X. Wang

My wife was a student from among the "workers, peasants, and soldiers" and studied history at university. One day, during her junior year, a female student from a country village announced loudly in class, "I don't know what a eunuch is!" She looked very pleased with herself when she had said this. Other students in the class chimed in: "I don't know either." "Neither do I." My wife is a very straightforward sort of person and she said shyly, "Oh, I think I might know—a eunuch is a man who has been castrated." Someone asked, "What does ‘castrated’ mean?" and she blushed scarlet and was unable to speak. She was only a girl at the time, and it upset her very much to admit in front of everybody that she knew what eunuchs and castration were. For a long while she felt miserable, not daring to see anybody or to say anything

[Bertrand] Russell, in On Authority, wrote about a kind of hieratic authority which in the past lay in the hands of the clergy, and said that in the West, intellectuals are the descendants of these clergy. He also said that Chinese Confucianism possessed a hieratic authority, which leads us to think that China's intellectuals are the descendants of the Confucians. The knowledge that clergy and Confucians possessed came from a few sacred books, such as the Bible and the Analects. But modern intellectuals, though they may not be wholly human, are at least partly so, and have no sacred books in their hands. They make people believe in them wholly on the basis of knowledge, and this knowledge can itself win people's confidence. The strange thing is, that this latter kind of knowledge cannot bring authority with it

I make my living by writing. Someone once said to me, "It's no good writing like this; you've no life! "At first I thought he meant I was dead, and I got very angry. Then I suddenly thought that the word' life" could be used in a different way. Writers often go and live for a while in remote places where conditions are hard, and such excursions are called "experiencing life." This expression may sound as if it refers to a corpse momentarily coming back to life, but that is not actually what it means. These writers do it in order to gain some understanding of a hard life and to write better books, and it is a very good way to set about it. This was what the person speaking to me meant by "life": He did not mean I needed to die. When I realized that, my anger turned to joy. Although I had lived and worked with a production team in a very poor area, I did not consider that I had seen enough of life. Far from it; in fact, I needed more experience of it. But I still felt that "experiencing the hard life" would be a better way of putting it. Leaving out the adjective implies that "life" means frequently having to suffer hardship—there is a presumption that life is to be understood especially in a negative sense. People of my age have all had the experience of contrasting present happiness with past misery: Listening to reports of past sufferings, eating "recalling suffering" meals, and so on. This is not the same as "experiencing life," but there are some similarities. As we all know, in the old society poor people led lives worse than the lives of cattle, eating chaff and greens—not vegetables, but wild plants—and the "recalling suffering" meals were modeled on the diet of the poor in the old society

Social thought in modern times, in the "modernity" as an empirical value targets and as a "problem" between, there have been several times variation. Contemporary Western society from the post-modern theory, adhere to and develop a modern and conservatism on three different standpoint to reflect modern issues. In the modern quest and modernity reflect the existence of a common demands: liberation. In Modem western social thought, there are several variations between taking 'modernity' as the value that was looked upon and sought after and as an issue of experimental realty. Contemporary social theorists reflect the issue of modernity from three different standpoints: the postmodern standpoint, the conservative standpoint and the standpoint insisting on and enlarging the project of modernity. There are a common concern between the longing for modernization and the reflecting on modernity : emanipation

We've had quite a number of outbreaks of "culture fever": The first one was apparently in 1985, when I was studying overseas, and friends told me the fever was raging at home in China. When I came home in 1988, I was in time for the second one. And over the last two years there has been a fever of cultural criticism, or "discussions on the humanist spirit." It looks as though the phenomenon of culture fever has certain similarities to a flu epidemic. The first two fevers were fairly respectable, and at least provided information on some of the things that had been achieved in the social sciences overseas; but the latest one has been no good at all, consisting as it does mostly of the airing of complaints. It is claimed that the attitude of society toward intellectuals in the humanities is incorrect; that the intellectuals themselves are incorrect; that since Confucius said "The gentleman understands what is moral; the small man understands what is profitable" [Analects IV. 16], we should be trying to emulate the gentleman. Probably other things too have been said, but I believe that these have been the main points of most discussions during this outbreak of cultural criticism fever. Wang Shuo has come in for a good deal of abuse this time, in the same way that, in Water Margin, Lei Heng the "Winged Tiger," county head of Yuncheng, is jeered at in the courtesan's house when someone tells him, "It would be easier for a dog to grow horns than for you to know the proper way to behave here!" Culture is just this sort of establishment, and the riff-raff are definitely not allowed to set foot inside it. Looked at in this way, culture is a set of values centered on the self, and implies a closing of the ranks against outsiders. But I have no wish to think too badly of others, so I shall just say that the "culture" which is so much in favor this time is a kind of moral strength which demands that we should all preserve our personal integrity and not be tainted by material desires. We cultural workers are like Tang dynasty Buddhist monks, and the material desires of the everyday world are like the female scorpion spirit. We must not be seduced by the sorceress and sleep with her, for then, when we have lost our original yang essence and the pure seed has left us, we will no longer be virgins, and will not be fit to go to the Western Heaven and worship the Buddha. […] But if I go on talking such rubbish, other people may not acknowledge me as a cultural worker and may deprive me of the right to discuss cultural issues. What I am trying to say is that if this fever continues, I shall soon no longer know what culture is

I, too, belong to the "old three classes."* At the age when I should have been in college, I went to Yunnan to dig ditches. This was bad for me; but worse, still, it caused my parents great anxiety. It has been said that worrying about their children took years off the lives of the parents of educated youth who were sent to the countryside, and that is how it was in my family. Parents always try to protect their growing children, and to be powerless to do so during that exceptional decade meant they had a lot of worry. As an adult, I have had pangs of conscience about this, and especially so when my father passed away. When I think about the details, of course, it was not my fault; but those feelings never go away

This study tests the effects of top management team member collectivistic values and TMT dissatisfaction with the financial situation on the environmental ethics of TMT members. We also examine the moderating effect of collectivistic values on the relationship between financial dissatisfaction and environmental ethics. Analyses of multi-level and source data show that financial dissatisfaction of the TMT negatively affects TMT members’ environmental ethics. However, TMT members’ individual collectivism can increase TMT members’ environmental ethics. Analyses also show that TMT members’ collectivism moderates the relationship between financial dissatisfaction and environmental ethics across individual and team levels.

Design based research has been acknowledged as a productive approach for advancing educational technology. Coincidentally, open source software has been found to be a good fit for implementing design based research. This report presents a case study of a software project using a design-based research approach and free/open source software. The project, iSocial, is developing a 3D virtual environment for youth with autism spectrum disorders to develop social competence. The study illustrates how the flexibility and community features of FOSS fit with the iterative nature of design-based research to benefit the development of iSocial, and the report also discusses challenges of implementing FOSS and DBR.

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science