A Study of Intercultural Competence under CLIL with the Assistance of E-learning - A Case Study of English Education of Chinese Culture

The COVID-19 has ushered the world into the post-epidemic era and has also brought challenges and opportunities to education. What educators must do now is not only integrating Electronic Learning with offline teaching, but also finding a teaching method that can build intercultural knowledge and understanding, as well as cultivating intercultural communication skills, which CLIL pedagogy will do. To improve students' intercultural ability under CLIL and cultivate their intercultural competence with international vision and Chinese feelings, offline learning should be combined with electronic learning. The theoretical foundation for this study is Coyle's definition of CLIL, as well as Dai and Chen's mode of intercultural competence. The research objects will be students in English Education of Chinese Culture in Guangzhou Xinhua University. With a mixed research method combining quantitative and qualitative research, this paper explores theoretically how CLIL can be used to improve intercultural competence in China and how to design the class of English Education of Chinese Culture under CLIL for a better development of students' intercultural competence with Electronic Learning. © 2022 IEEE.

Drawings + Talk: Capturing the Multimodal Authoring of Emergent Bilinguals through Culturally Responsive Teaching

Hao and Brown explore how a teacher-researcher team created a virtual learning space that embraced culturally relevant/responsive literacy practices and supported multimodal authoring practices for emergent bilingual children during COVID-19. The extenuating circumstances of the pandemic closed many heritage language schools, and there was a need to continue literacy learning for Chinese American children. These factors caused to rethink the best ways to maintain culturally responsive and relevant literacy instruction with young learners in a distance-learning format given the power of this approach to move children toward academic success, cultural competence, and an ability to navigate critical consciousness. Their central question was: How did emergent bilingual children make meaning of stories during a virtual book club driven by culturally responsive literacy practices and a multimodal approach to authoring? In this case, they invited eight children and their parents from Ling's Chinese class to join a virtual book club that met once a week to participate in multimodal authoring surrounding read-alouds of texts connected to Chinese culture and language.

Chinese Tales of Epidemics: In Search of Hope amid Despair

Tales (gushi in Chinese, including all narrative genres) are like living fossils-preserving not only historical events in general, but also behaviors and beliefs in specific places and in specific cultural groups. Therefore, Chinese tales of epidemics reveal fundamental beliefs in and life-views toward not only epidemics, but also the meaning of living a life. The three parts in this paper are intended to tell a long story: first providing some basic terms and concepts related to epidemics;second presenting, for the first time in English, seven tales spanning a two-millennia history up to the present day which show the struggles between the human and the god/ghost/wu-shaman of epidemics;and, finally, offering some reflections upon the realities we are facing in the current COVID-19 pandemic.1

The Dualistic Trends of Sinophobia and Sinophilia: Impact on Foreign Policy Towards China

The People's Republic of China has invited both fascination and fear, admiration and contempt in the last few years. Various public opinion surveys' data findings reveal a nuanced and conflicted phenomenon of ‘Sinophobia' and ‘Sinophillia' across the world nations. One view of China is that of an ‘autocratic,' ‘anti-democratic' regime provoking anxiety and suspicion reflected in a trending wave of anti-China sentiments evolving into ‘Sinophobia,' with its prevalence and intensity highlighted in increasing cases of racism and violence towards immigrant Chinese after the novel coronavirus outbreak. The growing intensity of Sinophobia is noticed in countries witnessing a barging influx of Chinese investment with Chinese land grabs and the loss of native jobs. However, another view is of a nation that inspires vast admiration for its economic ascent and traditional culture. Today, China has an increasing appeal and attraction not just for its economic engagement but also for its culture, language and tourism. Public perceptions and opinions are critical factors in determining a state's foreign policy preferences and choices. This qualitative study utilises various global surveys and public opinion polls to gauge the dualistic trends of public opinion on China and examines the salience of public opinion in foreign relations, underlining a pluralist approach. The article illustrates multiple cases highlighting how negative or positive public opinion of China is correlated with an aggressive or friendly foreign policy posture towards China. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Study of nonsynchronous online teaching of regional anatomy for international students integrated with medical humanities and local culture during COVID-19 pandemic.

PURPOSE: The COVID-19 pandemic imposed unexpected disruptions to anatomical educational practice, the teaching of regional anatomy for international students which has changed to an online format and faces various challenges. The challenges include creating online education homogeneous/equivalent to offline education, introducing local culture to international students, and educating students in medical humanities and ethics. METHODS: To address these problems, the teaching staff integrated medical humanities and local culture into nonsynchronous online teaching of regional anatomy. RESULTS: The nonsynchronous online teaching with interpreted videos of dissections does not significantly affect the experimental and total scores of regional anatomy courses for international students. Integrating medical humanities and local culture into this teaching model is appreciated by them and also has a good teaching effect. CONCLUSION: Students not only gained professional knowledge but also obtained enhanced exposure to local culture and professional spirit from this regional anatomy education.

Effect of Wuhan's anti-COVID-19 lockdown on its pace of life and metaphorical temporal perspective.

The pace of life, as an indispensable aspect of microscopic culture, has been largely ignored by the academia for a long time. This study proposes that the emergent outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan put people there into a fight against time, leading to a speeding up of their pace of life. This might have affected their temporal perspective, regardless of the macroscopic regulation of Chinese culture. To this end, we designed an online questionnaire to gather data about Wuhan people's pace of life and temporal perspective, both during its lockdown and seven months after the lockdown. The results showed that people in while-lockdown Wuhan displayed a much faster pace of life and also a much higher tendency to choose the Moving Time perspective than people in Wuhan seven months after the lockdown. This suggests that the pace of life is not only regulated by specific culture macroscopically, but also by certain pressing events microscopically, and one's temporal perspective is affected by the changed pace of life. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40167-022-00113-4.

Empirical Study on Design Trend of Taiwan (1960s–2020): The Evolution of Theme, Diversity and Sustainability

With significance in improving and developing local design culture as well as in supplementing global design history, this essay describes a study on the past and a clear prediction of the future by exploring Taiwan’s design history from approximately the 1960s to 2020 based on the evolution of theme, diversity, and sustainability. In this research, the Python programming language is used to apply three algorithms of term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), Simpson’s diversity index (SDI), and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to conduct a text exploration of design journals. The results show the following: in the 1960s–1980s, the evolution of theme focused on evaluation strategies, technical practices, and foreign cultures, on digital design, multiculturalism, and design aesthetics in the 1990s, and on emotional human factors, intelligent technology, and local culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Local culture and intelligent technology are the main driving forces of the current design industry. Regarding diversity, after a period of rapid change and stable rising, it has shown a downward trend in recent years. This indicates that current design needs to be stimulated by external environmental variations. Sustainability was focused on technology, the market, and education during the 1960s–1980s;on consumers, design education, and eco-design during the 1990s;and on integration across fields during the 2000s–2020. In order to gain a wider perspective of the complete design context of Chinese culture, the results show the current and future trends of the academic community, in addition to a reference for the study of the design histories of other areas in the world.

Perceived Benefits and Barriers to Chinese COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Among Young Adults in China.

Survey-based research has provided us with breadth regarding perceived benefits and barriers to COVID-19 vaccination among Chinese people. Most such research has been conducted within hypothetical COVID-19 vaccine contexts, and few studies are specific to young adults aged 18-40, a pivotal target population for COVID-19 vaccination. Now that the Sinopharm and Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines have been conditionally approved in China, qualitative investigation of young adults' perceptions of benefits and barriers to taking them is warranted. Such research may suggest potential candidate themes in the COVID-19 vaccination promotional messages targeting this population. Through in-depth interviews with 55 Chinese young adults and thematic analysis guided by the health belief model, social benefits and worry reduction emerged as significant positive factors in young adults' intention to vaccinate. Several novel barriers emerged as well, including perceptions that the vaccines' advantages are weak relative to non-medical preventions and beliefs regarding Ti Zhi (the individual human constitution), which confused some participants about their suitability for vaccination. The study also identified two modifying factors, trust in the government and perceived vaccine information insufficiency, both of which appeared to be indirectly associated with vaccination intention by augmenting the perceived barriers. The results suggest that more attention could be paid to young adults' cultural background when developing relevant health communications.

Cultural Influences on Chinese Citizens' Adoption of Digital Contact Tracing: A Human Infrastructure Perspective

Digital contact tracing is an ICT approach for controlling public health crises. It identifies users' risk of infection based on their healthcare and travel information. In the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries implemented digital contact tracing to contain the coronavirus outbreak. However, the adoption rates vary significantly across different countries. In this study, we investigate Chinese people's adoption of digital contact tracing. We aim at finding the influence of Chinese culture on people's attitudes and behaviors toward the technology. We interviewed 26 Chinese participants and used thematic analysis to interpret the data. Our findings showed that Chinese culture shaped citizens' interactions with the digital contact tracing at multiple levels;driven by the culture, Chinese citizens accepted digital contact tracing and contributed to making digital contact tracing a socio-technical infrastructure of people's daily lives. We also discuss such cultural influences with the growing literature of human infrastructure and crisis informatics. © 2022 ACM.

From Pandemic Diplomacy, Mainlandisation of Hong Kong to the Embattled Belt and Road Initiative: The Enigma of Communist China's Superpower March

Next, moving from CCP's Hong Kong geogovemance issue - which also involves direct policy impacts on its Taiwan policy, crossStrait relations as well as domestic ruthlessly suppressed civil society's rights-defending and pro-democracy movement - to international geoeconomic and regional geopolitical calculus, Tiago Luis Carvalho and Carla Guapo da Costa's article, "China's Geoeconomic Strategy: The Case of State Grid's European Investments", and Khadijah Md Khalid and Muhammad Daniai Azman's "In the Dragon's Tight Embrace? A Neo-Gramscian Perspective on Malaysia's Foreign Policy towards China" respectively analyse how China's State Grid, a transnational State-owned enterprise, can be an instrument of the Chinese geoeconomic strategy, and the hegemonic forces at play in the business-ruling elite nexus, resistance to Malaysia's attempted foreign policy recalibration towards China after the Southeast Asian nation's game-changing 2018 election, the interplay between domestic and international distinctions, as well as the formal and informal individual agency in various dimensions of bilateral ties. While Carvalho and da Costa from Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Portugal, draw our attention to the fact that despite the important economic gains that can be capitalised from SG's investments, such investments entail geopolitical effects that might collide with host countries' political and economic security, Khadijah and Daniai from the University of Malaya, Malaysia, based on their investigations into various Belt and Road projects in Malaysia and scrutiny on the China policy of the Najib administration, urge for the need to probe the dimensions and diffusions of power in state-society relations, variations between authoritarian regimes, and concealed business deals among policymakers in studying Malaysia-China relations, while acknowledging the significant impact of the interplay between domestic forces on foreign policy. The CCP regime's global ambitions are again the subject of investigation after the next paper on Hong Kong by Jason Cheung that has been discussed above - this time in a country case study "China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Energy Projects: China's Strategy and Implications for Pakistan" by Hidayatullah Khan from Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering, and Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Balochistan, Pakistan, and the University of Malaya's Geetha Govindasamy, member of the Malaysian Association of Japanese Studies (MAJAS) and the Malaysian Scholars on Korea (MASK) Network, and Korea Foundation and Sumitomo Foundation grant recipient, and Md Nasrudin Md Akhir, founder of the Malaysia-Japan Research Centre, co-founder of the Malaysian Association of Japanese Studies and the Japanese Studies Association in ASEAN, and recipient of the Emperor of Japan's Order of the Rising Sun. The second section of this focus issue, From SCO, BRI to SÂRS-CoV-2: Cooperation or leverage?, covers the PRC's engagement with strategic and trade partners through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - the Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance established in 2001 whose membership consists of China and Russia plus four Central Asian post-USSR republics (thus earning the rather unflattering description of "The League of Authoritarian Gentlemen"1 from some observer) with India and Pakistan joining later in 2017 - and Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road Initiative, and traces the CCP regime's attempt to shrewdly capitalise for diplomatic gain on a deadly global novel coronavirus pneumonia pandemic that was ironically caused by its mishandling of the original Wuhan outbreak through its usual suppression of information flow, persecution of whistle-blowers and citizen-reporters, and manipulating world bodies - in this case the World Health Organization - with its newfound strong global influence.

Research on the Mechanism of the Influence of Consumption Behavior in China's Cultural and Tourism Industry under the Normalization of COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control

Based on the revitalization of the tourism industry under the normalization of the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control, this study uses the most effective predictive index of research-driven behavior - behavior intention to construct the Extended-TPB model, to study the behavior intention of tourists in the special period background and clarify the influence mechanism of tourists' choice of consumption behavior. The research not only provides a reference for the cultural and travel enterprises to suggest the characteristics of tourists' consumption behavior at present, but it also provides a reference for the revitalization of the industry after the epidemic. The results show that: 1) the prevention and control effect of China's COVID-19 and the epidemic prevention measures of cultural and tourism enterprises are important factors such as tourist behavior attitude, subjective norms, etc.;2) Tourists' trust in Chinese culture and tourism industry and preference for Chinese culture dilute the pressure of subjective norms to a certain extent, that is the higher the trust, the less affected by the epidemic or the attitudes of surrounding relatives and friends, and vice versa;3) According to the characteristics of China's culture and tourism industry and epidemic situation, the construction of culture and information capitals can effectively promote the generation of cultural tourism behavior. © 2021 Kriedt Enterprises Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Gender Diversity and Work-Life Conflict in Changing Times.

The aim of the study is to contribute to the "well-being, diversity, equity, and inclusion" dialogue of the post-pandemic era. Specifically, we explored the joint effects of biological sex and gender diversity in self-identity on the role demands-work and family conflict relationships. To advance the inclusion of scientific knowledge, the present study was conducted in the cultural context of a Chinese society. We surveyed a sample of 317 Taiwanese employees. We used structured questionnaires to collect data on biological sex, gender identity (self-endorsement on masculinity and femininity traits), work and family demands, work-to-family conflict (WFC), and family-to-work conflict (FWC). We found two sets of significant three-way interactions (sex × femininity × role demands) in predicting work and family conflict. First, for men, identifying with high femininity traits strengthened the positive relationship between work demands and FWC; for women, identifying with low femininity traits strengthened the same relationship. Second, for men, identifying with high femininity traits strengthened the relationship between family demands and WFC; for women, identifying with low femininity traits strengthened the same relationship. Our findings highlight the importance of jointly examining the biological, psychological, and social aspects of gender on the work and family interface. Contextualizing in an Eastern cultural tradition, we put the spotlight on societal pressure on people of nontraditional gender identities.