According to the purpose and mission of the ethics of science and technology, it is necessary for the ethics of science and technology to achieve the following four pivotal turns: the ethical turn, the life-oriented turn, the era-responsive turn, and the China-focused turn. To overcome the ignorance of ethical dimension in the ethics of science and technology, the ethical turn emphasizes that ethics is the underlying tone of scientific and technological activities and ethical attributes constitutes the fundamental characteristics of the ethics of science and technology. The life-oriented turn tackles the over-theorization of the ethics of science and technology, aiming to revert to life as the foundation of the ethics of science and technology and affirm its practical essence. The era-responsive turn counters the detached research approach in the ethics of science and technology, seeking to identify the contemporary themes of the ethics of science and technology and establish its role as a contemporary form of ethics. The China-focused turn addresses the westernization tendency of the ethics of science and technology, aiming to foster the establishment of an independent knowledge system for China’s ethics of science and technology. Among these four turns, the ethical turn serves as the premise, the life-oriented turn as the foundation, the era-responsive turn as the key, and the China-focused turn as the ultimate objective.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (hereafter “AI”) has opened up an “Age of AI Agents”, in which humans and AI agents mirror each other. AI agents present themselves as “ethical entities” in the society, rationality, value and virtue where they are anchored. Criticizing the computationalist interpretation of AI’s “ethical anchor”, the philosophy of embodiment argues that a computationalist AI agent inevitably falls into the agent traps of “disembodied mind”, “moral machines”, and “meta-act”. According to the general articulation of “intentionality difference”, the comparison between the “intentionality of machines” and the “intentionality of bats” can explain the ethical anchor AI agent. The fourfold tension presented by the intentionality of machines indicates that the AI agent cannot transcend the limit of their initial instrumental form due to the “lack of subjectivity”, and thus there is a hidden “new slavery setup”. As the underlying framework of machine ethics, the co-existence intentionality of humans and machines takes “the self-awareness escape” as a technological approach. However, this actually presupposes the importance of “self-awareness” returning to and reflecting on itself. The worries or anxiety brought by reflexivity is an “ethical surplus barrier” that the intentionality of machines cannot cross. Clarifying the worries caused by “agent traps”, the “new slavery dilemma” and the “self-awareness escape” can help to dispel some ambiguous concepts emerged in the research of AI ethics.

The universalization of algorithmic technology is changing and reshaping the life world. The increasingly personalized and convenient function of algorithms can provide specific suggestions and guidance for human actions, but it also brings the problem of human “reverse adaptation”. Further inquiry into the ethics of algorithms shows that algorithmic technology constantly covers humans’ original will and choice, inhibits the vitality of human cultural innovation, and hinders the coordinated development of society. As this phenomenon continues to intensify, human beings are immersed in the fragmented reality, and gradually form an unaware “reverse adaptation”, forgetting how people should be. Human beings are willing to be transformed and dominated by algorithmic technology, cater to the generation of algorithm culture, and inevitably fall into the communal dilemma that people cannot connect with each other in the end. Based on this, we advocate an ethical attitude towards algorithms as follows: reflect on and go beyond “reverse adaptation”, and focus on the harmonious resonance of the good life so as to protect the essential existence of human beings.

Due to the unique position of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in contemporary China, various disciplines have paid close attention to the CPC as well as the issue of its construction. In addition to the discipline of the CPC history and construction, political science explores the unique connation and characteristics of the CPC by coining the concept of “mission-oriented party”, conducts a normative argumentation on the overall leadership of the CPC in China’s modernization, and empirically examines the way to improve the Party’s leadership. From the perspective of the evolution of China’s social structure since the Reform and Opening up, sociology mainly examines the organizational embedding of the ruling party in emerging fields, the absorption of elites from new classes, and the innovative practices of making grassroots party construction space serve better new groups. Introducing the concept of governance into the research of party construction, management science explores the self-governance of the Party, the leading role of the Party construction in grassroots governance, and the application of emerging technologies in the Party construction. In spite of their respective contributions to the study of the Party construction, different disciplines have their own limitations. Promoting the exchange and integration of various disciplines will help to improve the overall level of the research of the Party construction and provide new wisdom for establishing a knowledge system of party construction with Chinese characteristics.

The Urban spatial morphology of a city comprehensively reflects its generation, growth, form, structure, function and development. An in-depth analysis of a variety of historical documents and maps shows that the spatial morphological evolution of Shanghai from 1843 to 1949 can be divided into six distinct stages: “inner and outer cities”, “new and old cities”, “belt city”, “three-dimensional city”, “block city” and “main and secondary cities”. The spatiotemporal characteristics of the evolution of modern Shanghai’s urban spatial morphology reveal the institutional, economic and cultural characteristics of the city in different historical periods, which can be summarized as: river-oriented axis, all the way to the sea; circle development, towards openness; diversified development, heterogeneous interweaving. Clarifying the historical evolution of this urban spatial morphology will help us to explore the richer historical and cultural connotations of the city and grasp the direction and main trend of the development and improvement of urban spatial morphology in the future.

Guo Shengming was a renowned Chinese historian in the 20^th century, whose research fields are extensive and publications abundant. Guo’s writing of American history began with his translation of the influential Ten Days That Shook the World in the 1930s. His translation of the “Declaration of Independence” into modern Chinese in the 1950s has been celebrated for its accuracy and completeness. By writing popular books, textbooks and academic works on American history, Guo integrated his attention to and sympathy for people at the bottom and marginalized social groups into his writing of American history, demonstrating his view that historical writing should be oriented to the public and promote civic education and social progress. Together with a group of outstanding scholars, Guo made important contributions not only to China’s research on American history, but also to that on world history and global history.

The literature in the Wei and Jin Dynasties has always been known as the manifestation of the elegance style of that time, and this is due to the fact that the traditional style of elegance had been impacted. However, since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the literati, including Zhong Changtong, had made efforts to reconstruct a new style of elegance while abandoning its tradition. The relationship between abandonment and reconstruction was complex. In terms of deconstruction, it was mainly the change of times and the fate of literati that formed a concept of literature as well as its knowledge system different from that in the Han Dynasty. Fon instance, the beauty of qi and the style of gorgeousness were pursued in the poetry in the Jian’an period. The rise of the “metaphysical learning” in the Zhengshi period and Buddhism also helped to deconstruct the traditional style of elegance. The literary writing of emperors and literati in the Wei and Jin Dynasties organically integrated abandonment and reconstruction, and create a literary form that combines political cultivation and aesthetics, thus laying a good foundation for the development of literature in the Tang Dynasty.

The record of Xie An’s “deep affection of elegant poets” in the chapter of “Letters and Scholarship”, A New Account of Tales of the World has sparked long-lasting and extensive debate due to its concealed tension between classics and literature and another tension between “aspirations” and “sentiments”. For ages, scholars such as Song Qi, Liu Chenweng, Wang Shizhen have questioned Xie An while highly extoled Xie Xuan. In fact, “elegant poets” is not referring so much to “noble and refined persons” as to “poets”, or more precisely, “elegant poets” in contrast to “folk poets” in The Book of Songs. To understand the “deep affection of elegant poets”, we should know that “elegant poems” and “folk poems” are two different styles in The Book of Songs and even “elegant poems” consists of two different categories, one as “great” or “orthodox” while the other as “small” or “changed”. In addition, we should discern the internal difference between Xie An and Xie Xuan in terms of personality and life realm when they quoting particular verses to express their own aspirations. Wang Fuzhi once argued that both of the two verses, which were respectively quoted by Xie An and Xie Yuan from The Book of Songs, “equally expressed emotions in an excellent way”. Wang’s observation is not enough since he failed to discover the aesthetic difference between “elegant poems” and “folk poems”. Based on the traditional distinction between “elegant poems” and “folk poems” in Confucian poetry, Shen Zengzhi, a renowned Confucian scholar in the late Qing dynasty, returned to original condition of the ritual and musical cultivation of poetry by arguing that “the style of elegant poems is noble, while that of folk poems is humble”. From the perspective of personality, Shen argued that “elegant poets” are “gentlemen who tirelessly perform virtuous conducts”, profoundly revealing the Confucian concern and administrative responsibility of Xie An as a famous literatus. In that regard, Shen knew Xie An very well although they lived in a different historical period. In short, a correct understanding of the “deep affection of elegant poets” is not only a matter of poetics, but also an issue of personality. In other words, it concerns not only poetry education and poetry quality, but also human education and personality. Xie An is a famous literatus who has the most detailed records in A New Account of Tales of the World. He has played a vital role in the formation of China’s “elegant culture”. His poetic idea of the “deep affection of elegant poets” contains rich implications, which also proves the poetic value of A New Account of the Tales of the World from one aspect.

The phenomenon of Tang poets’ “utilizing” poem titles from Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Literature), which is mentioned in Ming poet Sun Nengchuan’s Notes in Shanxi and in Jiao Heng’s Jiao’s Collected Works, has not yet been systematically examined. With textual comparison, this thesis explores how Tang poets “utilized” poem titles from Wenxuan. It reveals that, on the level of poem titles, there are patterns such as direct adoption/expansion of titles, use of similar phrasing, and “digesting into my own words”; on the level of poetic lines, there are two dimensions, that is, “utilizing poem titles” and “adopting expressions and words”. Tang poetry may either incorporate an entire title from Wenxuan along with its associated allusion context, or selectively borrow some words from such a title and achieve a creative transformation. The reason why Tang poets could so seamlessly utilize poem titles from Wenxuan is partly due to the relevance of factors such as human affairs and geography, and partly because of the alignment between Tang literary contexts and those of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties. Meanwhile, these two internal approaches are grounded in the poetic laws inherent in poem titles from Wenxuan. This study reconsiders the issue of the “allusions in poem titles” in the collation and annotation of Tang poetry: we should not only pay attention to “ancient allusions” and “contemporary” allusions in Tang poetry, but also to the “allusions in poem titles”, observing how poem titles in the Tang dynasty were influenced by those before.

According to the collective and public attributes of national memory, the most fundamental content of a community of national memory lies in the collective memory and collective forgetting. The textual community serves as the precondition and basic path for the constitution of the national memory community. On the basis of memory textualization, repetitive performance and habit formation also make contribution to the construction of a community of national memory. As a holistic personality, the national collective must repeat the past and traditions of the nation through rituals, physical and other social practices in order to cultivate the nation’s cultural habits or cultural unconsciousness and promote the final formation of the community of national memory. It also confirms the inevitability of collective memory and collective forgetting, as well as their important roles for a community of national memory.

The Epic of King Gesar in Tibet China and its oral transmission practice is a precious and classic case of human cultural inheritance. This epic contains rich cultural resources of the Tibetan ethnic group and information of historical development and changes. In the process of its inheritance, “communicative memory” and “cultural memory” are fully intermingled, and rap art is integrated into vivid and rich daily interactions among groups in the context of ethnic culture. Thus, a shared memory of the nation is being constructed. As a carrier of collective imagination and cultural identity for the Tibetan people, the epic enriches the culture of the Chinese nation.

The core of collective memory lies in the dynamic integration of historical continuity of memory and its social construction. The frequently occurred public emergencies in modern society can be viewed as the sources and nodes of collective memory. Focusing on whether the construction of collective memory can be discontinuous, this paper tries to integrate and categorize scattered fragments of memory in different narrative dimensions of memory under the framework of “idea-image”, and integrates the overall construction logic of collective memory of public emergencies in modern society along the lines of “sketch-glue-construct”. At the same time, this paper holds that under the current uncertain society and the specific cultural context of China, the active construction and maintenance of collective memory of public emergencies with the goal of integrity is the basis of integrating useful experience in multiple time dimensions of modern society and the country, and rebuilding the cognition of social and cultural structure.

By introducing data from A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2022, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of the improvement of new quality productivity on the binary margin of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) of enterprises. The results show that new quality productivity can significantly improve the binary margin of OFDI of enterprises, and this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests and endogeneity treatments. Mechanism testing shows that new quality productivity enhances the binary margin of OFDI of enterprises by relaxing financing constraints, improving ESG performance, and increasing innovation output. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of new quality productivity on the binary margin of OFDI is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, non-heavy polluting enterprises, and non-high-tech enterprises, while the impact of new quality productivity on the intensive margin of OFDI is more pronounced in technology intensive and labor-intensive enterprises, and the impact on the extended margin is more pronounced in asset intensive enterprises. Expansion analysis shows that executives with overseas backgrounds play a positively regulatory role in the process of promoting the dual marginal effect of new quality productivity on enterprises’ OFDI. At the same time, new quality productivity also increases the probability of enterprises’ OFDI and overseas market profitability. The above research has first confirmed the positive impact of new quality productivity on enterprises’ OFDI, which not only enriches the existing international investment and productivity theories, but also provides theoretical guidance and useful references for the international development of China’s enterprises and the high-quality development of the China’s economy.

Previous studies have paid more attention to the impact of emerging technologies on corporate digital transformation, but often neglected the micro-foundations behind corporate digital transformation and its differentiated causes. In view of this, taking the A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2007 to 2022 as a sample, this paper examines the role of CEO characteristics in the process of corporate digital transformation from the perspective of corporate executives, as well as the consequences of different constraints on the CEO’s preference for corporate digital transformation. The results show that there is a significant impact of CEO on corporate digital transformation, in which CEO’s gender, age, education, tenure, and professional background all play important roles, and different constraints such as the business environment, the nature of the ownership of the first major shareholder, and the difference in enterprise size also form a significant differentiated impact. Further analysis of the economic consequences of CEO’s driving digital transformation reveals that a higher level of digitization makes it easier for a firm to increase its total factor productivity and create a digital ripple effect on upstream and downstream nodes in the supply chain. These findings have important policy implications for accelerating corporate digital transformation.

The contagion effect is a significant driver of corporate financialization. By utilizing the data from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020 to analyze the peer behaviors within interlocking directorate networks, this paper examines the contagion effect of corporate financialization and its economic consequences. The findings reveal that the peer behaviors in interlocking directorate networks lead to a pronounced contagion effect in corporate financialization, influenced by factors such as network position, managerial characteristics, and governance environment. Further research indicates that the peer behaviors concerning financialization decisions within these networks exacerbates the transmission of financial risks among firms, reduces their capacity to bear risk, diminishes investments in research and development, and lowers investment efficiency. Consequently, corporate financialization should attach importance to learning and imitation among firms through interlocking directorate networks, and prevent the risk of a turn from substantive to speculative activities spreading through these networks.