Zhi Li

Harbin is a city in Northeast China that rose to prominence as a result of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in a context of Russian imperial expansion. Affectionately known as “the Moscow of the East,” Harbin’s history, architecture, food, and language bear strong Russian/Soviet influences. Given the joint Chinese and Russian/European influences, Harbin represents a dynamic, hybridized, and liminal space. Adopting the conceptual lenses of “chronotope” and “polyphony,” this study explores the linguistic and semiotic landscape of the famous Saint Sophia Cathedral (an Eastern Orthodox church) and Zhongyang Street/Central Street (a Russian-style pedestrian street) in Harbin. Historically, these areas once featured highly Russified linguistic/semiotic landscape, which later saw significant de-Russification as many Russians left and a Chinese identity was emphasized. In recent decades, Russian linguistic and semiotic elements are deliberately foregrounded and strategically employed in a context of tourism, commerce, and business. Drawing on a corpus of photographic data, the study examines the combination and orchestration of multilingual signs (i.e., Chinese, English, and Russian), investigates issues of translation, and explores how the multilingual signs, various architectural styles (of Russian/European origins), various products (e.g., Russian-style khleb, kvass, and Matryoshka dolls) and spatiotemporal elements give rise to dynamic semiotic assemblages. Its findings reveal how such multimodal and multisemiotic ensembles construct a sense of authenticity and exoticness and importantly contribute to the commodification of Harbin. These lead to a diverse and cosmopolitan image, a hybrid East-meets-West urban identity and a layered urban palimpsest. This interdisciplinary study contributes to scholarship in multilingualism, linguistic/semiotic landscape, the commodification of language, multimodal discourse analysis, urban studies, urban geography, and sociolinguistics.

Is it possible for historical materialism to have a specific normative basis that allows the scientific aspects of Marx’s theory to be compatible with his political philosophy and ethics? No consensus has so far been reached on this question. The debate between the normative Marx and the non-normative Marx starts with an acknowledgement of a dichotomy between facts and value. In order to resolve this dichotomy, many studies tend to place value rather than facts at the heart of their arguments – they attempt to demonstrate that Marx explored issues of justice, equality, and liberty at the normative level. However, by drawing on John R. Searle’s answer to the Humean question of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, we can adopt a different approach to the study that puts facts, rather than values, at the heart of the argument. Under this approach, Marx’s analysis of the facts of estrangement, surplus-value, and the like, does not consist of factual statements that exclude value and the scientific theories that result from them. Rather, it consists of the statement of institutional facts that contain values. In Marx’s case, a fact-sensitive normative theory is fully possible.

Today, money takes an important role in our life, which is accompanied by a special mental phenomenon, i.e., fetish of money. Generally, this phenomenon occurs in modern society characterized by the money economy system. And this paper tries to give a systematic argument of fetish of money in order to uncover the ontological ground of it. It will be clarified in three parts. First, the reason why money and fetish of money are historically inevitable in history will be listed out and analyzed, through the discussion about the separation of individuality from sociality. Second, the ontological ground of fetish of money will be demonstratedbased on the argument of individual freedom in the way which history is considered identical with logic. This part will involve the analyses of the relationship between money and positive individual freedom, of the relationship between fetish of money and abstract individual freedom, and of mysteriousness of money and religiousness of fetish of money. Finally, there is an attempt to answer the question whether it is possible to overcome fetish of money.

As to Karl Marx, theory of estranged labor emphasizes the realization of man’s species-nature through free labor, based on views of man’s species-nature. Marx makes it clear that labor is the most important form of externalization of man’s species-nature. And three qualities of labor, i.e., objectivity, subjectivity and sociality, all eventually prove that man is a species-being. Another point; Marx takes priority to species-nature, even considering individual feeling as the realization of man’s nature. In commodity production, however, what occurs is self-estrangement of labor, and man wouldn’t be able to realize species-being into his existence. Consequently, the being of species becomes a meaning of individual being, and man’s essence sharply opposes his existence. I don’t think the above argument is reasonable, since the opposite proof was given by later Marx in Historical Materialism, especially in Theses on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology.