This book explores poems, novels, legends, operas and other genres of writing from the Ming Dynasty. It is composed of two parts: the literary history; and comprehensive reference materials based on the compilation of several chronologies. By studying individual literary works, the book analyzes the basic laws of the development of literature during the Ming Dynasty, and explores the influences of people, time, and place on literature from a sociological perspective. In turn, it conducts a contrastive analysis of Chinese and Western literature, based on similar works from the same literary genre and their creative methods. The book also investigates the relationship between literary theory and literary creation practices, including those used at various poetry schools. In closing, it studies the unique aesthetic traits of related works. Sharing valuable insights and perspectives, the book can serve as a role model for future literary history studies. It offers a unique resource for literary researchers, reference guide for students and educators, and lively read for members of the general public.

This book offers a unique historical documentation of the development of the ambitious religious entrepreneurism by leaders of the Early Rain church (and later Western China Presbytery leadership), in an effort to gain social influence in China through local institution-building and global public image management. It unravels the social processes of how this Christian community with a public image of defending religious freedom in China was undermined by an internal loss of moral authority. Based on publicly available texts from Chinese social media that aren’t readily available in the West as well as in-depth interviews, it is framed by existing scholarship in social theories of the public sphere, charismatic domination in social transition, and the role of power in organizational behaviour. These churches’ stories show how Christianity, which has long been politically marginalized in communist China, has not only adapted and challenged the socio-political status quo, but how it was also ironically shaped by the political culture. This is an insightful and critical ethnographic study of one of modern China’s most famous house churches. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religion in China as well as those working in Religious Studies, Asian studies, Chinese studies, and Mission Studies more generally.

Selected as one of Ten Outstanding Books of 2017 for Mission Studies by the International Bulletin of Mission Research This sociological portrait presents how Chinese Christians have coped with life under a hostile regime over a span of different historical periods, and how Christian churches as collective entities have been reshaped by ripples of social change. China’s change from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, or from an agrarian society to an urbanizing society, are admittedly significant phenomena worthy of scholarly attention, but real changes are about values and beliefs that give rise to social structures over time. The growth of Christianity has become interwoven with the disintegration or emergence of Chinese cultural beliefs, political ideologies, and commercial values. Relying mainly on an oral history method for data collection, the authors allow the narratives of Chinese Christians to speak for themselves. Identifying the formative cultural elements, a sociohistorical analysis also helps to lay out a coherent understanding of the complexity of religious experiences for Christians in the Chinese world. This book also serves to bring back scholarly discussions on the habits of the heart as the condition that helps form identities and nurture social morality, whether individuals engage in private or public affairs.

Testing and characterizing the difference between two data samples is of fundamental interest in statistics. Existing methods such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer- von-Mises tests do not scale well as the dimensionality increases and provide no easy way to characterize the difference should it exist. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for inference that addresses these challenges in the form of a prior for Bayesian nonparametric analysis. The new prior is constructed based on a random-partition-and-assignment procedure similar to the one that defines the standard optional P´olya tree distribution, but has the ability to generate multiple random distributions jointly. These random probability distributions are allowed to "couple", that is to have the same conditional distribution, on subsets of the sample space. We show that this "coupling optional P´olya tree" prior provides a convenient and effective way for both the testing of two sample difference and the learning of the underlying structure of the difference. We provide both simulated and real data examples to illustrate the work of this method and compare its performance to several existing methods, both frequentist and Bayesian. We demonstrate through an analysis of the Wellcome Trust Case-control Consortium data how the method can be applied to conduct multiple marker association tests. We also discuss some practical issues in the computational implementation of this prior and explore techniques that can be utilized to improve the computational efficiency in the appendices.

This book focuses on the #MeToo movement in China, critically examining how three competing ideologies have worked in co-opting #MeToo activism: China’s official communism, Western neoliberalism, and an emerging Chinese cyber feminism. In 2018, China’s #MeToo cyber activism initially maintained its momentum despite strict censorship, presenting women’s voices against gendered violence and revealing scripts of power in different sectors of society. Eventually though it lost impetus with sloganization and stigmatization under a trio of forces of pressures: corporate corruption, over-politicization by Western media, and continued state censorship. The book documents the social events and gendered norms in higher education, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business, and religious circles that preceded and followed high-profile cases of alleged sexual abuses in mainland China, engaging with sociological scholarship relating to demoralization and power, media studies, and gender studies. Through these entwined theories the author seeks to give both scholars and the general audience in gender studies a window into the ongoing tension in the power spheres of state, market, and gendered hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, China studies, media studies, and cultural studies

Assisted by a diverse mass media industry, American evangelicalism has been long plagued by consumerism, entrepreneurism, and social engineering. Churches and movements that carry the name of Christ have become projects of ambition and scandals in the public eye. Without fixing its dysfunctions, these ministry models have expanded to other parts of the world, reaping similar fruits of corruption, prejudice, and abuses. The alarm call of #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements since 2017 made it more urgent for the global body of Christ to inspect its pathological patterns. What kind of response does the #MeToo movement require of our public theology and leadership ethics? Sociologist Li Ma invites us to re-engage with biblical exegesis while being attentive to new mandates of God revealed from #MeToo. A creative Ellulian integration of sociological analysis and theology, Babel Church incisively reveals why American evangelicalism and its global projects have succumbed to the temptations of worldly power at the expense of vulnerable members in the body of Christ.

This book traces archaeological exploration and discoveries as early as 2012 and reveals Liangzhu culture by reviewing seven years of archaeological findings at the Liangzhu historical site, developments in archaeology history, the psychological journeys of archaeologists, as well as the collision of schools of thought. It also contains in-depth interviews with archaeological experts and other specialists, building a bridge between popular interest and academic interest, and showcases Liangzhu civilization and archaeology for professionals and the general public alike.

Christian Women and Modern China presents a social history of women pioneers in Chinese Protestantism from the 1880s to the 2010s. The author interrupts a hegemonic framework of historical narratives by exploring formal institutions and rules as well as social networks and social norms that shape the lived experiences of women. This book achieves a more nuanced understanding about the interplays of Christianity, gender, power and modern Chinese history. It reintroduces Chinese Christian women pioneers not only to women’s history and the history of Chinese Christianity, but also to the history of global Christian mission and the global history of many modern professions, such as medicine, education, literature, music, charity, journalism, and literature.

Precision motion control is strongly required in many fields, such as precision engineering, micromanufacturing, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Although great achievements have been made in control engineering, it is still challenging to fulfill the desired performance for precision motion control systems. Substantial works have been presented to reveal an increasing trend to apply optimization approaches in precision engineering to obtain the control system parameters. In this book, we present a result of several years of work in the area of advanced optimization for motion control systems. The book is organized into two parts: Part I focuses on the model-based approaches, and Part II presents the data-based approaches. To illustrate the practical appeal of the proposed optimization techniques, theoretical results are verified with practical examples in each chapter. Industrial problems explored in the book are formulated systematically with necessary analysis of the control system synthesis. By virtue of the design and implementation nature, this book can be used as a reference for engineers, researchers, and students who want to utilize control theories to solve the practical control problems. As the methodologies have extensive applicability in many control engineering problems, the research results in the field of optimization can be applied to full-fledged industrial processes, filling in the gap between research and application to achieve a technology frontier increment.

This book offers a sociological analysis as well as a theological discussion of China’s internal migration since the marketization reform in 1978. It documents the social and political processes that encompass the experiences of internal migrants from the countryside to the city during China’s integration into the global economy. Informed by sociological analysis and narratives of the urban poor, this volume reconstructs the political, economic, social and spiritual dimensions of this urban underclass in China who made up the economic backbone of the Asian superpower.