The current judicial reform in China aims at enhancing the professionalism and accountability of judges, and at the same time, at improving the people's assessor system to broaden lay participation in adjudication. The duality of the purpose of reform calls for a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the people's assessor system from the perspective of Chinese history and culture as well as comparative law. Historically, the concept of ″lay participation″ was adopted in China during the period of the Modern Democratic Revolutionwhen Western legal culture was introduced. It is the political symbol of the people's participation in justice, but has not well integrated into modern procedure law. From the perspective of comparative law, although it is literally called ″jury″, it embraces some features of the lay assessor system in continental law system countries while retaining some elements from Chinese traditional judicial culture although it is literally called ″jury″. Japan and South Korea initiated lay participation in criminal trials as a pillar of the judicial systems at the beginning of 21st century, which was an important development in Northeast Asian comparative law, The similarities in the institutional framework and legal culture between Japan, South Korea and China provide useful reference for the reform of China's people's assessor system. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out comparative study on the motivation of the reform, the content and the effectiveness of lay participation in the three countries. In terms of motivation, Japan and South Korea both aim to overcome bureaucratic deficiencies, such as lack of judicial transparency and inadequate social awareness in highly formal judicial decisions by high elite judges, hoping to gain public support of and trust in the judicial system. By comparison, China has stressed the importance of improving judicial professionalism while allowing ordinary citizens to participate more in the adjudication process. Although the three countries share common goals of reform, they differ in system and functional designs. The lay participation in China and Japan is in many respects closer to the model of lay assessors in those countries with civil law tradition, in which lay persons have equal power and obligation as professional judges. By contrast, Korean jurors are only allowed to decide the facts of the case and such decisions on the facts are only for the reference of the panel of judges when they make the final decision. The comparison with Japanese lay participation and Korean jury not onlydemonstrates the institutional similarities and differences, but also provides reference for the further reform of the people's assessor system in China. The primary goal of lay participation is to ensure and achieve fairness and justice in each case. The practice in Japan and South Korea indicates that it is the top priority of Chinese judicial reformers to balance the relationship between professionalism and lay participation, and meanwhile to ensure the goal of professionalism. It should also be realized that lay participation in adjudication is not the only possibility for ordinary citizens to be involved in judicial practice. The reformers should consider some other ways to involve lay persons in the review of prosecution, fact finding, etc. Moreover, it is also crucial in the future reform to weaken the political significance and strengthen the judicial function through the improvement of procedural rules on the court in order to meet the increasing demands arising from the practice and litigation in China.

In recent years, measuring the Rule of Law (MRL) through Qualitative Research Methods (QRM), which is symbolized by the Judicial Transparency Index (JTI) research, burgeons and thrives, heralding the age of empirical studies in law. JTI assimilates the principles of assessment, the assessment criteria, and the quantitative techniques, all of which are employed by modern social scientists, and introduces them to the research in judicial transparency. JTI scientifically measures the implementation and effectiveness of judicial transparency through a meticulous index system and assessment methods, indicates objects' merits and demerits in the field of judicial transparency, and pressurizes courts externally into reforms. Accordingly, JTI enhances judicial credibility and checks abuses by judicial power. The current studies on JTI, however, face several problems, such as the disproportionality between JTI's subjective and objective indicators, the limitations of assessment methods and techniques, and the criticisms on the extent of JTI's effectiveness. The experimental study of JTI in Wuxing District epitomizes the difficulties to grasp the underlying rules behinds judicial data, and to acquire valuable information. Intolerable observational errors due to incomprehensive sampling, the limitations of access to judicial data, and the insufficiency of data consolidation haunt the study.The advent of the Age of Big Data ushers in momentous changes to JTI studies, besides other QRM ones. The natures of Big Data, including massive storage capacity, high-speed processing, multiple-resolution analysis, and high-accuracy, contribute to the explanation of the intrinsic correlations between the operations of judicial activities and other related social phenomena, to precisely deduce what kinds of rules the judicial operations follow, and to accommodate decision analysis and future directive plans. The JTI research in the Age of Big Data should cope with the structural transformations, which are related to the patterns of thinking, the compositions of the society, and the methodology employed by scholars. On the one hand, public demands on judicial issues deserve concrete responses, which entails a dynamic equilibrium between judicial transparency and judicial justice. On the other hand, the social mechanisms of judicial transparency should be properly elucidated for the purpose of optimizing judicial operations and decisions. Moreover, scholars should keep their optimism discreetly and prudently, and never covet anything out of JTI's hands from it.

The name of ″The Economic Belt of the Silk Road and the Silk Road on the Sea in the Twenty-first Century ″ (abbreviated as ″the Belt and Road″ or ″B & R″) originated from the ″Silk Road ″. Research findings on ″B & R″ published in recent years involve topics such as ″economy ″, ″trade ″, ″finance ″, etc. There have been few Chinese literatures on ″the Belt and Road ″ from the perspective of world heritage. Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) first named the Silk Road in his book China: The Result of my Travels and the Studies based Thereon (1877-1912, 5 vols. and atlas). In the process of using the name in different countries, times and disciplines, the Silk Road has derived many names by geographical landform, place name & location, transportation, trade goods and cultural concept. From its first initiative on September 7, 2013, to being officially launched in March 28, 2015, the vision and action of ″B & R″ went through a process of understanding and planning. ″B & R″ is named through long social practice, yet it is still open to discussion for pure academic accuracy. Although ″B & R″ is a linear or banded ″road″, the scope of its space can be extended to the world. Its core scope ranges from the important nodes along the new Silk Road (key economic towns, harbors, customs and islands, etc.), its main areas to the road net of the main lines. Its substantial scope includes the sum of national economic hinterland, which is reached by important nodes, main areas and road nets along the new Silk Road. Its buffer zone covers the territories, territorial waters and airspace boundaries of countries along the new Silk Road. Its virtual scope is the area covered and radiated by the modern communication network. The traffic thoroughfare of ″B & R″ includes thoroughfare in land (land routes & water routes in land), thoroughfare in ocean (sea routes through islands and reefs), aviation thoroughfare and network thoroughfare. The traffic terminal of ″B & R″ consists of points of departure, destination, intermediate transit (in the Silk Road network) and nodal (of land, sea and air lines). Theoretically, each region, province and city in China can become a starting point, or point of origin, of ″the Silk Road″. But the transfer point and nodal point must have the corresponding conditions, which are the key sites for infrastructure construction. The traffic type of ″B & R″ composed of transport vehicles and routes is complex and varied. There are 31 types of traffic combinations and 325 types of traffic arrangement. The construction and maintenance of ″B & R″ need safety and security. ″B & R″ will represent the mainstream of world civilization in the early Twenty-first Century.

It is a landmark event of the Beijing academia banqueting Paul Pelliot in 1909 in the history of early Dunhuang Studies.The first man who discloses the list of scholars attending the banquet is Tanaka Keitaro, a Japanese bookseller.The diaries of the experienced person are the first hand of literature in historical studies.Diary of Jiang Han newly announced records the event of the Beijing academia banqueting Paul Pelliot.The exact time is October 4th, 1909.It can be further confirmed that the date of the September 4th Tanaka Keitaro recording is wrong.It is especially valuable that Diary of Jiang Han records 18 people at the banquet.This list is the largest number of records found so far and provides an important material for reexamining the nature and significance of the event from the perspective of academic history. The foreign scholars who attended the banquet and were recorded by Diary of Jiang Han were Paul Pelliot,French and Fredrick McCormick,American.Thus Dong Kang made academic contact with stranger Paul Pelliot through the introduction of the middleman Fredrick McCormick.Investigating the identity of Chinese scholars attending the banquet,they were all incumbency officials from the Imperial Educational Ministry,the Imperial University of Peking and the Dali Court.The high officials from the Imperial Educational Ministry played an irreplaceable practical role in the banquet. The original intention of the banquet had a double purposes, one was contact with western scholars to promoting the publication of Dunhuang Literature,the other one was to promote the high officials from the Imperial Educational Ministry and the Imperial University of Peking to buy and protect the Dunhuang Literature.The banquet not only succeeded in achieving the above goals, but also greatly improved the influence of the Dunhuang Literature on Chinese academia.This event directly promoted the rise of early Dunhuang Studies. Over all, Dong Kang and Luo Zhenyu played the most important role in a series of activities before and after the banquet.They made a lot of work which had been fully recognized by the academia in Beijing,so they were elected to contact Paul Pelliot.They established good academic connection with Paul Pelliot and laid the foundation for long-term cooperation. In addition,the most noticeable of the people attending the banquet was Wang Guowei.Diary of Jiang Han provides precious historical materials to researching academic connection between Wang Guowei and the early Dunhuang Studies. Wang Guowei was an interpreter of the Imperial Educational Ministry.He could meet Paul Pelliot, read the Dunhuang Literature and attend the banquet because of help from Luo Zhenyu and Jiang Fu. Although Wang Guowei was focused on Ci and Qu,he laid the foundation for the Dunhuang Studies and greatly deepened his understanding of the Dunhuang Literature by assisting Luo Zhenyu in editing related books.

In the "Internet +" era, national cultural innovation has entered a new stage of national culture construction. The core of national cultural innovation lies in national culture, which is a cultural concept universally acknowledged in the developed countries since the end of WWII. As an important basis of a state’s international recognition, it grows with the formation of the "nation-state" concept and represents a specific manifestation of the national image. To improve the soft power of national culture, in the final analysis, efforts must be made to promote national cultural innovation, where the key is how to transform different cultural resources to enrich the national cultural system. The national cultural innovation has three characteristics: the first is that the transformation and development of the traditional culture are promoted simultaneously, so that in the "Internet +" era, the traditional culture has shown a new charm and become an important resource of national cultural innovation; the second is to absorb foreign cultures while discarding the dregs, where to absorb means taking in the contents that conform to China's national conditions and have a positive influence in foreign cultures while removing the components not suitable for Chinese politics, morals, religions and other specific national conditions at all; the third is to inherit and discriminate the revolutionary culture, while absorbing and inheriting the revolutionary culture. It requires effective promotion of it in a discriminating manner, to screen the revolutionary culture with the help of fast and efficient information transmission in the "Internet +" era, so that it is at the service of the national cultural innovation and grows into a cultural form with influence, identity and dissemination value around the world. Because the national culture is generally expressed in the form of language, the national cultural innovation comes into a close relationship with the national language security. Firstly, in the "Internet +" era, the promotion of national cultural innovation must go with the maintenance of national language security, as safeguarded national language security is the basis for the promotion of national cultural innovation. At present, the problems in national language security have been highlighted and presented mainly in three aspects: the first is that a large number of foreign and Internet words are flooded in the mother tongue, leading to the emergence of an "Internet language"; the second is that in the "Internet +" era, faster information dissemination exacerbates invasion of the mother tongue by foreign languages; the third is that the whole society fails to pay enough attention to the national language security, and the national language security problem becomes increasingly prominent with rapid development of the Internet technology. Secondly, in the "Internet +" era, the national cultural innovation must be in keeping with the national language security, so as to achieve a multiplier effect. National cultural innovation is to build and disseminate the national culture with new ideas by new means and new ways in the "Internet +" era, thus producing internal cohesion and making an impact externally. But all this must be done in tandem with the maintenance of national language security. The above is the core of this study. To correctly cope with the relationship between national cultural innovation and national language security, it is required to combine the cultural confidence with the national cultural innovation organically, to prevent the operation and understanding from stepping into two misunderstandings, namely, cultural isolationism and language hegemonism, which is the innovation of this study. Cultural isolationism is a cultural symptom caused by cultural inferiority. In the modern "nation-state" context, the degree of cultural confidence reflects the level of national cultural innovation. Cultural isolationism binds the development of the national cultural innovation, while bringing the cultural symptom of cultural arrogance as a result of language hegemonism. Specifically, it is required to prevent other countries from promoting their state or national languages in China and avoid holding a double standard to language hegemonism, so as to prevent the national cultural innovation work from being dogmatic, vulgar and quick profit oriented. Therefore, the establishment of cultural confidence is an important means to break cultural isolationism and language hegemonism.

The first populist wave appeared in the Western world in the 1860s, and, like a ″spectre″, populism has never been out of the world stage. In the 1950s, the second populist wave came into being in Latin America. Since the end of the 1980s, the third populist wave has been in flood in Europe and America, which is still in development now. In recent years, most European parliaments have populist parties and their representatives. Populism is more popular in the USA, as is proved by Trump's winning of the White House. However, as one of the basic concepts of politics, populism doesn't have a universally accepted definition. ″Populism″ in essence expresses the dissatisfaction of people with the present governments and politics in the Western world. Although it is difficult to define populism in a perfect way, its core value is clear - it's a theory of the people, and it's a movement for the people.  ″People″, ″elites″, and ″the general will″ are three key words of populism. Elites ignore people's appeal or the public will, inducing people to fight against them. In addition, the distinction between left and right wing populism should be discussed, as it is one of the issues raised by the third populist wave. The right-wing populism allows social difference and inequality, and emphasizes the inequality, which is closely related to xenophobia, racism and welfare chauvinism. But the left-wing populism tends to eliminate the differences among the people, in terms of social ideology against neoliberalism, globalization and everything that might cause the wealth inequality.  The third populist wave, as a political and social force, has swept over the Western world, leaving a profound influence on the whole world. Brexit and Donald Trump's presidency may be a good justification. The negative effects brought by the defects of globalization and neoliberalism are the direct reasons for the burst of the third populist wave. The defects of globalization and the continual economy crisis decay the middle class and the blue-color class, and populism suits their needs.  Even as it is, the inducement of the third populist wave is the agitation of the social and cultural agitation of the bottom in society. The agitation is visualized in the concern of the identity recognition of Caucasians, the crisis of immigration, the threat of terrorism, and the passive consequences of separatism. In supplement, the third populist wave shows not only the predominance function of social and cultural factors, but also the influence of political factors and the media. In a word, the reasons for the third populist wave are rather complex. Besides factors in economy, politics and media, we should pay attention to the cultural backlashes in the wave. The issues such as minorities, immigration, terrorism, EU integration are major ones to attract citizens, and they may vote for their own interests and ideas. Unlike the first two waves, the third populist wave reveals many new features. Firstly, the social basis of the third populism wave changes, expressing different social positions and political orientations. Secondly, the third populist wave, especially the right-wing populism, expresses the influences of social factors rather than economic factors towards modern politics. Thirdly, the third populist wave is not confined to the bottom of the society. It is shown in different levels of power. Economic factors and politicized social cultural factors merge at the same time and the left and the right wings of the populism rise at the same time, which results in an interactional populism at three levels: a populism in social groups, a populism between social groups and states, a populism between state and super-state levels. Fourthly, the third populist wave is much more influential than the previous ones. The populists in the third wave have won a great success, or even reached the supreme power in some countries. Fifthly, this wave is closely related to extremism or radicalism, but it will never turn to fascism or Nazism. Besides, this populism should be clearly distinguished as a political doctrine and a social movement. The criticism on populism, elitism, dictatorship and irrationality is caused by regarding populism as a realistic political movement, although in reality populism does have such troubles. However, populism is of great importance regardless of its natural defects in moral standard. In practice, it raises the topics to the front ignored by mainstream parties or politicians, expressing people's doubt on the universal values dominated by the Western world. It hopes authorities and decision makers will hear the ″painful appeal″ from the people. The wider gap between the establishment and the people there is, the more powerful this burst will be. When we take populism as a supplementary towards democracy, we will go beyond the parochialism assuming populism as a political movement, whereas the emphasis on popular sovereignty is the foundation of contemporary democracy.  As long as there is a deficit in this democracy, the pride of the elite and the indifference of the intelligentsia, there will be a return of people's power marked by populism, it is the revival of the people. Ignoring the people's interests, betraying people' will, will betray the ideals of political civilization. In this sense, the warnings of the populism to the Western democracy will never end. We should welcome rather than reject this wave flooding all over the world.

In recent years, China's conception of international order has been a hot topic among scholars at home and abroad. However, few scholars have systematically looked into China's knowledge of the component elements of an equitable and reasonable international order as well as the interrelation among them. In fact, for an all-round understanding of China's conception of international order, it is of great significance to clarify how China understands the component elements and the interrelation among them in such an order. Since the reform and opening up, China has always expressed her expectation and pursuit of an equitable and reasonable international order either in government published political documents or her leaders' important speeches. Essentially, an equitable and reasonable international order in China's vision is an intrinsic unity consisted of such components as sovereign states, pluralistic civilization views, multi-polarization, multilateralism, new security concepts and so on. Sovereign states are the foundation of an equitable and reasonable international order, and respect for sovereign equality is an essential guiding principle for building up an equitable and reasonable international order. The reason for this is that sovereign equality is one of the important principles of international law, not only the most important norms regulating mutual relations among states, but also the fundamental guarantee for equal coexistence among nations, big or small, in international society. While accepting the diversity of civilizations is the logical result of respecting sovereign equality, for respecting sovereign equality means every country has equal rights and duties, and is free to choose its own social system and development road, regardless of economic, social, political or other differences. Promoting multi-polarization is not only a prerequisite to maintaining sovereignty independence and the basic principles of international law, but also an important way to weaken and control U.S. hegemonism, promote democratization of international relations and build up an equitable and reasonable new international political and economic order. To participate in multilateralism is not only beneficial for promoting multi-polarization and democratization of international relations, but also helpful in enhancing China's international image as a responsible country, and promoting the reform of the existing international order towards building up an equitable and reasonable one. Advocating new security concept not only embodies respecting the rights for each state to equally engage in international and regional security matters, but being helpful in strengthening mutual trust between countries and common security, an important way to promote establishing a harmonious world. In order to lead global governance system towards a more equitable and reasonable direction, China has adopted policies of combining realism with liberalism. On one hand, China has actively integrated into the existing international order and participated in most of its international institutions since the reform and opening up. On the other hand, to improve global governance capability, China has made efforts to promote the reform of the unjust and unreasonable arrangements in the existing order, and tried to build up new international systems in the fields ignored by the existing international systems or beyond the governance of such systems. Therefore, China is not only an active participant and maintainer in today's international order, but also a reformer of the existing international order as well as a founder of an equitable and reasonable international order.

The duty to inform in the contracting phase can effectively eliminate the information asymmetry existing between the subjects of transactions in the market and thus safeguard the contractual mechanism. One of the core problems is the application of the liability after the violation. In general, culpa in contrahendo and malicious fraud can both be applied in breach of the obligation of the duty to inform in the contracting phase, so there will be a concurrence of liabilities between culpa in contrahendo and malicious fraud. Both of culpa in contrahendo and malicious fraud may lead to the cancellation of the contract between the parties, and return the interests of both sides to the state before the contract is concluded. Therefore, culpa in contrahendo and malicious fraud have similar legal consequences. However, the requirements of the subjective element of culpa in contrahendo and malicious fraud are not the same, as the former requires intention or negligence, while the latter only requires intention. Therefore, in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase, due to the application of culpa in contrahendo, the free competition between the two will lead to the intentional elements of malicious fraud being circumvented. For the applicable dilemma in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase, the academic community has offered a wide range of possible explanations, but each of them has its own corresponding limitations. Some scholars hope to cover the case of "negligent fraud" by explaining the intentional elements in malicious fraud, but such explanations have obviously gone beyond the meaning of "intentional" itself and at the same time do not conform to the definition of intentional elements of malicious fraud in the traditional theory of civil law. In the comparative law, German scholars tried to limit the application of culpa in contrahendo in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase by intentional liability, existence of specific property damage, etc. However, their theoretical system still lacks harmony and fails to reach a consistent conclusion. In the current law of China, Article 42(2) of Contract Law denies the possibility of the application of culpa in contrahendo in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase, and requires the feason to be intentional. Although it is still possible to explain the possibility of applying culpa in contrahendo by invoking the exhaustive clauses of article 42(3) of Contract Law, however, based on the principle that special rules take precedence over general provisions, and taking into account that the application of culpa in contrahendo will lead to the intentional elements of malicious fraud being circumvented, it should be considered recognized that the current law in our country negates the application of culpa in contrahendo in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase. However, the responsibility of the feason in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase is not only conducive to protecting the freedom of decision, but also to enhancing the overall trust of the parties concerned in the legal order. In addition, this is also the trend of comparative law. Therefore, in case culpa in contrahendo cannot be applied, other means should be found to provide functional alternatives and corresponding relief for the counterpart. In addition to culpa in contrahendo, “major misunderstanding” is one reasonable choice in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase. In such a case, due to the mistakes made by the counterpart, the one who claims a major misunderstanding of the right of revocation does not have to bear the reparation of trust interests, but instead, the rules of contributory negligence can be applied to this party. As a result of this application, the lack of trust and benefit compensation rules in the case of major misunderstandings in the Chinese law will not be an obstacle to advocating a major misunderstanding in the case of negligent breach of the duty to inform in the contracting phase.

In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, the monetary authorities in various countries carried out the positive monetary policy based on their national conditions. During the global financial crisis, the People's Bank of China implemented the traditional monetary policy, such as opening market operations, lowering deposit reserve ratio and benchmark interest rate, in order to provide liquidity for the market, and canceled the hard credit constraints to increase the flexibility of commercial banks' credit supply. The global financial crisis cannot be avoided. Only by minimizing the negative impact of the global financial crisis on the economy, formulate and implement a reasonable monetary policy so as to enable the economy to resume growth as soon as possible. Therefore, efforts to study the impact of the global financial crisis on the effectiveness of monetary policy and monetary policy transmission in China, and explore the methods to improve the effectiveness of monetary policy during the financial crisis, have a great theoretical and practical significance for improving the effects of macro-control and promoting the financial reform. After the global financial crisis, the academia reflects the relationship between the financial crisis and monetary policy. The impact of monetary policy on the level of risk-taking has become a hot spot of academic research. The domestic and foreign literatures have studied more of the choices and effectiveness of monetary policy during the global financial crisis, but less on the impact of the global financial crisis on the channels of monetary policy transmission. In addition, domestic and foreign scholars mainly use macro data and bank data to study the channels of monetary policy transmission. However, these approaches cannot effectively separate the credit supply and the credit demand. This paper uses the mixed OLS model and the fixed effect model to examine whether a risk-taking channel exists in China and whether there are cross-sectional differences in response to the monetary policies among companies of different characteristics based on the micro-perspective of corporate risk-taking, employing loan-level data and micro-data of the listed companies from 2001 to 2016. On this basis, further studies have been done on the impact of the global financial crisis on the risk-taking channel of monetary policy transmission. Risk-taking channel of monetary policy transmission based on the corporate micro-conduction refers to the monetary policy control first affects the corporate risk-taking, and then affects the corporate lending behavior. The result of our study indicates that the risk-taking channel of monetary policy transmission exists in China and expansionary monetary policy will lead to significant increase in our corporate risk-taking, then the rise of corporate risk-taking also leads to a significant increase in corporate bank loans; when monetary policy tightens, the level of corporate risk-taking is lower and corporate lending scale is smaller. While monetary policy affects the scale of corporate loans through the level of corporate risk-taking, the corporate lending behaviors are also different due to the differences in asset size, ownership structure and the nature of ownership and other corporate characteristics. The corporate bank loans of small and medium enterprises, equity balance class enterprise and private enterprises are more sensitive to the monetary policy. During the global financial crisis, the level of corporate risk-taking is more sensitive to changes in monetary policies, while the sensitivity of corporate bank loans to corporate risk-taking has declined. Large-scale enterprises, equity concentration enterprises and state-owned enterprises, whose bank loans are based on enterprise risk-taking transmission, are more affected by the global financial crisis.

Implicit causality describes a semantic property of transitive verbs that relate two nouns referring to animate beings in such a way that it is implicated that one of the nouns is the assumed locus of the underlying cause of the action or attitude. Namely, the implicit causality of a verb is toward the argument that initiates an action or evokes a response. Verbs whose arguments fill the roles of Initiator (I) and Reactor (R) in a psychological relationship can be analyzed into two types. For N1 type, Initiator appears in the subject position in the surface structure of a sentence, and Reactor appears in the object position; for N2 type, the surface position of the roles is the reverse. In both cases, the relative accessibility of Initiator in the discourse model constructed during reading is increased and facilitates the processing of sentences that contain those verbs. Cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic studies on reference processing have shown that verbs exhibiting implicit causality could increase the relative accessibilities of their arguments (Initiators) in the discourse model. Implicit causality is used proactively, allowing readers to focus on, and perhaps even predict, whom or what will be talked about next. Especially, the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a referent processing cue is enhanced when the connective because is present. Topic is a functional notion only at the discourse level, minimally at the paragraph or clausal chain level. Referring to the entity within current focus of attention, it does influence whether and how an entity is mentioned in the subsequent discourse. When the same referent reoccurs consecutively in Zero (?), a clause-chain would be constructed, characterizing high coherence in cognition. In this situation, the referent has a high degree of topicality and predicts high possibility of recurrence in subsequent discourse fragments.  Though it has been found that verbs' implicit causality and discourse topicality can affect the anaphoric choice, it is unclear how they jointly affect it. It is equally unclear whether interaction exists between them in the processing; and if it exists, how they will interact with each other and which one plays a more decisive role. Therefore, further investigations should be conducted to address these concerns. This study goes beyond the local factor of verbs′ implicit causality to consider discourse factors of topicality, and aims to explore their interactions and effects on the anaphoric choice during discourse production. Based on a pilot study of verbs in Chinese, ten N1 type and N2 type of verbs are respectively selected according to their degree of implicit causality. Then a continuation experiment is carried out to simulate the process of discourse production under the given context. Equivalent familiarity of entities rendered in noun phrases is guaranteed, and consistent structure of N1 V N2 in the target sentence is maintained. The factors of verb type, discourse topicality and the causal connective yinwei (because) are manipulated in eight conditions, namely, conditions a, b, c, and d for either N1 or N2 type. Because the anaphoric bias can be identified by looking at the first subject referent and its expression in the production, three parameters are annotated for statistical analysis, that is, the first subject referent (N1/N2/others) and its linguistic forms (/Pron./NP) in the continuation, and the type of connectivity between the target sentence and the immediate continuation, i.e., cause, consequence, specification, contrast, etc. The results show that the implicit causality of the verb indeed affects the anaphoric choice, especially with the presence of the causal connective yinwei. Noticeably, the anaphoric bias that is initiated by the verbs' implicit causality proves to be the strongest when the referent is a newly introduced entity rather than the discourse topic. This further indicates that the discourse production observes the Principle of Least Effort. Overall, the verbs' implicit causality overrides discourse topicality in constraining the anaphoric choice.

There are many tongjiazi in the Chinese versions of Buddhist Scriptures. They have distinctive characteristics, and are closely related to the study of the words in translated Buddhist scriptures. Studying tongjiazi is valuable and meaningful for the study of the words in the translated Buddhist scriptures, which will be discussed in the following five aspects: First, it examines the meanings of the words and helps interpret the sutras correctly. For many difficult words in Chinese Buddhist translations, it is difficult to find an explanation if only its literal meaning is examined, but it is possible to analyze tongjiazi and find the original word and then interpret the meaning of sutras correctly. For example, the “隤” in“云隤” is the interchangeable word of “队”, “刬” in the “刬其身” is the interchangeable word of “丳”, and “落” in the “落治” should be read as “〖XC各.tif,JZ〗”. So the meanings of “隤”,“刬”,“落” can be explained correctly with a background knowledge of their respective interchangeable word. Second, it provides new ideas and evidence for the existing research and offers a new interpretation of the Buddhist scriptures. Some researches on the words of Buddhist translations are inadequate literal interpretations without truly understanding the meanings, or fail to explain the development of the meanings. Analyzing interchangeable words can be a way to clarify the misinterpretation and to elucidate the reasons for the correct meanings. For example, “脯” in “脯煮” should be read as“缹”; “脯煮” is equivalent to ″boiled″ , and doesnt mean ″be dried and boiled″ as was explained by Prof. KARASHIMA Seishi. Furthermore, words such as “疽尅”,“诱訹”and “牒” get new interpretations from the interchangeable words in the text . Third, it helps identify the arbitrary changes to the texts of Buddhist scriptures caused by the ignorance of the interchangeable word, and base the research of the words of Buddhist Sutras on the actual texts. Interchangeable words often change with the times. A good knowledge of the interchangeable words in the Chinese Buddhist translations helps discern and correct the mistakes in the arbitrary changes so that the research of the words of Buddhist translations can be based on the original texts. Fourth, it helps us to get out of the dilemma of the usage of words and date the words accurately. The form of Chinese vocabulary is complicated and the words in Buddhist translations are no exception. This impedes the dating work. Analyzing interchangeable words gives us a better understanding of the diversity of the forms of the words in Buddhist translations, and distinguishes ″character″ and ″word″ so that the words are dated accurately. At the same time, the dating of the words also benefits the dating of a certain translated version of Buddhist Sutra. Fifth, it helps identify the written form of the words and thus avoid mistakes when incorporating certain lost lexical items into dictionaries. Currently, using Buddhist texts to supplement the lost items into Chinese Dictionary is a focus in the study of words and expressions used in the Buddhist Scriptures. However, some words which were not included in the dictionaries have been mistaken as lost or error words. Studying the interchangeable words in Chinese Buddhist translations is helpful in distinguishing such words and their written forms.

The Ming Dynasty Royal Court had a sufficient collection of paintings and calligraphies, but scholars had an insufficient attention to it. Instead, they paid more attention to the individual collections of Ming Dynasty. By combing through the relevant historical documents, the following text has outlined the gathering, the preserving, and the dispersing of paintings and calligraphies by the Ming Dynasty Royal Court, and has made a systematic statistics of the presently remained ones. Different from the traditional points of view, this dissertation holds that the collection still had been opulent till the fall of Ming dynasty in despite of its huge loss since mid-Ming, attributed to the continuous creations and the inverse-flow of artifacts brought out from the royal palace. There are three main sources for the Ming Dynasty Royal collection of paintings and calligraphies. First, the trophies gained from the early Ming dynasty unification wars. The Ming army took over almost all the collections of the Yuan Palace Treasury (neifu) along with the Yuan dynasty capital city Dadu, including enormous paintings and calligraphies from previous dynasties which laid the foundation for the Ming Dynasty Royal collection. The Ming Dynasty Royal Court also attained a large amount of paintings and calligraphies from the Zhang Shicheng regime based in Suzhou which was mostly created by the Yuan scholars.  The second key source was the confiscated individual collections of the disgraced officials that were registered at the imperial affairs department. The first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, successively campaigned the great purge during which countless dignitaries of meritocracy and aristocracy were implicated in the cases of Counsellor Hu Weiyong and the senior general Lan Yv, and in turn, all their luxury collections were sequestrated and listed in the imperial affaires department. During the Jiajing and the Wanli eras, the households of two powerful prime ministers, Yan Song and Zhang Juzheng, were expropriated one after another; thus their tremendous paintings and calligraphies along with other collections were listed into the Ming Dynasty Royal collections. The third main source was those created by the Ming emperors, empresses and consorts as well as the court painters and calligraphers. Besides the above-mentioned three main sources, the gifts given by the courtiers formed even another source.  It was the job for artisans from the Directorate for Imperial Accouterments (yuyongjian) and court painting artists to mount, restore, file and identify paintings and calligraphies. Court painting masters Sheng Zhu in the Hongwu era and Bian Jingzhao in the Yongle era used to work on restoring and identifying for the Palace Treasury of the Imperial Affairs Department. The Ming emperors would often appreciate paintings and calligraphies collected by the Palace Treasury at leisure. This kind of appreciation might often be rendered with some political meanings. That was to caution themselves and the lieges or to educate their offspring. In the Ming Dynasty Royal Court, paintings and calligraphies are mainly under the supervision of the Directorate of Ceremonial Affairs (silijian). This duty had been formerly carried out by the Office of Discipline Supervision (jichasi), the predecessor of the Directorate of Ceremonial Affairs, since no later than year 1378, because there are half stamps from ″the Seal of the Discipline Supervision Office″ (jichasi yin) on the paintings and calligraphies collected by the early Ming Dynasty Royal Courts. According to statistics, there exists over 140 pieces of work as a whole with such stamps of pre-Ming dynasties, which implies the abundance of the early Ming collection in the Palace Treasury. Each painting and calligraphy was coded and stored in the Prudent Mortgage Warehouse (zhishenku), which was supervised by a senior eunuch. Moreover, the Directorate for Seals and Ribbons (yinshoujian) had been responsible for keeping court archives as well as part of the court collections, namely the portraits of the previous emperors, which were kept in the General Storehouse (gujin tongji ku) at the southeast corner of the Forbidden City.〖JP〗 After the Jiajing era, the Ming Dynasty Royal collection of paintings and calligraphies were dispersed out of the palace through awarding as benedictions, offsetting for salaries, and stealing of the eunuchs. It boosted the rise of private collection activity in late Ming times. Amongst the war chaos at the end of Ming dynasty, the paintings and calligraphies from the Ming Dynasty Royal Court were all gone, mostly being lost for the arson by Li Zicheng. Some of the dispersed artworks later showed up on the markets, laying foundations for the mass emergence of private collectors in the early Qing dynasty.

This paper argues that even if the skeptical argument is sound, skepticism does not pose a serious challenge to our inquiry, for we can still make epistemic progress. The skeptical argument comes in various forms, all of which rest on a set of demanding criteria of knowledge. Suppose the skepticscriteria of knowledge are correct. Then if we can meet the criteria, then we may achieve knowledge; if we cannot meet this set of criteria, then we can merely acquire things that fall short of knowledge. Knowledge (given the skeptics criteria) is epistemically valuable. But things that fall short of knowledge may also be epistemically valuable. Consider two individuals, S1 and S2. Both believe the truth that there is a table in the room. But both are unable to rule out the possibility that each of them is a brain in vat. Yet there is a difference between S1 and S2. If there were a chair or stone instead of a table in the room, S1 would believe that there is no table in the room, while S2 would still believe that there is a table in the room. According to the skeptics criteria of knowledge, neither S1 nor S2 knows that there is a table in the room. Thus, if nothing that falls short of knowledge is of epistemic value, then ceteris paribus, S1 is not doing epistemically better than S2. But clearly, ceteris paribus, S1 is doing epistemically better than S2. Therefore, there is something (e.g., S1's cognitive state) that falls short of knowledge but is of epistemic value. In addition, the skeptical argument, even if it is sound, does not show that S1's cognitive state is unattainable. If S1s cognitive state is attainable and epistemically valuable, then we can make epistemic progress even if we cannot know anything about the external world given the skeptics criteria of knowledge. Historically, the skeptics argue not only that we cannot know anything, but also that we should suspend judgment. They seem to implicitly assume that one should believe p only if one knows that p, for from the fact that one does not know that p, it does not follow that one should not believe p. This assumption is known as the knowledge norm of belief. The knowledge norm of belief seems to presuppose that any cognitive state that falls short of knowledge is epistemically valueless. For if there is a cognitive state that falls short of knowledge but is epistemically valuable, then we do not have to suspend judgment when we cannot acquire knowledge. If we can acquire something of epistemic value by believing a certain proposition, we may believe it even if we do not know it. Thus, skepticism is false. Finally, this paper shows that contemporary responses to skepticism cannot avoid value talk. I discuss three kinds of responses: Mooreanism, abductivism, and contextualism. It is argues that each of them appeals to certain value assumptions. Specifically, the core idea of Mooreanism is that we can know p even if we cannot prove p or rule out all alternatives to p. This criterion of knowledge is less demanding than the skeptics criteria. A less demanding criterion of knowledge is plausible only if it does not entail that those who know that p are doing no epistemically better than those who merely believe that p (as far as whether p is true is not about a trivial matter). So Mooreans must assume that knowledge that p (according to their account of knowledge) is epistemically better than mere belief that p. In addition, both abductivism and contextualism employs the inference to the best explanation. Abductivism directly appeals to the inference to the best explanation. Contextualists argue that contextualism is better than alternative accounts of knowledge because contextualism best explains both why the skeptical argument is forceful and why the daily knowledge attribution is appropriate. What counts as the best explanation is clearly a value question.

This study is conducted in the context of M&A. Typical for in-group members, we choose the situation that leaders and their subordinates come from the same organization before M&A has carried out. From previous research, we already know that the boundary of groups appears and group membership plays an important role as soon as M&A process is completed. We aimed at refining the previous studies by the following aspects. First, even if leaders and subordinates come from the same organization before M&A, the degree of upward trust may be varied with the implementation of M&A. Second, in the organization after M&A, both leaders and subordinates have at least two kinds of identity characteristics: one is group identity characteristics, which can be described as ″the group I came from″, the other is organizational identity characteristics as ″I am a member of newly-formed organization after M&A″. In this study, we focus on how both the group identity characteristics and organizational identity characteristics of leaders influence the upward trust of in-group subordinates in the background of M&A. On the one hand, from the perspective of group identity characteristics, leader group prototypicality is a determinant of both trust for leaders and leadership effectiveness. The degrees of leader group prototypicality represent the possibility that the leaders would obey the norms of groups and guarantee the benefits of in-group members. These behaviors of high group prototypicality leaders would arouse the feelings of subordinates that the leaders would be the protectors of group identity and reduce uncertainty accompanied by M&A. In this way, subordinates are more likely to trust high group prototypicality leaders since they would think ″leaders are typical group members, and I am also an in-group member″. We propose that leader group prototypicality is positively correlated with upward trust. On the other hand, in the aspect of organizational identity characteristics, organizational identity salience highlights that leaders would focus on the goals and interests of newly-formed organization after M&A instead of their own group that leaders came from. High degrees of leaders' organizational identity salience will weaken the boundary of groups and strengthen the common organization identity shared by all subordinates and leaders, convincing their subordinates that leader would behave from the standpoint of the newly-formed organization, rather than the group that leader came from. As a consequence, the original group identity characteristics will be gradually replaced by the organizational identity characteristics. Since leaders pay more attention to the development and integration of the new organization after the M&A, subordinates would hardly establish upward trust by judging whether the leader ″is a typical in-group member″. Therefore, we think that leader's organizational identity salience would negatively moderate the causality between leader group prototypicality and upward trust. In this paper, we explore the effects using two kinds of research methods: In study 1, we simulated M&A scenarios in laboratory, we choose the situation that leaders and subordinates came from the same organization before M&A as a typical representation of in-group members, by the sample of undergraduate students and MBA students, we preliminary verified the hypotheses above. In study 2, we conducted an empirical study by collecting questionnaires from subordinates of organizations that just encountered M&A. We found that the group prototypicality of leaders have positive predictive effect on upward trust, while the organizational identity salience of leaders negatively moderates the relationship. Based on Social Identity Theory, this research reminds us of considering both group and organizational identity characteristics of leaders when discussing the upward trust for in-group leaders, thus promoting the research on the antecedent of upward trust in context of M&A.