation results in prior work.

Statistics available at http://www.stats.gov.cn/

Z. Zeng ( [email protected] ) was responsible for data collection, code implementation, as well as writing this paper. B. Hua ( [email protected] ) put forward the research topic and revised this paper.

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• Published: 25 October 2018

How can cultural sociology help us understand contemporary Chinese society?

• Amy Tsang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9575-1306 1 &
• Michèle Lamont 1  

The Journal of Chinese Sociology volume  5 , Article number:  15 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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In this editorial for the Thematic Series: Cultural Sociology and China, we discuss the global growth of cultural sociology as a sociological sub-discipline, its current state and future prospects in mainland China, and the aims of this special issue in promoting the subfield’s further growth domestically in China.

Introduction: the global rise of cultural sociology

For the last 40 years, American sociology has been transformed from the inside by the rapid growth of the study of culture, which includes (in short) both the study of meaning-making, identity, myths and narratives (cultural sociology) and the study of cultural institutions and cultural production, diffusion, and reception (the sociology of culture). We will refer to this field as “cultural sociology” for convenience.

From a relatively obscure, small, and marginal research area in the1970s and early 1980s, this field became central to American sociology a short decade later. Indeed, founded in 1988, the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) rapidly grew to become one of the largest sections of the ASA by the mid-1990s, attracting more scholars than the Sex and Gender and Medical Sociology sections—the other two largest areas, with more than a thousand members each.

There are many other indicators of the intellectual vitality, centrality, and influence of cultural sociology besides section membership. Most significantly, all major sociology departments now have cultural sociologists on staff. By the mid-2000s, sociological theory was generally taught by cultural sociologists in top ten research departments (these departments train a significant portion of those who will teach sociology across the country). Footnote 1 New specialized journals have emerged (e.g., American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Cultural Sociology ) and older, more established journals, such as Poetics , have seen their impact factor increase significantly (reaching 1.649 in 2017, with a 5-year average of 2.280). The leading journal American Sociological Review is now co-edited by a cultural sociologist (Omar Lizardo) as are other high profile publications, such as Contemporary Sociology (Michael Sauder) and Sociological Forum (Karen Cerulo). Moreover, the “Princeton Series in Cultural Sociology” which Michèle Lamont has coedited at Princeton University Press for the last 20 years with three leaders of the field (Paul DiMaggio, Robert Wuthnow, and Viviana Zelizer) now includes a large number of prize-winning books that are widely regarded as representing the best of theoretically-informed systematic empirical research in contemporary American sociology. The popularity of cultural sociology has diffused beyond the USA, with stellar departments specializing in the field at leading institutions such as the London School of Economics, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Toronto (among others).

The rapid development of cultural sociology is indicative not only of a growing interest in the systematic empirical study of cultural phenomena but also of the centrality of culture in the transformation of neighboring fields such as inequality, economic sociology, organizational sociology, the sociology of education, and sociological theory. For instance, culture concepts such as “frame,” “narrative,” “identity,” “symbolic boundary,” and “institutions” are increasingly central to the study of poverty and are transforming this area of research (Lamont et al. 2014 , Small et al. 2010 ). Also, the scholarship of many of the leaders in these connate fields is now in dialog with cultural sociology—not only with the work of Pierre Bourdieu but also with that of many senior and mid-career scholars.

Among the defining characteristics of American cultural sociology is its methodological pluralism: sociologists working in the field tend to be multi-methods in orientation—that is, to mobilize equally qualitative and quantitative evidence. Indeed, network analysis is proving to be as central to the field as is observation, and both ethnography and interviews have been used in influential research (Lamont and Swidler 2014 ). Scholars engaged in the systematic analysis of cultural phenomena consider culture both as explanans or explanandum (cause and effect). Indeed, the field has operated as a big tent, leaving room for a variety of types of research. However, it has often been defined in contrast with cultural studies as it is practiced in humanities departments, because its goal is to identify regularities and to provide interpretation and explanation, as opposed to focusing more exclusively on close reading.

Given the effervescence and abundant scientific activity that has accompanied the growth of the field in the USA and Europe, it is surprising that cultural sociology has remained relatively underdeveloped in mainland China. Footnote 2 While a number of overseas cultural sociologists have done research on cultural topics located in the Chinese context, Footnote 3 the field itself remains rather underdeveloped within China. In contrast, this is not the case for the field of economic sociology, which is clearly recognized as a specialty, and which has benefited from the growing concern about phenomena such as consumption and market transition.

The state of cultural sociology in China: slow but accelerating growth

In preparing this introduction, we spoke with several Chinese scholars who have been pioneers in the field of cultural sociology, to gain a better understanding of the current situation. The consensus is that cultural sociology is generally viewed as a niche specialty that is poorly understood by the majority of Chinese sociologists. Most believe that the nascent state of the subdiscipline in the Chinese context is evidenced by the fact that the majority of Chinese sociology departments lack expertise in cultural sociological theory and few scholars self-identify as cultural sociologists (even fewer researchers would call themselves true experts in the field). However, interviewees know that a growing number of their colleague’s research topics usually associated with cultural sociology in the West, from gender norms (Shen 2011 ; Choi and Peng 2016 ) to charitable giving practices (Zhou and Hu 2015 ), media discourses, and consumption to leisure and popular religion. However, lack of familiarity with the intellectual history and theoretical concepts that define the global subfield means that many of these colleagues do not self-identify as cultural sociologists nor engage with larger debates in the global sub-discipline. Still, awareness of cultural sociology spreading and our expert interviewees are optimistic concerning the potential for growth.

To explain the current state of cultural sociology in China, one must understand the recent history of sociology in China. According to an earlier pioneer of cultural sociology, Yi Zhou, a Professor of Sociology at Fudan University, timing explains the underdevelopment of the field and its relative isolation from global conversations: as cultural sociology was taking off in the West, Chinese sociology turned more quantitative (Chen 2017 , 21) and became more focused on macro-sociological issues that were of direct relevance to the challenges that Chinese society faced in the 1980s and 1990s.

Again, interest in culture has by no means been completely foreign to the development of Chinese sociology. In the early days of the discipline’s development in China between 1898 and 1949, many prominent scholars did attend to culture. For instance, Fei Xiaotong and Pan Guangdang’s research on topics such as kinship and agrarian society paid attention to the cultural aspects of social life. However, all sociological research was put on hold between 1949 and the initiation of “Reform and Opening-up” in 1978. After that transition, Chinese sociology underwent a period of revival and reconstruction in the 1980s and 1990s. Grounded in empirical epistemology, the quantitative methodology was then able to gain traction, with a sustained focus on structural changes (Chen 2017 , Zhou 2018 ). Again, these trends were shaped by the needs of domestic Chinese developments and by the priorities of the Chinese goverment.

Indeed, the discourses of modernization and “scientific” development became associated and pervasive in the early days of China’s “Reform and Opening-up.” While state-led efforts to reconstruct and professionalize the social sciences often held up the natural science as models (Chen 2017 ), these foci encouraged the development of quantitative methods and technical skill. Heavy state investment into large-scale survey data-collection also promoted the status of quantitative research over qualitative analysis (Chen 2017 , 29). At the same time, the dramatic nature of market reforms initiated in 1979 captured domestic attention. This helped focus the attention of sociologists on the social structural effects of marketization and other macro-structural topics of research. Sociological research on stratification, economic transformation, and political reform thrived in this environment. Cultural sociology did not.

However, cultural sociology has found a more favorable environment in recent years. Indeed, Chinese sociological research gradually became decidedly more methodologically and substantively pluralistic. Qualitative research is now more widely practiced and growing attention is given to a wider range of social issues, such as gender, family, identity, and consumption. According to Zhou ( 2018 ), two major trends have promoted these changes. First, China has matured developmentally. As the initial stages of economic reforms have passed, interest in their micro-level and cultural impacts has developed. Studying culture is now seen to align with current national priorities of promoting Chinese cultural development, including leisure, tourism, quality of life and subjective well-being.

A second force enabling change has been the increasing global embeddedness of Chinese sociology. Growing numbers of Chinese scholars travel abroad as graduate students and visiting scholars, and the community of diasporic Chinese scholars abroad is increasingly connected internally and externally. Both movements facilitate the circulation of information and a greater intellectual cross-pollination across national intellectual fields. At the same time, foreign sociologists are visiting China in growing numbers and many are developing collaborative relationships with Chinese institutions, as this current special guest-edited issue of The Journal of Chinese Sociology demonstrates. In particular, the Chinese Sociological Association has been eager to engage with other national associations, such as the European Sociological Association and the American Sociological Association, and has facilitated conversation and exchanges in the context of its national congresses. These developments have promoted an openness to diverse sociological ideas and a greater awareness of international trends in the discipline.

Our interviewees mentioned several indicators that suggest the growing penetration of cultural sociology in China. First, the number of culture-related Chinese publications has grown, as has the number of China-based scholars doing culture-related research. There are also signs that the subfield is becoming increasingly methodological pluralist, as both quantitative and qualitative research are now being conducted. While the growth of cultural sociology in China had been driven by the efforts of a few individual scholars with little institutional backing, in recent years, Chinese cultural sociology has become more organized. It is proving to be better at mobilizing institutional resources and of gaining recognition.

For instance, the Culture Section of the Chinese Sociological Association has grown to around 40 members, and more sociology departments are hiring cultural sociologists. Resources are now available to fund specialized guest lecturers and research centers such as the Yale-Fudan Center for Research in Cultural Sociology (a partnership between Yale University and Fudan University initiated in 2017). The Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is consecrating a special issue to cultural sociology and is also recognized by a prominent and highly influential academic organization. Our interviewees believe that better domestic graduate training in qualitative and interpretive methods will be needed to sustain the growth of the field. They are confident that cultural sociology has much to offer Chinese sociology as a whole and, conversely, that research on China can enrich cultural sociological theory as well.

This special thematic series

Our objectives in organizing this special themed journal issue are threefold. First, we aim to update knowledge in China about China-focused research influenced by American and European cultural sociology. Second, we wish to boost the visibility and growth of cultural sociology as a subdiscipline in China. Third, we wish to foster two-way dialog between global cultural sociology and Chinese sociology. Towards this end, the five papers in this special issue reflect a number of key developments in the field in the USA and Europe. At the same time, they also illustrate how cultural sociological theory and scholarship on contemporary China may mutually enrich one another.

A common misconception is that “cultural sociology” is limited to the study of cultural objects and industries themselves; in reality, as mentioned above, it attends to meaning-making and to the cultural dimensions of all domains of social life. Accordingly, articles in this issue demonstrate the full breadth of the field and that cultural meanings and processes are important dimensions of countless other aspects of social life (Alexander 2003 ). For instance, Wanning Sun’s paper shows the importance of cultural practices of consumption, in this case of bridal photos and engagement rings, in the construction of class boundaries in a changing China. While not a cultural sociologist, Sun speaks to important topics in the field. In their paper on breastfeeding among urban Shanghainese women, sociologists Hanser and Li attend to cultural meanings of what Blair-Loy ( 2005 ) calls norms of “intensive motherhood” and adds an important dimension to the sociology of parenting and gender in China. Otis and Wu’s ethnographic work enriches the study of organizational inequality by examining how collective, stratified “rural” and “urban” identities gain salience in a Chinese retail store. And through a survey of netizens engaging in online humor, Yates and Hasmath enrich our understanding of the formation of networks and the role of the internet in contemporary Chinese society.

Our authors build upon and extend well-known theoretical ideas from influential previous research in cultural sociology. For instance, Hanser and Li extend Ann Swidler’s well-known metaphor of culture as a “toolkit,” to shed light onto how it plays out in a gendered, “unsettled” social context (Swidler 1986 ). Sun’s article invokes earlier work at the intersection of cultural and economic sociology to discuss ritual consumption (Zelizer 2010 ). Otis and Wu attend to “boundary work” (Lamont and Molnár 2002 ) and collective identities while introducing the new concept of “service capital” and referencing work on how cultural processes contribute to social stratification (Small et al. 2010 ). For their part, Yates and Hasmath challenge existing assumptions about the social functions of subversive humor, connecting it to research on social networks in society. These contributions demonstrate not only the relevance of common cultural sociological concepts for the analysis of Chinese contexts but also the ways in which honing in on the distinctive features of Chinese cases can enrich sociological knowledge on under-researched dimensions of well-known theoretical ideas.

This is particularly the case for Xiaoying Qi’s paper: she argues that the study of cases from Chinese and other non-Western cultures can challenge existing assumptions and conventions in the application of existing sociological theories. She illustrates this point by showing how the variety of Chinese conceptions of “face” allow us to capture a more nuanced view of its collective and relational dimensions, extending beyond the individual dimensions theorized by the prominent theorists like Erving Goffman. The interplay of the various Chinese terms, lian and mianzi (two different words that mean “face”), offer sociologists a more sophisticated way to capture the relationship between individual agency and group affiliation. Thus, she offers a powerful example of how China-based empirical work makes contribution to general sociological theorizing.

It should also be noted that several of the papers (e.g., those by Qi, Hanser and Li, Sun, and Otis and Wu) draw on in-depth interviews and ethnographic evidence to develop rich interpretation of the cases at hand. Yet, cultural sociology is also growing with the spread of quantitative and computational methods to analyze cultural phenomena and cultural meaning structures (Mohr 1998 ; Bail 2014 ). Thus, the field is well-positioned to remain not only relevant but essential in the age of big data age; it offers unique theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools to help us make sense of the massive volumes of data being produced in the internet age. Yates and Hasmath’s analysis of the engagement of Chinese netizens with internet humor through the lens of network society is exemplary of the benefits of methodological pluralism for the field’s growth. This expansion can go hand-in-hand with the simultaneous growth of other research areas.

Conclusions

Unfortunately, by necessity, this special issue does not reflect the full breath of important research being conducted in cultural sociology. Most importantly, we have chosen to showcase recent, cutting-edge work by scholars who study Chinese society but from outside mainland China. Footnote 4 As Western-based scholars, we have chosen to more deeply delve into one part of the global conversation we seek to promote between global cultural sociologists and domestic Chinese scholars: overseas-based scholars talking to and about China for a global audience. We have done this with the knowledge that other facets of the conversation have and will be carried out in other forums. To take only one important example, the recently-published inaugural issue of Fudan University’s Chinese language 社会学刊 ( Journal of Sociological Studies ) has been centered around cultural sociology, featuring a number of papers authored by Chinese scholars intended for a Chinese-speaking audience. The future should give rise to more publications, conferences, courses, and joint projects in which Chinese and overseas cultural sociologists converse with one another more directly.

Another area not covered in our special issue suggests directions for future research. All of the papers featured in our special issue focus solely upon China. And overall, few cultural sociological works we are familiar with situate Chinese cases within a comparative study or within a transnational theoretical framework (see Hoang ( 2015 ) for an example pertaining to Vietnam). It is our hope that cultural sociological work on China will mature by moving beyond the currently-dominant area-studies paradigm, one in which the Chinese case is frequently regarded as an extreme or an anomaly for the purposes of theory building. More research that situates Chinese phenomena within comparative and transnational frameworks will serve to normalize rather than exoticize Chinese social phenomena. It may take time for the subfield of cultural sociology to mature in China so as to enable more dialog with sociology as practiced elsewhere. But we hope that this special issue, along with other similar initiatives, will facilitate future exchanges and deeper engagement.

As argued in Lamont ( 2004 ).

Because the focus of this issue is mainland China, when not specified, “China” refers to mainland China and “Chinese sociology” refers to the sociological discipline within the mainland.

For instance, the prize-winning book by Lei ( 2017 ).

In focusing on newer research conducted by younger scholars, we have forgone, by necessity, the opportunity to feature culture-related work by a number of pioneering China-focused sociologists in the West that has inspired work by subsequent generations of scholars, including Deborah Davis’ research on consumption and marriage, Richard Madsen’s work on morality and religion, and Martin Whyte’s research on familial life and subjective views on inequality (Davis 2000 ; Davis and Friedman 2014 ; Madsen 1984 , 1998 ; Whyte 1997 , 2010 ).

Abbreviations

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We thank Professor Yi Zhou of Fudan University for her comments.

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Author one played a primary role in researching and drafting pages 5–14 of the article. Author two outlined the article’s structure, drafted pages 1–4, and edited the article for clarity. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Michèle Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African and African-American Studies, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, and the Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016–2017, and she chaired the Council for European Studies from 2006 to 2009. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Erasmus prize for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world. A cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont has written on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods.

Amy Tsang is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. Long interested in cultural sociology and contemporary China, her research interests lie at the intersection of culture, stratification, migration, and urban development. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the China Scholarship Council of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China.

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Tsang, A., Lamont, M. How can cultural sociology help us understand contemporary Chinese society?. J. Chin. Sociol. 5 , 15 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-018-0086-5

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One Hundred and Eight Possible Term Paper Topics

Related to traditional chinese society, page outline, family life, archaeology, extremely bad term paper topics, introduction.

As far as I know, all of the topics on this page can actually be developed into term papers suitable for a college course on traditional Chinese society. The list was originally developed in order to provide students in my courses with a broad enough list of topics that they wouldn't all try to use the same library resources simultaneously. Over the years many good papers have been developed from the list. (Actually, so have many bad ones, but never mind that.) It is offered here for the use of students needing inspiration as they start developing topics.

As to length , I notice that the Encyclopaedia Britannica editors maintain that there is no topic too complex to summarize in 750 words. On the other hand, there is no topic so inherently straightforward that nobody is willing to be longwinded about it. That said, most topics listed here can probably be handled adequately in about ten to twelve pages, the length of an average college term paper.

Term papers should always be legible, written in graceful English , and correctly spelled and punctuated; the list of citations at the end should follow a normal citation format. (Click here for help with graceful English or an easy and widely acceptable citation guide .)

If bibliographic resources are ample enough, you may wish to focus your paper more closely than is implied by the topic as stated here. For example:

• If you are writing about prostitutes, for example, and you find that there is enough material, you may wish to contrast prostitution under the Han dynasty with prostitution under the Song dynasty. Or you may wish to limit yourself to Cantonese prostitutes. Or you may wish to limit yourself to village prostitution.
• If you are writing about life in the army, you may wish to limit yourself to army units stationed at the frontier, or contrast them with non-frontier ones, or you may wish to restrict the discussion to Chinese units in the Qing dynasty, when Manzhou ("Manchu") units had special privileges.

On the other hand if the information is spare and hard to find, such a restriction is impossible, and you may find yourself even having to broaden the topic. In a prologue to your paper, placed before the first paragraph, you may if you wish explain what sorts of bibliographic constraints you experienced and the changes you were able (or forced or delighted) to make in the original topic in view of the materials you found.

An appendix at the end of this list suggests three utterly terrible topics for which it is nearly impossible to receive a decent grade.

(Pet Peeve of All Right-Thinking Paper Graders: Princess Di's England was not the same as Julius Caesar's Italy, Napolean's France, or Count Dracula's Romania. So what makes you imagine that China didn't have any variation!? If, in a fit of last-minute idiocy, you write a term paper that refers to 1920 as "ancient times" or uses quotations from Mao Zedong as examples of Hàn dynasty court decisions, or cites modern business practices as the opinions of Confucius, your professor may have apoplexy. Or run amok. Or both. Think about that!)

1. Chinese craft and mercantile guilds. 2. Chinese domestic animals and ideas about domestic animals. 3. Finance, money, and credit in Chinese farming life. 4. How Chinese irrigation systems worked. 5. How marketing operated. 6. Land and labor: the ecology of Chinese village life in [a particular region] 7. Landlords and tenants. 8. Peddlers. 9. Money lending and money lenders: rural credit in traditional China. 10. The silk industry and the organization of labor. 11. Did ancient peasants really wear silk? Most ancient clothing in China.

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12. A man and his wives: polygyny. 13. Adoption of children. 14. Birth control, reproduction, and fertility. 15. Chinese genealogies. 16. Famale infanticide and the sale of children. 17. How big were families really? 18. Mothers are compassionate, fathers are severe: parental stereotypes in traditional China. 19. Love: the place of romantic love in a society with arranged marriage. 20. Reflections of familistic ideology in New Year rites. 21. The expression of values about families and family life in pre-XXth century short stories. 22. Tiger women: myths of dangerous female sexuality in traditional China. 23. Why clans and lineages divide and when. 24. Why families divide and when.

25. Chinese city walls and city planning. 26. Civil Service examinations as a route to social advancement. 27. Contracts, written & unwritten, in traditional times. 28. Crime and crime rates among Chinese populations: Is there a "Chinese pattern of Crime"? 29. Crime and police work. 30. Heroic warriors and military lore in folk life. 31. Intervillage warfare in the Cantonese-speaking world. 32. Cheating the tax man: the collection of taxes in traditional China. 33. The model of an ordered state implied in the Confucian canon. 34. The use of torture under traditional Chinese law: theory and practice. 35. Village-level organization in two dynasties. 36. Was the Chinese local government adequately staffed for the job it was supposed to do?

37. Different schools of interpretation concerning the nature of Shang and Zhou period bronzes. 38. Manchus and Mongols: How two kinds of outsiders tried to run the Chinese empire. 39. Recent archaeological evidence concerning the origins of agriculture in China. 40. Taiwan at the time of the Dutch & Dutch policy concerning Taiwan. 41. Taiwan at the time of the Japanese annexation: What did the Japanese get? 42. The Chinese migrations into Malaya and their local-level organization. 43. How can we know how big the population of China was in the Yuan dynasty? 44. Was the famous Tang dynasty persecution of Buddhists really necessary? A study of the anti-Buddhist position. 45. Western experience of China: The view of three nineteenth- or early twentieth-century missionaries. 46. What are the Dunhuang manuscripts and what do they tell us about Chinese society? 47. What do we actually know about the reforms of Wang Mang? 48. What we know about most ancient Chinese writing and what needs to be done if we are to find out more. 49. What we know about the Xiongnu. 50. Who are the Hakkas?

51. Chinese "Culture-bound psychiatric syndromes." 52. Medical diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine. 53. Religion and the treatment of childhood illness in traditional China. 54. Diet and nutrition before the discovery of the Americas. 55. How Chinese thought about the human stomach. 56. Plagues, pestilence, and famines. 57. The idea of qi in Chinese medicine.

58. How did Chinese children learn to read? 59. How much literacy was there in China really? 60. Elementary education in imperial times: village schools, clan schools, and tutors. 61. What were "textbooks" like in traditional China? Did they work? 62. Was there education for people who didn't aspire to the civil service exam system? 63. How were "clan schools" organized anyway?

64. The cult of the goddess Mazu in south China. 65. Buddhist monasticism. 66. What's in the Buddhist canon as known to most Chinese? 67. The Kings of Hell and Judgement after death. 68. Chinese contributions to the Buddhist canon. 69. Chinese place gods: Chenghuang (the city god) and Tudi Gong (the earth god, a.k.a. She). 70. Chinese theology and the view of hell. 71. Divination: when must the goeds be consulted and why? 72. Evidence for nature worship in pre-Han times. 73. Evidence for popular (i.e., non-royal) ancestor worship in pre-Han times. 74. The evolution of the idea of reincarnation after it is introduced to China from India. 75. Lay Buddhism. 76. Liturgical Taoism (as against philosophical or literary Taoism). 77. Elixirs of immortality in Chinese tradition. 78. The nature of indigenous Chinese Christian churches. 79. Nuns, priests, and other religious professionals. 80. Patterns in Chinese ghost stories. 81. The religious beliefs of the Taiping rebels of the 19th century and their relation to traditional religious beliefs. 82. The role of texts in Chinese Buddhism as it was practiced. 83. Secret societies and small-scale religious sects during the Ming and Qing dynasties. 84. Secret societies in pre-Ming-dynasty times. 85. Tai Shan: a sacred mountain. 86. Trance and possession in Chinese society. 87. What actual evidence is there about the behavior of the ancient Wu ("shamans")?

88. Banditry. 89. Charity and welfare in theory and practice. 90. Chinese rhetoric: how Chinese argue. 91. Chinese styles of conflict and conflict resolution. 92. Ethical dilemmas and the celebration of ethical dilemmas. 93. How Chinese thought about painting and paintings. 94. Jokes and farces: the underlying patterns in what Chinese found funny. 95. Life in the army. 96. What is "face" anyway? 97. Patterns in the conceptualization of the "martial arts." 98. Song Dynasty Prostitution. 99. The punishment of children in traditional families. 100. Theatricals as a way to teach morality and history to illiterate people. 101. Two Chinese games and their social and cultural significance. 102. Value orientations in Chinese proverbs & popular expressions.

103. Neolithic peoples of Heilongjiang: a second Xia dynasty? 104. Neolithic peoples of the Sichuan Basin: a second Xia dynasty? 105. So what's with the Xia Dynasty? 106. Who was "Peking Man" and does he matter to later China? 107. Is there any actual evidence that prehistoric China was matriarchal? 108. What were the "Dunhuang Caves" all about?

Very broad topics tend to result in appallingly superficial papers. It is always best to start with a broad interest, try to narrow it as far as humanly possible, and then broaden it again only as sources require. A paper on why peach wood is considerd to have magical properties will almost always turn out to be more successful than a paper on "Buddhism."

Certain topics are especially terrible because, in my experience, they have never in all of human history produced adequate term papers. Here are some examples:

• "The Position of Women in China." Women did not occupy a single position in China, and attempts to treat of all Chinese women at all stages of their lives in all times and places have always resulted in ill-considered ideological tracts of no intellectual merit. Papers about aspects of women's lives with a more limited focus can be wonderful, but attempts to treat "the position of women in China" as a single brief topic have always been disasters.
• "Chinese Medicine." Chinese medicine is an immense and extremely technical subject about which whole libraries, have been written. To treat a subject this broad in a single term paper has in every instance resulted in a depressingly superficial product, usually made worse by mindless preaching about how Chinese medicine works (of course) or is better than "Western" medicine. (Sometimes students have tried to write brief papers on "acupuncture." That normally doesn't work either, since the bulk of the literature on this subject that they locate is either a list of cures or promotional hoopla praising acupuncture as ancient wisdom. Although considerably narrower than "Chinese medicine," acupuncture is a topic that has never produced a term paper to which I could give a grade above C.)
• "Martial Arts." This is a favorite of students taking martial arts classes and has in every case resulted in a mediocre to poor product with little analytical thought. It seems as though taking a martial arts class seduces participants into the sense of knowing something but is not very conducive to thinking about how martial arts really fit into Chinese society. A more limited topic linked to martial arts might work all right. Purporting to treat the whole subject in a single paper pretty clearly does not work. And if you are actually practicing martial arts, experience suggests that picking it as a term paper topic is an extremely bad decision.

An unsolicited translation this page is available as follows. Note that translated pages are not normally updated, and links in them simply refer to the pages in the English original.

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Education About Asia: Online Archives

Bringing traditional chinese culture to life.

This issue of Education About Asia addresses the question, “What should we know about Asia?” Based on my experiences teaching courses on China and East Asia, traditional Chinese culture is one of the most important topics in understanding both past and present Asia. China has one of the world’s oldest civilizations. This poses many challenges to teachers who desire to make this rich and complex tradition accessible to their students. On both a temporal and spatial level, traditional China may seem far removed to Western students of the modern world. To bridge these gaps in time and space, and to make it more relevant to my students, I often connect its significance to contemporary society by highlighting the current appeal of learning about traditional Chinese culture in modern China. To demonstrate this process, this article examines examples from three cultural fields: Chinese philosophy, focusing on Confucius and his thought; Chinese history, with an illustration from the Shiji ; and Chinese literature, with a case study on plum blossom poems. Moreover, this article discusses how to develop course questions that are relevant to the students’ needs, as well as how to update teaching styles by incorporating multimedia sources, such as current news and films, in the classroom in order to appeal to students of the digital age. Furthermore, the examples and approaches outlined in this article are applicable to a wide variety of courses, including, but not limited to, Chinese literature, history, philosophy, or world history. It is hoped that this article may therefore encourage teachers across many disciplines to incorporate these techniques, as well as their own innovations, in their classrooms.

Confucius and His Thought

Confucian thought played an important role in shaping Chinese culture and identity. In order to make this complex philosophy more engaging, I utilize the “What Did Confucius Say?” articles from the Asia for Educators website, which is hosted by Columbia University.1 This reading material is concise and contains seven major sections grouped according to various topics, including primary sources and discussion questions. The first two sections cover the life and major ideas of Confucius, and provide the background and main features of the Analects of Confucius . For instance, the reading informs users that the Analects of Confucius is not a single work composed by Confucius (551–479 BCE) during his lifetime, but rather multiple writings compiled by Confucius’s disciples after his death. The Analects are also a useful starting point for students to encounter traditional Chinese culture due to the format of the text itself. Students frequently perceive that in many of these stories, Confucius engages in either a monologue or a conversation with his disciples or a ruler to articulate his ideas. Moreover, Confucius’s words are terse and concise, leaving room for various interpretations, thereby promoting a lively class discussion.

When designing class activities, I include some of the discussion questions from the reading material on the website into my own questions in order to unpack both the meaning of his sayings in their own cultural context, as well as their current appeal in contemporary society. These questions are well-designed for high school and undergraduate instructors. The first few questions come from the website and are always based on a primary source in order to ensure the students understand the text. I then follow up these general comprehension questions with my own questions in order to place Confucius’s sayings into a larger intellectual and social context by asking students to apply Confucian thought to modern and contemporary issues. To prepare for class discussion, I may ask students to read some passages together or invite individual students to take turns reading them aloud, followed by their interpretations of the text’s meaning and broader significance. For example, one primary source comes from “On Confucius as Teacher and Person,” which includes Confucius’s sayings on education. I assign students the following discussion questions:

• Why is Confucius often called a great teacher? Please note several qualities of Confucius’s teaching philosophy as demonstrated by his sayings.
• If Confucius were your teacher today, how would you evaluate his teaching approaches and methods? Would you want to attend his class? Why or why not? Students are then able to discuss these questions based on a close reading of the document itself. For instance, the students learn that Confucius broke away from the traditional education system of his time, which had been limited to teaching the sons of noble families. In contrast, he allegedly would teach anyone who was willing to learn. In addition, he taught students with different approaches according to their own situations and characters. As a teacher, he showed his eagerness to learn from other people and improve his knowledge and skills, stating that “Walking along with three people, my teacher is sure to be among them.”2

Another important Confucian thought is the concept of ren (humanity). In this section, I demonstrate that some of Confucius’s sayings possess universal value, and thus, everyone can relate Confucius’s primary beliefs regardless of their own personal knowledge and backgrounds. The discussion questions below are used to facilitate students’ understanding of this concept and allow them to compare it to other traditions:

• Based on the reading section, what qualities does humanity include? Could you use some examples to illustrate Confucius’s ideas on humanity?
• Humanity is a universal value in many philosophies and religions. Please discuss the similarities and differences between Confucians’ humanity and other traditions that you are familiar with, such as Christianity or Buddhism. Although Confucius’s beliefs, such as humanity, have many similarities with other philosophical and religious traditions, some of Confucius’s values, such as filial piety, are different from Western cultural traditions. Filial piety is the core of Confucian moral philosophy, but it may be difficult for students outside of the Chinese tradition to understand, thus instructors must explain it and similar concepts in detail. To this end, I provide the following discussion questions:
• What are the major ideas of Confucius’s filial piety?
• Why do Chinese rulers promote and advocate this concept?
• If you were to apply filial piety to your family, what would happen? Do you think that filial piety applies to modern Western society? Why or why not?

To make these abstract concepts more concrete, I also ask students to offer specific examples to explain filial piety and its reciprocity. For instance, Confucius teaches that younger family members should respect their family elders, and in return, the elders have an obligation to take care of their younger family members. When explaining this, instructors should emphasize that this kind of relationship is hierarchical and that it was later advocated by rulers in different dynasties to legitimize their power by equating the ruler to the head of the family. When discussing filial piety, the instructor must also highlight its societal significance and philosophical ramifications. For instance, Confucian scholars maintained that if family members showed filial piety, then they would become peaceful and harmonious. Moreover, because society consists of many small families that make up the state, following this logic, a society that practices filial piety will naturally become well organized. Therefore, these scholars argued, a ruler should not rely on severe laws and regulations to govern his state; instead, a ruler should lead by exemplary deeds and moral values. Thus, students will learn that Confucian values such as filial piety affected all aspects of traditional Chinese culture, from the individual household to the governing state itself.

After students have grappled with the original texts and their historical significance, I then assign them Jeremy Page’s 2015 Wall Street Journal article “Why China Is Turning Back to Confucius”3 in order to further demonstrate the current appeal of Confucian thought on modern Chinese society. Page begins by describing a lecture on Chinese philosophy that many senior Chinese officials attended in order to further understand Confucian values and how to apply them in their daily lives. He then discusses the causes behind this revival of traditional Chinese culture (i.e., Confucianism), such as coping with domestic social problems, legitimating the Communist Party’s rule by arguing that it has inherited the Confucian tradition, and opposing Western influence. In addition, the article briefly traces the reception of Confucianism from the 1840s to the present and discusses many ways that contemporary Chinese society commemorates Confucius, such as establishing monuments, opening Confucian academies and training centers, and holding museum exhibitions and lectures.

In class, I first briefly discuss Confucius’s fluctuating status from the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when his thought was largely criticized and condemned. This provides a historical context behind the return that contemporary Chinese society is making toward the study and appreciation of Confucian ideology. It also enables students to understand how the traditional Confucian value of obeying a ruler’s orders is being utilized to keep the present government in power . As students discuss this article, many observe that the top Chinese leaders attend Confucian classics courses and workshops, and even tune in to national television broadcasts and lectures on Confucian thought during primetime. In addition, they discover that school textbooks include more materials that encompass traditional values, and parents send their children to learn Confucian rituals as part of their extracurricular activities. After discussing these newly developing trends in Chinese society today, students often conclude that the Chinese government wants to revive traditional Chinese culture rooted in Confucianism in order to promote the “China Dream” and build a harmonious society. Moreover, Chinese leaders want to gain wisdom from indigenous Chinese culture to help solve contemporary problems, such as government corruption and the decline of moral integrity, while simultaneously opposing strong Western political and cultural influence. However, I make sure that students also know that Confucianism is but one historical tradition that influences China’s political leaders. For example, legalism, which dates back to even before the establishment of China’s first empire, the Qin in 221 BCE, is equally influential on the policies of Chinese leaders in many ways. Historically and in contemporary times, it can sometimes have ominous results for elements of the Chinese population. Instructors interested in making sure their students have an understanding of legalism are advised to access the Columbia University Asia for Educators website.4

Record of the Grand Historian

Another important aspect of Chinese culture is Chinese history. The Shiji ( Record of the Grand Historian ), written from the late second century BCE to 86 BCE, is the foundational text of Chinese history and covers a broad historical spectrum from the mythical Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu (156–87 BCE) of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–8). The class is introduced to the Shiji through a survey of its content, time span, the motivations behind its compilation, and major subdivisions within the work. For instance, students learn that the government did not sponsor the Shiji , and so did not dictate its contents. Rather, it was Sima Tan (ca. 165–110 BCE) who initially conducted the Shiji project, but his son, Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE), actually compiled this monumental masterpiece in order to fulfill his father’s posthumous will. Moreover, Sima Qian fell out of favor with Emperor Wu because he defended Li Ling (134–74 BCE), a Han dynasty general, who defected to the Xiongnu nomadic tribes to the north of China. Sima Qian was ultimately punished for this by undergoing the humiliation of castration. In addition to these family and personal reasons for compiling the Shiji , Sima Qian also sought to establish a lineage of great historical figures who would otherwise have been forgotten in history. These factors strongly influenced what type of historical figures Sima Qian selected for the Shiji , the ways in which he narrated their accounts, and the conclusions he reached about them, as well as the lessons they represented for society as a whole. In general, Sima Qian emphasized the moral value and social impact of historical figures rather than their social or political status.

In my class, I select some biographies to discuss, among which is “The Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers.”5 Here I use the biography of Jing Ke (d. 227 BCE) as an example of how I lead class discussion, integrate the Shiji through film, and highlight its appeal in a contemporary context for students.6 The Jing Ke story took place toward the end of the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE), when the state of Qin had already annexed several rival states and had set its target on the state of Yan in the north. Prince Dan of Yan (d. 226 BCE) consulted his officials about this important issue, and a senior official named Tian Guang (d. 227 BCE) suggested that the prince should hire Jing Ke to assassinate the King of Qin (259–210 BCE). In order to gain an audience with the King of Qin, Jing Ke requested three items: the map of Dukang (part of Yan’s territory), a poisonous dagger, and the head of General Fan (d. 227 BCE), a traitor to the state of Qin. After obtaining these items, Jing Ke was granted an audience with the king in the Qin court. Jing Ke concealed the dagger inside the map scroll and unrolled it to its end. Suddenly, he grabbed the dagger from the scroll and attempted to kidnap the king as a hostage, but was unsuccessful. Eventually, the king and his courtiers killed Jing Ke. After reading this story, students must first summarize the text’s plot, as well as the major characters and their personalities. To engage critically in understanding the historical narrative, students discuss the following questions:

• Why is Jing Ke willing to accept Prince Dan of Yan’s order and carry out this assassination?
• How do you understand Jing Ke’s complex personality and psychological state? • Jing Ke was a failed assassin, yet he is glorified in Sima Qian’s record. Please consider Sima Qian’s own situation to explain why Jing Ke is immortalized and praised.
• In your opinion, is Jing Ke a hero? Why or why not? Students brainstorm different points and piece them together on the whiteboard to understand the history of the Warring States, the knight-errant culture, and the reception of the Jing Ke story. In addition, I explain the possible connection between Sima Qian’s choice of Jing Ke and his own life experiences.

To relate the Jing Ke story with contemporary Chinese society, I then show students parts of two film adaptations of the tale: Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin and Zhang Yimou’s Hero , which are available through YouTube for a nominal fee. The former follows the standard historical narration fairly closely, while the latter changes the content substantially; however, students are still able to link the story with the film. In order to make this discussion more lively, students are required to complete a homework assignment on the following questions: How have the two films adapted the Jing Ke lore? What are their major changes? How do you evaluate these changes; are they successful or not? Through this exercise, students learn that the major plot of The Emperor and the Assassin is based on historical narration, with the exception of a new character— Lady Zhao—who is not found in any historical narrative. Students are to explain why this new role might have been created. Several factors shed light on this addition: since this is a three-hour-long, big-budget movie, the director may have been considering the box office results. More importantly, the purpose behind creating this role could have been to create a more complex and romantic plot. Even the director acknowledged in an interview that “Designing such a character like Lady Zhao cannot be said to have been done out of a lack of consideration for the plot. If I produced and shot a purely twoman story, it may not have had such a good effect.”7

Lady Zhao ultimately provides a link between the King of Qin and Jing Ke. When she is young, she admires Yingzheng’s (the King of Qin) courage and political ambition. However, when she later realizes that Yingzheng occupies the state of Zhao by slaughtering many innocent people, she turns to Jing Ke for help to stop such brutality. This additional character provides new possible interpretations of the motivations behind Jing Ke’s assassination attempt, which stems not only from his loyalty to Prince Dan, but also from his righteousness in desiring to remove a brutal ruler. This modern adaptation increases the significance of Jing Ke’s mission. In Zhang’s film Hero , students identify the major change of the assassin abandoning his mission to kill the king, where the assassin instead engages in a direct dialogue with the king in the Qin court. Through their conversation, the assassin comes to understand that the king wants to defeat all other kingdoms and unify China in order to bring peace to all people under heaven. Students then discuss their implications of this change. Often, students are critical towards this adaptation because it glorifies the King of Qin and conveys a problematic and debatable message to the audience that a ruler can adopt any method or make any sacrifice to achieve one’s goal, as long as one’s intention is good or meaningful.

These films demonstrate how contemporary approaches to narrating the story of Jing Ke continue to provide different interpretations of the story and its significance. The discussion about the Jing Ke lore has switched from focusing on the details of his assassination attempt to adapting his story to fit the contemporary needs of strengthening nationalism and Chinese identity. The promotion of a strong “nation-state” ideology by Chinese leaders has played an important role in shaping this reception. Contemporary society portrays him as a national hero, a strong man attempting to remove an evil and despotic ruler, and a knight-errant who embodies the traditional moral values of China in the face of Western influence during China’s rapid economic development, through which intellectuals can further probe China’s recent past and thus bring history to life.

Poems on Things and Objects

Along with Chinese philosophy and history, literature also plays an important role in Chinese culture, particularly poetry, which was the dominant literary subgenre throughout premodern Chinese history. This section provides a creative approach not only on how to teach classical Chinese poems, but also on integrating them within a type of traditional art—blow painting. By exploring this topic, students develop a solid understanding of Chinese poetry, learn the cultural meaning of the plum blossom, and express their own appreciation for Chinese poetry. 8

The plum blossom is famous, along with the orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum, as one of “The Four Gentlemen” in China. Furthermore, it is considered one of “The Three Friends in Winter,” together with pine trees and bamboo. However, plum trees are not common in the US, nor do they carry a significant cultural value, so the topic naturally stimulates student interest. Before we approach the topic of the plum blossom, my students have already studied other Chinese poems, so I briefly review some basic features of Chinese poetry, particularly the Chinese quatrain, which is often made up of four lines with five or seven characters in each line, and regulated verse, which is often made up of eight lines, and each line includes either five or seven characters. These two types of poetry were popular in the Tang dynasty (608–907), known as the golden age of Chinese poetry.9 Next, students gather information on the cultural meaning of the plum blossom and answer the following questions: How and when do Chinese people discuss plum blossoms? What does the plum blossom mean in Chinese society? What interesting facts do you know about the plum blossom? What can you learn from the symbolic meanings of plum blossoms? Students find appropriate information online and in the library about plum blossom culture and outline their primary ideas on the topic. Through class discussion, students also discover that the plum blossom has profound cultural connotations in China. The plum blossom symbolizes courage and strength because the fragrance of plum blossoms comes out of bitterness and coldness. The plum blossom also represents endurance and perseverance because plum blossoms flower in winter while most other plants do not survive. Furthermore, the plum blossom also embodies purity and lofty ideals, possibly because they bloom in winter, often covered with snow. To explore this motif, I incorporate several poems on plum blossoms in the lesson. Here are two examples from Shao Yong (1011–1077) and Wang Anshi (1021–1086):

A Leisure Walk by Shao Yong Once upon a time, we walk leisurely for two or three miles On the way, we see four or five misty villages Six or seven temples and Eight, nine or ten branches of plum blossom10

This poem is easy to understand but demonstrates the major characteristics of Song (960–1279) poetry, which focuses on the details of daily life. The poet’s focus gradually shifts from distant scenery to a closer look at his surroundings. At the beginning, the poet is far away, so he cannot see things clearly. When he moves closer, he sees the pavilions and houses. Looking even closer, he notices plum blossoms. The language in this poem is simple and clear without any descriptive words, but students still identify the poet’s cheerful mood and recognize that this is a pleasant experience. This is typical in Shao’s poems; as modern scholar Xiaoshan Yang states, “Shao Yong was always keen on distinguishing himself as a man of true joy and leisure from those who could only ‘steal leisure’ for a fleeting moment.”11 After discussing the content of the poem, I highlight the word “misty” in the first couplet, which, rather than denoting smoke caused by fire, instead is used to depict the remote villages. Because one cannot see the villages clearly in the distance, it seems like they are surrounded by mist. Another possibility is that many families had been cooking, hence smoke from their chimneys could be obscuring the poet’s vision and creating this phenomenon.

The second poem that I use on this topic is a five-character quatrain:

Plum Blossoms by Wang Anshi In the nook of a wall a few plum sprays, In solitude blossom on the bleak winter days, From the distance, I see they cannot be snow, For a stealthy breath of perfume hither flows.12

In this quatrain, the poet encourages his readers to make use of their senses such as sight and smell. This poem does not focus on the appearance of the plum blossoms, but rather on their character and spirit. Students often note that these plum blossoms appear in the corner of a wall during winter, which is unlikely to draw the attention of many people, revealing the unique character of the poet. In addition, without much nutrients, they still manage to blossom, demonstrating their hardiness. Furthermore, the last couplet forms a reverse causality: the third line tells the reader the result of noticing that the things in the distance are not snow; the fourth line informs the readers why the poet believes this is so: they are fragrant and cannot be snow. Thus, without describing the color of the plum blossoms themselves, the reader knows that they are either a white variety or are covered by snow, so they seem like snow when one looks at them far away. In terms of language, this poem does not employ overly ornate syntax. Yet through this simple and tranquil language, the poet conveys the spirit of plum blossoms: strong endurance and vibrant life. They are not afraid of cold weather, an analogy for people who do not fear power or authority. This allows the class to understand that the subtext of Chinese poetry often has political implications. Based on students’ discussions, I further explain a possible hidden reading: this poem may also allude to the poet’s own frustrated situation, when his political reform efforts faced resistance and gradually lost the Emperor Shenzong’s (1048–1085) support. However, through such adversity, like the plum blossom in winter, he was determined not to yield.

To make this topic even more lively, I integrate blow painting into the section on plum blossom poetry. The instructor should finish a complete blow painting before class so that students can see what the final product looks like. A simple blow painting requires some basic items, such as paper plates, calligraphy brushes, ink, red paint, and water. Ideally, one should use xuan paper made of different fibers, such as blue sandalwood, rice straw, and mulberry, which is specially designed for painting and calligraphy. However, it is difficult to obtain in the US, so I use paper plates instead. The procedure is simple: first, one puts drops of ink in the middle of the paper plate, blowing the drops slowly and patiently in different directions as the first several blows shape the main stem of the tree. Then, blow a little harder, so the stem becomes thicker. Once the main stem is shaped, one can blow the ink quickly in various directions, which become different branches. One may use a straw to do the blowing to expedite the whole process. After the basic painting is completed, one may use a brush to dip into the red ink and put the petals or flowers around the branches and twigs. This combination of poetry appreciation and blow painting demonstration enables students to understand Chinese culture more vividly and concretely.

Many colleges and universities have some type of traditional Chinese culture courses, whether they be premodern Chinese literature, history, philosophy, or other China-related courses. This article offers personal insight and unique methods of diversifying approaches to teaching Chinese culture effectively. It investigates avenues for bringing traditional Chinese culture to life by demonstrating how to integrate multimedia (such as recent news and films), as well as fine arts (such as blow painting of plum blossoms) into a culture class. These examples and approaches, including discussion questions, are used to explore the current appeal of traditional Chinese culture, which continues to shape Chinese identity and character. In addition, these practices include useful materials for designing extracurricular activities in Chinese clubs, film presentations, or guest lectures. A combination of Chinese culture, multimedia, and hands-on experience in the classroom has proven to increase students’ interest and motivation, as well as broaden their horizons with regards to Chinese civilization and society.

Acknowledgements :

This article is made possible by Valparaiso University’s Research Expense Grant and the East Asian Studies Library Travel Grant of the University of Chicago. I also appreciate useful comments from two anonymous reviewers, EAA Editor Dr. Lucien Ellington, Dr. David Chai, Amanda S. Robb, and James Churchill.

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NOTES 1.”What Did Confucius Say?,” Asia for Educators , accessed February 20, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ycyosqn9.

3. Jeremy Page, “Why China Is Turning Back to Confucius,” Wall Street Journal , September 20, 2015 https://tinyurl.com/ya6fhy37.

4. See “Introduction to Legalism” on the Asia for Educators website at https://tinyurl.com/ya6becmm.

5. For the English translation of this chapter, see Burton Watson, Record of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II (rev. ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and William H. Nienhauser Jr., The Grand Scribe’s Records: The Memoirs of Pre-Han China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

6. For a detailed discussion on the reception of the Jing Ke story, see Yuri Pine, “A Hero Terrorist: Adoration of Jing Ke Revisited,” Asia Major 21, no. 2 (2008): 1–34.

7. Chen Kaige, Fenghuang Wang, “Chen Kaige jiu ‘Jing Ke ci Qinwang’ da jizhe wen,” accessed May 24, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y726n7ew.

8. A few good scholarly books on this topic are Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Hans H. Frankel, Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

9. For more information on the Chinese quatrain and regulated verse, see Zong-Qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 161–225.

10. The English translation of this poem is adapted from Learning Mandarin Chinese , https://tinyurl.com/ya9jud46l, accessed February 18, 2018. The flowers appearing at the end of this poem may not necessarily refer to plum blossoms, but for the purpose of teaching this topic, instructors may choose to interpret it as plum blossoms.

11. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 216. 12. The English translation of this poem follows: Cultural China , accessed February 18, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ya282e6h.

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The Costs and Benefits of Clan Culture: Elite Control versus Cooperation in China

Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits – or lack thereof – depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied historical episodes from the early years of the People's Republic of China, utilizing four distinct proxies for county clan strength: the presence of recognized ancestral halls; genealogical records; rice suitability; and geographic latitude. We show that the loss of livestock associated with 1955-56 collectivization (which mandated that farmers surrender livestock for little compensation) documented by Chen and Lan (2017) was much less pronounced in strong-clan areas. By contrast, we show that the 1959-61 Great Famine was associated with higher mortality in areas with stronger clan ties. We argue that reconciling these two conflicting patterns requires that we take a broader view of how kinship groups interact with other governance institutions, in particular the role of kinship as a means of elite control.

Chen would like to acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71933002; 72121002), Zhuoyue Talent Project, Theoretical Economics Peak Program and Legendary Project on Humanities and Social Sciences (XM04221238) at Fudan University. Wang would like to thank National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 72172090) for financial support. Qing Ye would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 72172060, 72132004) and the Major Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research Funds for Jiangsu University (grant No. 2020SJZDA068) for financial support. We thank Rui Rong for excellent RA work, all remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Birds of a Feather: Sharing Democratic Values Eases Immigration in a Postmaterialist Society

• Original Paper
• Published: 03 October 2023

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• Jin Jiang 1 ,
• Shouzhi Xia 2 &
• Dong Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9350-3253 3  

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Although prior research has proposed multiple approaches to reducing anti-immigrant discrimination, less is known about whether priming a shared political ideology works. Integrating a text analysis and a pre-registered survey experiment, we study Hong Kong residents’ attitudes toward mainland Chinese immigrants. By employing the structural topic model, we analyze more than 4,000 Hong Kong newspaper articles on mainland immigrants between 2003 and 2020 and show that the political implications of mainland immigration have gained increasing attention in mass media, whereas economic and social concerns have waned in salience. Resonating with this analysis, our survey experiment reveals that when exposed to a vignette priming mainland immigrants’ support for democratic values, young adults in Hong Kong are less likely to support restrictive immigration policies for mainland Chinese. We also find that priming immigrants’ economic contribution and cultural integration, as well as natives’ family history, has limited effects on Hongkongers’ immigration attitudes.

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Propaganda, Presumed Influence, and Collective Protest

Divided by Income? Policy Preferences of the Rich and Poor Within the Democratic and Republican Parties

Blame it on my youth: the origins of attitudes towards immigration

Data availability.

The data replication files are available at Harvard Dataverse, see: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KALTKV .

The International Organization for Migration, “World Migration Report 2020,” https://bit.ly/ 3JIMhYS (last accessed on August 10, 2023).

Mainland China is the largest source of immigrants to Hong Kong (see Fig. A1 of the Online Appendix).

The One-way Permit (OWP) scheme is one major channel for mainland Chinese to migrate to Hong Kong (see Fig. A1 of the Online Appendix).

See Hong Kong 2016 Population By-census, https://www.bycensus2016.gov.hk/en/bc-mt.html (last accessed on August 10, 2023).

BBC News , June 29, 2017. “Cantonese v Mandarin: When Hong Kong Languages Get Political.”

https://bbc.in/3GFpdsj (last accessed on August 10, 2023).

The media portrayal of mainland visitors is likely to have an impact on local residents’ perceptions toward mainland people including mainland immigrants. Keywords such as “mainland tourists” (內地客/內地遊客/內地旅) and “parallel traders” (水貨客) were used to filter relevant coverage on mainland visitors. We have obtained 3,925 news articles about mainland visitors.

See Table B1 of the Online Appendix for the full list of newspapers and magazines.

We also take into account certain topic modeling parameters such as Semantic Coherence and Exclusivity (see Fig. B2 of the Online Appendix).

See Table B3 for the original news article.

We preregistered the experiment with AsPredicted in September 2021 ( https://aspredicted.org/Q97_Z65 ).

YouGov employed quota sampling based on the general population of Hong Kong and provided post-

weighting to the final sample by referring to census statistics. For details, see Table C4 of the Online Appendix.

Kustov et al. ( 2021 ) demonstrate that the public’s attitudes toward immigrants are quite stable, and are shaped more by socialization and pre-dispositions than by exposure to new information. This finding may help us understand why the priming effects on Hong Kong respondents’ attitudes toward mainlanders are not strong in our study. Moreover, Carnahan et al. ( 2021 ) show that the significant and durable treatment effect of new information is associated with repeated exposure. The treatments in our experiment were one-shot, which may have made it difficult to obtain a substantial treatment effect.

While acknowledging the overlap between political ideology and group identification in the Hong Kong context, it is difficult to attribute the acceptance of mainland immigrants by locals to their group identity because Hong Kong identity is not only associated with democratic values but also involves clear anti- mainland elements. Prior research has documented that a strong sense of Hong Kong identity is a crucial factor contributing to discrimination or hostility toward mainlanders by local residents (Chow et al., 2020 ; Lee et al., 2016 ).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Wanjing Chen, James Druckman, Yusaku Horiuchi, Dongshu Liu, Wen Wang, Han Zhang, and Wenjuan Zheng for helpful comments and suggestions.

This study draws on part of the data collected from the online survey of a research project (Project Number: 2019.A3.019.19C.A2) funded by the Public Policy Research Funding Scheme from the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The authors acknowledge this funding support.

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Jiang, J., Xia, S. & Zhang, D. Birds of a Feather: Sharing Democratic Values Eases Immigration in a Postmaterialist Society. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09900-y

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China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation – should the US be worried?

Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs, The Ohio State University

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Caroline Wagner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science . My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.

I am a policy expert and analyst who studies how governmental investment in science, technology and innovation improves social welfare. While a country’s scientific prowess is somewhat difficult to quantify, I’d argue that the amount of money spent on scientific research, the number of scholarly papers published and the quality of those papers are good stand-in measures.

China is not the only nation to drastically improve its science capacity in recent years, but China’s rise has been particularly dramatic. This has left U.S. policy experts and government officials worried about how China’s scientific supremacy will shift the global balance of power . China’s recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. The country has taken explicit steps to get where it is today, and the U.S. now has a choice to make about how to respond to a scientifically competitive China.

Growth across decades

In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the Four Modernizations , one of which was strengthening China’s science sector and technological progress. As recently as 2000, the U.S. produced many times the number of scientific papers as China annually. However, over the past three decades or so, China has invested funds to grow domestic research capabilities, to send students and researchers abroad to study, and to encourage Chinese businesses to shift to manufacturing high-tech products.

Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad . The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.

Today, China is second only to the U.S. in how much it spends on science and technology . Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering Ph.D.s in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years .

Producing more and better science

Thanks to all this investment and a growing, capable workforce, China’s scientific output – as measured by the number of total published papers – has increased steadily over the years. In 2017, Chinese scholars published more scientific papers than U.S. researchers for the first time.

Quantity does not necessarily mean quality though. For many years, researchers in the West wrote off Chinese research as low quality and often as simply imitating research from the U.S. and Europe . During the 2000s and 2010s, much of the work coming from China did not receive significant attention from the global scientific community.

But as China has continued to invest in science, I began to wonder whether the explosion in the quantity of research was accompanied by improving quality.

To quantify China’s scientific strength, my colleagues and I looked at citations. A citation is when an academic paper is referenced – or cited – by another paper. We considered that the more times a paper has been cited, the higher quality and more influential the work. Given that logic, the top 1% most cited papers should represent the upper echelon of high-quality science.

My colleagues and I counted how many papers published by a country were in the top 1% of science as measured by the number of citations in various disciplines. Going year by year from 2015 to 2019, we then compared different countries. We were surprised to find that in 2019, Chinese authors published a greater percentage of the most influential papers , with China claiming 8,422 articles in the top category, while the U.S had 7,959 and the European Union had 6,074. In just one recent example, we found that in 2022, Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as U.S. researchers; in the top 1% most cited AI research, Chinese papers outnumbered U.S. papers by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similar patterns can be seen with China leading in the top 1% most cited papers in nanoscience, chemistry and transportation.

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative – and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific papers. The more diverse and varied the referenced research was in a single paper, the more interdisciplinary and novel we considered the work. We found Chinese research to be as innovative as other top performing countries.

Taken together, these measures suggest that China is now no longer an imitator nor producer of only low-quality science. China is now a scientific power on par with the U.S. and Europe, both in quantity and in quality.

Fear or collaboration?

Scientific capability is intricately tied to both military and economic power. Because of this relationship, many in the U.S. – from politicians to policy experts – have expressed concern that China’s scientific rise is a threat to the U.S., and the government has taken steps to slow China’s growth. The recent Chips and Science Act of 2022 explicitly limits cooperation with China in some areas of research and manufacturing. In October 2022, the Biden administration put restrictions in place to limit China’s access to key technologies with military applications .

A number of scholars, including me, see these fears and policy responses as rooted in a nationalistic view that doesn’t wholly map onto the global endeavor of science.

Academic research in the modern world is in large part driven by the exchange of ideas and information. The results are published in publicly available journals that anyone can read. Science is also becoming ever more international and collaborative , with researchers around the world depending on each other to push their fields forward. Recent collaborative research on cancer , COVID-19 and agriculture are just a few of many examples. My own work has also shown that when researchers from China and the U.S. collaborate, they produce higher quality science than either one alone.

China has joined the ranks of top scientific and technological nations, and some of the concerns over shifts of power are reasonable in my view. But the U.S. can also benefit from China’s scientific rise. With many global issues facing the planet – like climate change , to name just one – there may be wisdom in looking at this new situation as not only a threat, but also an opportunity.

• Geopolitics
• Science policy
• Globalization
• Science and technology
• Chinese science
• CHIPS and Science Act

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Chinese Culture

China is one of the Four Ancient Civilizations (alongside Babylon, India and Egypt), according to Chinese scholar Liang Qichao (1900). It boasts a vast and varied geographic expanse, 3,600 years of written history, as well as a rich and profound culture. Chinese culture is diverse and unique, yet harmoniously blended — an invaluable asset to the world.

Our China culture guide contains information divided into Traditions, Heritage, Arts, Festivals, Language, and Symbols. Topics include Chinese food, World Heritage sites, China's Spring Festival, Kungfu, and Beijing opera.

China's Traditions

China's heritage.

China's national heritage is both tangible and intangible, with natural wonders and historic sites, as well as ethnic songs and festivals included.

As of 2018, 53 noteworthy Chinese sites were inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List: 36 Cultural Heritage, 13 Natural Heritage, and 4 Cultural and Natural Heritage .

China's Performing Arts

• Chinese Kungfu
• Chinese Folk Dance
• Chinese Traditional Music
• Chinese Acrobatics
• Beijing Opera
• Chinese Shadow Plays
• Chinese Puppet Plays
• Chinese Musical Instruments

Arts and Crafts

• Chinese Silk
• Chinese Jade Articles
• Ancient Chinese Furniture
• Chinese Knots
• Chinese Embroidery
• Chinese Lanterns
• Chinese Kites
• Chinese Paper Cutting
• Chinese Paper Umbrellas
• Ancient Porcelain
• Chinese Calligraphy
• Chinese Painting
• Chinese Cloisonné
• Four Treasures of the Study
• Chinese Seals

China's Festivals

China has several traditional festivals that are celebrated all over the country (in different ways). The most important is Chinese New Year, then Mid-Autumn Festival. China, with its "55 Ethnic Minorities", also has many ethnic festivals. From Tibet to Manchuria to China's tropical south, different tribes celebrate their new year, harvest, and other things, in various ways.

Learning Chinese

Chinese is reckoned to be the most difficult language in the world to learn, but that also must make it the most interesting. It's the world's only remaining pictographic language in common use, with thousands of characters making up the written language. Its pronunciation is generally one syllable per character, in one of five tones. China's rich literary culture includes many pithy sayings and beautiful poems.

Symbols of China

Every nation has its symbols, but what should you think of when it comes to China? You might conjure up images of long coiling dragons, the red flag, pandas, the Great Wall… table tennis, the list goes on…

Top Recommended Chinese Culture Tours

• China's classic sights
• A silent night on the Great Wall
• Relaxing in China's countryside
• China's past, present, and future
• The Terracotta Amy coming alive
• Experience a high-speed train ride
• Feed a lovely giant panda
• Explore China's classic sights
• Relax on a Yangtze River cruise
• Walk on the the Great Wall.
• Make a mini warrior with a local family.
• Pay your respects at the pilgrim's holy palace.

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List of Interesting Cultural Research Paper Topics

Cultural research paper topics allow students to explore people’s historical aspects, actions, ideas, and narratives that they have copied or altered over time. People express their cultures via various symbols and language. Additionally, different aspects of culture affect people’s mindsets.

When pursuing cultural students, students write research papers, essays, and articles on varied topics. However, most learners struggle to select the best titles for their papers. That’s because the topic that a student selects influences the path they take when completing this assignment. For this reason, we’ve come up with this guide with a list of interesting cultural research topics for learners to consider.

Discover a vast array of captivating cultural research paper topics with the expertise of our professional dissertation writers . Our dedicated team is ready to assist you in selecting compelling topics and crafting high-quality research papers that meet the highest academic standards.

How to Choose Cultural Research Topics

The internet is awash with cultural research ideas from which students can choose what to explore. However, not every topic you come across will be suitable for you. For that reason, consider the following aspects when choosing your cultural topic for research.

• Select a topic that meets your writing assignment requirements
• Settle on a topic you find interesting
• Pick a topic that meets the scope of your assignment

In addition to these criteria, check the available research to select a topic you will find sufficient information for before you start writing your paper. Also, brainstorm concepts and create a research question around the topic. Here are different categories of cultural research paper topics from which you can choose your favorite title.

Cultural Anthropology Research Topics

If you find cultural anthropology interesting, pick your topic from the following ideas.

• How traditional food can reflect a nation’s history
• Analysis of the refugees’ impact on the cultures of the European countries
• How Christian traditions differ from one culture to another
• How countries in the Soviet Union moved from communism
• Effects of liberalism on the education system
• Analysis of a communistic nation’s cultural values
• Causes of political division in the United States
• Why most people in the Netherlands love cycling
• How people view the death concept in Africa
• How the English language influences the American culture as the common language

Cultural Diversity Research Paper Topics

Perhaps, you’re interested in cultural diversity. In that case, consider these ideas for your research paper.

• Analysis of cultural diversity’s role in schools
• How cultural diversity influences modern society
• How significant is cultural diversity in this century?
• How multiculturalism and pluralism affect the American citizens’ lives
• Psychological counseling associations to cultural diversity
• How cultural diversity affects the medical industry
• How migration affects cultural diversity of the Asian land
• How cultural diversity affects people’s interactions
• Demonstrating critical thinking with special attention to diversity and multicultural issues
• Cultural diversity as a reason for not tolerating racism

Cross-Cultural Communication Research Topics

Cross-cultural communication is among fields with excellent topics for cultural research. Here are some of the best ideas in this field.

• Approaches to cross-cultural information exchange
• Practical cross-cultural dialogue strategies
• Intercultural dialogue and translation
• Teaching cross-cultural communication and culture
• Cross-cultural information exchange artifacts
• Factors enhancing cross-cultural dialogue competence
• Cultural and health-related issues between ethnic minorities and healthcare providers
• The adaptation of international students to American campuses
• Low-context cultures versus high-context cultures- Cross-cultural perspective
• Assessing cross-cultural effectiveness

Cultural Psychology Research Topics

If interested in cultural psychology research, consider these ideas for your papers and essays.

• How cultural psychology has evolved over the years
• How cultural psychology affects diversity
• Filial piety and personality among the British citizens
• Impacts of famous artists on the global culture
• Impacts of COVID-19 on the US political atmosphere
• Comparing women’s emotions and gender stereotypes as exhibited by men’s superior thinking
• Influences of cross-cultural psychology
• Social and self behavior among the United States’ Red Indians
• Analyzing the unemployed graduates’ experiences in the United Kingdom
• How parenting stress relates to the stigma of a mother with an autistic child

Cross-Cultural Research Topics

Cross-cultural research paper topics cover psychological behavior and processes across different cultures. Here are topic samples in this category.

• Communication styles among different cultures
• How attitudes towards conflicts differ among cultures
• How people from different cultures approach the same task differently
• How different cultures approach knowing
• Why humans should respect and work with people from different cultures
• The attitudes of different cultures towards disclosure
• How decision-making styles differ among cultures
• How non-verbal communication promotes a culture
• What determines business communication across cultures?
• How history and social organization affect modern society

Cultural Studies Research Paper Topics

When pursuing cultural studies, writing research papers is unavoidable. Here are cultural research paper topics to consider for your papers and essays.

• How stigma affects the efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases from spreading
• Challenges encountered by people with social disorders and anxiety
• How films influence the audiences’ cultures
• How songs promote feminism
• Coping mechanism for culturally different people
• How cultural studies facilitate the promotion of brands in global markets
• How people perceive the old and the youths in their cultures
• How cultural studies can help in promoting businesses internationally
• Cultural traits exhibition in exotic and indigenous animals
• Influence of associating with a particular language on a person’s culture

Cultural Geography Research Topics

Cultural geography focuses on cultural changes in various geographical settings. Here are topics to explore in this category.

• Explaining the cultural concept
• Analyzing a culture area and the culture itself
• Analysis of cultural landscapes
• Cultural ecology and culture history
• Focusing on the institutions
• Understanding cultural geography
• The history of cultural geography
• Understanding feminist geography
• Explain the evolution of urban geography
• Analysis of the geography of space and sexuality

Chinese Cultural Research Topics

Are you interested in studying Chinese culture? If yes, this list has the best cultural topics for research paper that you can explore.

• Evaluating Cultural Revolution in China
• The Chinese government and Tibet
• Culture-bound psychiatric syndromes in China
• The Chinese culture and silk road
• Cross-cultural competency in China
• How culture influences the Chinese politics
• Effects of Buddhism on the Chinese culture
• Chinese medicine and culture
• Childhood illness treatment in traditional China and religion
• The cultural perspective of the human stomach in China

Research Topics on Community-Centered Cultural Adaptation

Are you interested in community-centered cultural adaptation research? If yes, here are topics to consider for your papers.

• Stage-setting and professional consultations for cultural adaptation purposes
• Preliminary cultural content adaptation
• Iterative cultural content adaption with members of the community
• Cultural adaptation with meetings and community feedback
• Role of language during cultural adaptation
• The concept of cultural adaptation
• Factors that limit community-centered cultural adaptation
• How conflict of interest can hinder community-centered cultural adaptation
• How gender influences community-centered cultural adaptation
• How to enhance community-centered cultural adaptation

Cultural Analysis Topics for Research

Perhaps, you’re interested in analyzing a cultural aspect or phenomenon. In that case, consider these ideas for your research paper.

• Analysis of cultural phenomenon in your community
• Analyzing the influence of TikTok on local culture
• Analysis of “the dab” popularity
• Analyzing the effects of bandwagon on the culture
• Analysis of the normalization of the holocaust in some cultures
• Analyzing religious beliefs as a cultural phenomenon
• Analyzing the popularity of sitcoms
• Analyze the fan base of your favorite celebrity
• Analysis of social media as a cultural phenomena
• Analyzing cross-cultural fashion trends

Cultural Analysis Essay Topics

If interested in analyzing the culture, pick the idea to write about in this list.

• Analyzing drug use by sportspeople
• Analyzing homelessness in America
• Communication differences between males and females
• Analyzing obesity trends across age brackets
• How sports influence culture
• Analyzing multicultural identity
• Analysis of modeling and body size aspects of a culture
• Effects of multicultural families on the involved parties
• Analysis of gender role changes over time
• How being raised by a single parent affects a child- A cultural perspective

Unique Cultural Analysis Paper Topics

Are you looking for a unique topic for cultural research? If yes, this section has a good idea for you.

• Why are cultural studies essential?
• How society treats people based on their cultures
• How the minorities cope in a different culture
• How feminism affects the culture
• How isolated communities can conserve their cultures
• How religion influences culture- Use the Muslim community as a case study
• Describe the cultural commonalities among human beings
• Explain the correlation of sex and attitude as cultural tools
• The influence of associating with a particular language on a person’s culture
• How exotic and indigenous groups exhibit cultural differences

Pick your topics from this list and then take your time to develop them through research to come up with solid papers or essays that will earn you the top grades.

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The Zhou Dynasty: a Crucible of Chinese Civilization

This essay about the Zhou Dynasty examines its significant role in shaping Chinese civilization from roughly 1046 to 256 BC. It discusses the dynasty’s key contributions, including the introduction of the Mandate of Heaven, which infused Chinese rulership with a moral and revocable right to govern. The essay also explores the implementation of a feudal system, which, while initially successful in managing a vast territory, eventually led to fragmentation and the era of the Warring States. Additionally, the Zhou period is highlighted as a cultural golden age, advancing literature, arts, and the philosophical richness of the “Hundred Schools of Thought” spearheaded by figures like Confucius. These cultural and political innovations of the Zhou Dynasty are shown to have a lasting impact on subsequent generations, shaping administrative practices and philosophical discourse in China for centuries.

How it works

When we talk about ancient dynasties that have left an indelible mark on their cultures, China’s Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BC) is a standout. This wasn’t just a time of kings and conquests, but a pivotal era that fundamentally shaped the philosophical, political, and cultural contours of Chinese civilization. The Zhou Dynasty’s reach extended beyond its time, influencing countless generations with its innovative governance and rich intellectual blossoming.

Let’s start with one of its greatest political innovations: the Mandate of Heaven.

This wasn’t just another divine right to rule; it was a revolutionary idea that introduced accountability to Chinese rulership. According to this doctrine, heaven blessed emperors with the right to rule, but there was a catch—it was based on their ability to govern wisely and justly. Failure meant potential revocation of this divine endorsement, providing a check on the emperor’s power, unlike the absolute divine rights claimed by rulers in other ancient civilizations. This concept was pivotal when the Zhou leaders used it to justify their overthrow of the Shang Dynasty, and it echoed through history as a moral groundwork for challenging despotic rule.

The Zhou period also saw the introduction of a feudal system, where the king’s authority was decentralized, distributed among trusted nobles who managed various regions. This system initially helped manage the expanded territories that the dynasty acquired but eventually led to its own set of challenges. As these feudal states grew in power, their rulers less frequently looked to the central authority, setting the stage for the era of the Warring States that followed the dynasty’s decline. The weakening of centralized power reflected a broader theme in the dynasty’s history—the tension between central authority and local power, a dynamic that has played out in many cultures throughout history.

Culturally, the Zhou Dynasty was a golden age. The period saw significant advancements in literature and the arts. The evolution of Chinese script during this time, moving from the oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty to a more standardized form, was crucial for administrative and creative expression. Literary achievements included works like the “Book of Songs,” an anthology that provides a window into the life and values of the Zhou people, covering themes from political affairs to personal emotions.

Philosophically, the Zhou era was nothing short of transformative. The latter part of this dynasty, known as the Eastern Zhou, was characterized by the “Hundred Schools of Thought,” an intellectual flourishing that saw the rise of major philosophical frameworks such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism. These were not merely academic exercises; they were deeply practical philosophies that aimed to answer pressing questions about ethics, governance, and human nature. Confucius, perhaps the most renowned philosopher from this period, taught principles of ethics and leadership that emphasized moral rectitude and societal harmony. His teachings would permeate Chinese thought and governance for millennia.

Despite these cultural booms, the Zhou Dynasty faced continuous internal strife and external pressures, which eventually culminated in its fragmentation and the rise of regional powers that fought relentlessly for dominance in what is known as the Warring States period. However, the legacy of the Zhou did not simply fade away. The political theories, philosophical thought, and cultural achievements of the Zhou era deeply influenced subsequent Chinese dynasties. The administrative practices, the emphasis on moral governance, and the intellectual pursuits initiated during the Zhou continued to be revered and adapted through successive generations.

Reflecting on the Zhou Dynasty today, it’s clear that this wasn’t just another sequence of rulers; it was a crucible in which much of Chinese civilization was forged. From introducing crucial political doctrines that promoted a form of governance accountable to moral standards, to fostering a renaissance of philosophical and cultural expression, the Zhou Dynasty offers profound lessons on how a society’s formative periods can cast long shadows, influencing the course of its future. In many ways, the story of the Zhou Dynasty is a narrative about how the seeds of ideas planted in the past can flourish and shape the ethos of a nation long after their originators have passed on the torch.

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A Plan to Remake the Middle East

While talks for a cease-fire between israel and hamas continue, another set of negotiations is happening behind the scenes..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[MUSIC CONTINUES]

Today, if and when Israel and Hamas reach a deal for a ceasefire fire, the United States will immediately turn to a different set of negotiations over a grand diplomatic bargain that it believes could rebuild Gaza and remake the Middle East. My colleague Michael Crowley has been reporting on that plan and explains why those involved in it believe they have so little time left to get it done.

It’s Wednesday, May 8.

Michael, I want to start with what feels like a pretty dizzying set of developments in this conflict over the past few days. Just walk us through them?

Well, over the weekend, there was an intense round of negotiations in an effort, backed by the United States, to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

The latest ceasefire proposal would reportedly see as many as 33 Israeli hostages released in exchange for potentially hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

US officials were very eager to get this deal.

Pressure for a ceasefire has been building ahead of a threatened Israeli assault on Rafah.

Because Israel has been threatening a military offensive in the Southern Palestinian city of Rafah, where a huge number of people are crowded.

Fleeing the violence to the North. And now they’re packed into Rafah. Exposed and vulnerable, they need to be protected.

And the US says it would be a humanitarian catastrophe on top of the emergency that’s already underway.

Breaking news this hour — very important breaking news. An official Hamas source has told The BBC that it does accept a proposal for a ceasefire deal in Gaza.

And for a few hours on Monday, it looked like there might have been a major breakthrough when Hamas put out a statement saying that it had accepted a negotiating proposal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the ceasefire proposal does not meet his country’s requirements. But Netanyahu says he will send a delegation of mediators to continue those talks. Now, the terms —

But those hopes were dashed pretty quickly when the Israelis took a look at what Hamas was saying and said that it was not a proposal that they had agreed to. It had been modified.

And overnight —

Israeli troops stormed into Rafah. Video showing tanks crashing over a sign at the entrance of the city.

— the Israelis launched a partial invasion of Rafah.

It says Hamas used the area to launch a deadly attack on Israeli troops over the weekend.

And they have now secured a border crossing at the Southern end of Gaza and are conducting targeted strikes. This is not yet the full scale invasion that President Biden has adamantly warned Israel against undertaking, but it is an escalation by Israel.

So while all that drama might suggest that these talks are in big trouble, these talks are very much still alive and ongoing and there is still a possibility of a ceasefire deal.

And the reason that’s so important is not just to stop the fighting in Gaza and relieve the suffering there, but a ceasefire also opens the door to a grand diplomatic bargain, one that involves Israel and its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians, and would have very far-reaching implications.

And what is that grand bargain. Describe what you’re talking about?

Well, it’s incredibly ambitious. It would reshape Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors, principally Saudi Arabia. But it’s important to understand that this is a vision that has actually been around since well before October 7. This was a diplomatic project that President Biden had been investing in and negotiating actually in a very real and tangible way long before the Hamas attacks and the Gaza war.

And President Biden was looking to build on something that President Trump had done, which was a series of agreements that the Trump administration struck in which Israel and some of its Arab neighbors agreed to have normal diplomatic relations for the first time.

Right, they’re called the Abraham Accords.

That’s right. And, you know, Biden doesn’t like a lot of things, most things that Trump did. But he actually likes this, because the idea is that they contribute to stability and economic integration in the Middle East, the US likes Israel having friends and likes having a tight-knit alliance against Iran.

President Biden agrees with the Saudis and with the Israelis, that Iran is really the top threat to everybody here. So, how can you build on this? How can you expand it? Well, the next and biggest step would be normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And the Saudis have made clear that they want to do this and that they’re ready to do this. They weren’t ready to do it in the Trump years. But Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, has made clear he wants to do it now.

So this kind of triangular deal began to take shape before October 7, in which the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia would enter this three way agreement in which everyone would get something that they wanted.

And just walk through what each side gets in this pre-October 7th version of these negotiations?

So for Israel, you get normalized ties with its most important Arab neighbor and really the country that sets the tone for the whole Muslim world, which is Saudi Arabia of course. It makes Israel feel safer and more secure. Again, it helps to build this alliance against Iran, which Israel considers its greatest threat, and it comes with benefits like economic ties and travel and tourism. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been very open, at least before October 7th, that this was his highest diplomatic and foreign policy priority.

For the Saudis, the rationale is similar when it comes to Israel. They think that it will bring stability. They like having a more explicitly close ally against Iran. There are economic and cultural benefits. Saudi Arabia is opening itself up in general, encouraging more tourism.

But I think that what’s most important to the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is what he can get from the United States. And what he has been asking for are a couple of essential things. One is a security agreement whose details have always been a little bit vague, but I think essentially come down to reliable arms supplies from the United States that are not going to be cut off or paused on a whim, as he felt happened when President Biden stopped arms deliveries in 2021 because of how Saudi was conducting its war in Yemen. The Saudis were furious about that.

Saudi Arabia also wants to start a domestic nuclear power program. They are planning for a very long-term future, possibly a post-oil future. And they need help getting a nuclear program off the ground.

And they want that from the US?

And they want that from the US.

Now, those are big asks from the us. But from the perspective of President Biden, there are some really enticing things about this possible agreement. One is that it will hopefully produce more stability in the region. Again, the US likes having a tight-knit alliance against Iran.

The US also wants to have a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia. You know, despite the anger at Mohammed bin Salman over the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration recognizes that given the Saudis control over global oil production and their strategic importance in the Middle East, they need to have a good relationship with them. And the administration has been worried about the influence of China in the region and with the Saudis in particular.

So this is an opportunity for the US to draw the Saudis closer. Whatever our moral qualms might be about bin Salman and the Saudi government, this is an opportunity to bring the Saudis closer, which is something the Biden administration sees as a strategic benefit.

All three of these countries — big, disparate countries that normally don’t see eye-to-eye, this was a win-win-win on a military, economic, and strategic front.

That’s right. But there was one important actor in the region that did not see itself as winning, and that was the Palestinians.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

First, it’s important to understand that the Palestinians have always expected that the Arab countries in the Middle East would insist that Israel recognize a Palestinian state before those countries were willing to essentially make total peace and have normal relations with Israel.

So when the Abraham Accords happened in the Trump administration, the Palestinians felt like they’d been thrown under the bus because the Abraham Accords gave them virtually nothing. But the Palestinians did still hold out hope that Saudi Arabia would be their savior. And for years, Saudi Arabia has said that Israel must give the Palestinians a state if there’s going to be a normal relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Now the Palestinians see the Saudis in discussions with the US and Israel about a normalization agreement, and there appears to be very little on offer for the Palestinians. And they are feeling like they’re going to be left out in the cold here.

Right. And in the minds of the Palestinians, having already been essentially sold out by all their other Arab neighbors, the prospect that Saudi Arabia, of all countries, the most important Muslim Arab country in the region, would sell them out, had to be extremely painful.

It was a nightmare scenario for them. And in the minds of many analysts and US officials, this was a factor, one of many, in Hamas’s decision to stage the October 7th attacks.

Hamas, like other Palestinian leaders, was seeing the prospect that the Middle East was moving on and essentially, in their view, giving up on the Palestinian cause, and that Israel would be able to have friendly, normal relations with Arab countries around the region, and that it could continue with hardline policies toward the Palestinians and a refusal, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said publicly, to accept a Palestinian state.

Right. So Michael, once Hamas carries out the October 7th attacks in an effort to destroy a status quo that it thinks is leaving them less and less relevant, more and more hopeless, including potentially this prospect that Saudi Arabia is going to normalize relations with Israel, what happens to these pre-October 7th negotiations between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel?

Well, I think there was a snap assumption that these talks were dead and buried. That they couldn’t possibly survive a cataclysm like this.

But then something surprising happened. It became clear that all the parties were still determined to pull-off the normalization.

And most surprisingly of all, perhaps, was the continued eagerness of Saudi Arabia, which publicly was professing outrage over the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks, but privately was still very much engaged in these conversations and trying to move them forward.

And in fact, what has happened is that the scope of this effort has grown substantially. October 7th didn’t kill these talks. It actually made them bigger, more complicated, and some people would argue, more important than ever.

We’ll be right back.

Michael, walk us through what exactly happens to these three-way negotiations after October 7th that ends up making them, as you just said, more complicated and more important than ever?

Well, it’s more important than ever because of the incredible need in Gaza. And it’s going to take a deal like this and the approval of Saudi Arabia to unlock the kind of massive reconstruction project required to essentially rebuild Gaza from the rubble. Saudi Arabia and its Arab friends are also going to be instrumental in figuring out how Gaza is governed, and they might even provide troops to help secure it. None of those things are going to happen without a deal like this.

Fascinating.

But this is all much more complicated now because the price for a deal like this has gone up.

And by price, you mean?

What Israel would have to give up. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, you have an Arab population that is furious at Israel. It now feels like a really hard time to do a normalization deal with the Israelis. It was never going to be easy, but this is about as bad a time to do it as there has been in a generation at least. And I think that President Biden and the people around him understand that the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is intolerable and it is going to lead to chaos and violence indefinitely.

So now you have two of the three parties to this agreement, the Saudis and the Americans, basically asking a new price after October 7th, and saying to the Israelis, if we’re going to do this deal, it has to not only do something for the Palestinians, it has to do something really big. You have to commit to the creation of a Palestinian state. Now, I’ll be specific and say that what you hear the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, say is that the agreement has to include an irreversible time-bound path to a Palestinian state.

We don’t know exactly what that looks like, but it’s some kind of a firm commitment, the likes of which the world and certainly the Israelis have not made before.

Something that was very much not present in the pre-October 7th vision of this negotiation. So much so that, as we just talked about, the Palestinians were left feeling completely out in the cold and furious at it.

That’s right. There was no sign that people were thinking that ambitiously about the Palestinians in this deal before October 7th. And the Palestinians certainly felt like they weren’t going to get much out of it. And that has completely changed now.

So, Michael, once this big new dimension after October 7th, which is the insistence by Saudi Arabia and the US that there be a Palestinian state or a path to a Palestinian state, what is the reaction specifically from Israel, which is, of course, the third major party to this entire conversation?

Well, Israel, or at least its political leadership, hates it. You know, this is just an extremely tough sell in Israel. It would have been a tough sell before October 7th. It’s even harder now.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is completely unrepentantly open in saying that there’s not going to be a Palestinian state on his watch. He won’t accept it. He says that it’s a strategic risk to his country. He says that it would, in effect, reward Hamas.

His argument is that terrorism has forced a conversation about statehood onto the table that wasn’t there before October 7th. Sure, it’s always in the background. It’s a perennial issue in global affairs, but it was not something certainly that the US and Israel’s Arab neighbors were actively pushing. Netanyahu also has — you know, he governs with the support of very right-wing members of a political coalition that he has cobbled together. And that coalition is quite likely to fall apart if he does embrace a Palestinian state or a path to a Palestinian state.

Now, he might be able to cobble together some sort of alternative, but it creates a political crisis for him.

And finally, you know, I think in any conversation about Israel, it’s worth bearing in mind something you hear from senior US officials these days, which is that although there is often finger pointing at Netanyahu and a desire to blame Netanyahu as this obstructionist who won’t agree to deals, what they say is Netanyahu is largely reflecting his population and the political establishment of his country, not just the right-wingers in his coalition who are clearly extremist.

But actually the prevailing views of the Israeli public. And the Israeli public and their political leaders across the spectrum right now with few exceptions, are not interested in talking about a Palestinian state when there are still dozens and dozens of Israeli hostages in tunnels beneath Gaza.

So it very much looks like this giant agreement that once seemed doable before October 7th might be more important to everyone involved than ever, given that it’s a plan for rebuilding Gaza and potentially preventing future October 7th’s from happening, but because of this higher price that Israel would have to pay, which is the acceptance of a Palestinian state, it seems from everything you’re saying, that this is more and more out of reach than ever before and hard to imagine happening in the immediate future. So if the people negotiating it are being honest, Michael, are they ready to acknowledge that it doesn’t look like this is going to happen?

Well, not quite yet. As time goes by, they certainly say it’s getting harder and harder, but they’re still trying, and they still think there’s a chance. But both the Saudis and the Biden administration understand that there’s very little time left to do this.

Well, what do you mean there’s very little time left? It would seem like time might benefit this negotiation in that it might give Israel distance from October 7th to think potentially differently about a Palestinian state?

Potentially. But Saudi Arabia wants to get this deal done in the Biden administration because Mohammed bin Salman has concluded this has to be done under a Democratic president.

Because Democrats in Congress are going to be very reluctant to approve a security agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

It’s important to understand that if there is a security agreement, that’s something Congress is going to have to approve. And you’re just not going to get enough Democrats in Congress to support a deal with Saudi Arabia, who a lot of Democrats don’t like to begin with, because they see them as human rights abusers.

But if a Democratic president is asking them to do it, they’re much more likely to go along.

Right. So Saudi Arabia fears that if Biden loses and Trump is president, that those same Democrats would balk at this deal in a way that they wouldn’t if it were being negotiated under President Biden?

Exactly. Now, from President Biden’s perspective, politically, think about a president who’s running for re-election, who is presiding right now over chaos in the Middle East, who doesn’t seem to have good answers for the Israeli-Palestinian question, this is an opportunity for President Biden to deliver what could be at least what he would present as a diplomatic masterstroke that does multiple things at once, including creating a new pathway for Israel and the Palestinians to coexist, to break through the logjam, even as he is also improving Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia.

So Biden and the Crown Prince hope that they can somehow persuade Bibi Netanyahu that in spite of all the reasons that he thinks this is a terrible idea, that this is a bet worth taking on Israel’s and the region’s long-term security and future?

That’s right. Now, no one has explained very clearly exactly how this is going to work, and it’s probably going to require artful diplomacy, possibly even a scenario where the Israelis would agree to something that maybe means one thing to them and means something else to other people. But Biden officials refuse to say that it’s hopeless and they refuse to essentially take Netanyahu’s preliminary no’s for an answer. And they still see some way that they can thread this incredibly narrow needle.

Michael, I’m curious about a constituency that we haven’t been talking about because they’re not at the table in these discussions that we are talking about here. And that would be Hamas. How does Hamas feel about the prospect of such a deal like this ever taking shape. Do they see it as any kind of a victory and vindication for what they did on October 7th?

So it’s hard to know exactly what Hamas’s leadership is thinking. I think they can feel two things. I think they can feel on the one hand, that they have established themselves as the champions of the Palestinian people who struck a blow against Israel and against a diplomatic process that was potentially going to leave the Palestinians out in the cold.

At the same time, Hamas has no interest in the kind of two-state solution that the US is trying to promote. They think Israel should be destroyed. They think the Palestinian state should cover the entire geography of what is now Israel, and they want to lead a state like that. And that’s not something that the US, Saudi Arabia, or anyone else is going to tolerate.

So what Hamas wants is to fight, to be the leader of the Palestinian people, and to destroy Israel. And they’re not interested in any sort of a peace process or statehood process.

It seems very clear from everything you’ve said here that neither Israel nor Hamas is ready to have the conversation about a grand bargain diplomatic program. And I wonder if that inevitably has any bearing on the ceasefire negotiations that are going on right now between the two of them that are supposed to bring this conflict to some sort of an end, even if it’s just temporary?

Because if, as you said, Michael, a ceasefire opens the door to this larger diplomatic solution, and these two players don’t necessarily want that larger diplomatic solution, doesn’t that inevitably impact their enthusiasm for even reaching a ceasefire?

Well, it certainly doesn’t help. You know, this is such a hellish problem. And of course, you first have the question of whether Israel and Hamas can make a deal on these immediate issues, including the hostages, Palestinian prisoners, and what the Israeli military is going to do, how long a ceasefire might last.

But on top of that, you have these much bigger diplomatic questions that are looming over them. And it’s not clear that either side is ready to turn and face those bigger questions.

So while for the Biden administration and for Saudi Arabia, this is a way out of this crisis, these larger diplomatic solutions, it’s not clear that it’s a conversation that the two parties that are actually at war here are prepared to start having.

Well, Michael, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

On Tuesday afternoon, under intense pressure from the US, delegations from Israel and Hamas arrived in Cairo to resume negotiations over a potential ceasefire. But in a statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that even with the talks underway, his government would, quote, “continue to wage war against Hamas.”

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a dramatic day of testimony, Stormy Daniels offered explicit details about an alleged sexual encounter with Donald Trump that ultimately led to the hush money payment at the center of his trial. Daniels testified that Trump answered the door in pajamas, that he told her not to worry that he was married, and that he did not use a condom when they had sex.

That prompted lawyers for Trump to seek a mistrial based on what they called prejudicial testimony. But the judge in the case rejected that request. And,

We’ve seen a ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.

In a speech on Tuesday honoring victims of the Holocaust, President Biden condemned what he said was the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in the United States after the October 7th attacks on Israel. And he expressed worry that too many Americans were already forgetting the horrors of that attack.

The Jewish community, I want you to know I see your fear, your hurt, and your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Clare Toeniskoetter, and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Liz O. Baylen, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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• May 3, 2024   •   25:33 The Protesters and the President
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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Michael Crowley

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Clare Toeniskoetter and Rikki Novetsky

Edited by Liz O. Baylen

Original music by Marion Lozano ,  Elisheba Ittoop and Dan Powell

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

If and when Israel and Hamas reach a deal for a cease-fire, the United States will immediately turn to a different set of negotiations over a grand diplomatic bargain that it believes could rebuild Gaza and remake the Middle East.

Michael Crowley, who covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times, explains why those involved in this plan believe they have so little time left to get it done.

On today’s episode

Michael Crowley , a reporter covering the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The New York Times.

Background reading :

Talks on a cease-fire in the Gaza war are once again at an uncertain stage .

Here’s how the push for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia looked before Oct. 7 .

From early in the war, President Biden has said that a lasting resolution requires a “real” Palestinian state .

Here’s what Israeli officials are discussing about postwar Gaza.

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state. More about Michael Crowley

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