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This paper examines COVID-19 narratives of China as a form of soft power. The coronavirus pandemic and its handling have presented an image problem for China on the global stage. The country has struggled to control the narratives surrounding the pandemic. This article is interdisciplinary in nature with a focus on contemporary Chinese history, culture, and politics, as well as communication issues and narratives. It analyses non-fictional and fictional narratives as part of China’s COVID-19 diplomacy. Beyond documentaries, this paper examines the two docudramas Heroes in Harm’s Way 最美逆行者 (2020) and With You 在一起 (2020) and how these popular TV shows present the coronavirus crisis in China at the beginning of the pandemic. We argue that they provide positive narratives of the COVID-19 response that highlight people’s courage and sacrifice to inspire the Chinese population to stand together as a nation. The docudramas showcase everyday life during the lockdown in Wuhan over 76 days from the end of January 2020 to early April 2020. Nurses, doctors, and patients are represented as heroic characters who fight the pandemic together. Heroes in Harm’s Way and With You are testament of a united China broadcast both to domestic audiences and viewers abroad. The docudramas function as damage control to enhance China’s image in the world. This helps increase China’s soft power as the country presents itself as a capable force for good within its boundaries and beyond.

This article studies some central developments in the propagation and teaching of mathematical logic in 1930s China. Focusing on the emergence of a twofold disciplinary approach to mathematical logic, namely as a discipline studied and disseminated by Chinese philosophers on the one hand and mathematicians on the other, this paper explores one of the key turning points in the development of the academic notion of mathematical logic in China. Apart from casting some light on the teaching of mathematical logic in the framework of both philosophical as well as mathematical spheres of inquiry, this article also provides some preliminary insights into the circumstances surrounding the first systematic introduction of mathematical logic into the modern standardized system of education, which gradually took shape over the late-1920s and early 1930s in China.

“Science” and “magic” are not simply two opposing thought processes which have a straightforward relationship, first, on a presumed axis of progress—from magic to science, and second, within the context of a presumed cultural divide—Western “science” vs. Eastern “tradition”. The aim of this paper is to examine in historical perspective the introduction of so-called “Western medicine” in Japan and examine the idea that through this introduction “traditional” Chinese knowledge was simply superseded by “modern” Western science. By looking into the intellectual currents within the field of medicine, specifically in eighteenth-century Japan, and comparing them to those in the West, the article tries to challenge the narrative of “modernity” as a sort of uniquely Western achievement defined by “disenchantment”, “rationalism” and “science”.

The article examines the specifics of the Chinese containment measures of the COVID-19 pandemic and their social consequences at the beginning of 2021. The author analyses empirical psychological research results on distress and anxiety of people in times of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, and explores to what degree the individual feelings of anxiety in contemporary China are conditioned by the traditionally prevailing absence of faith in higher transcendent forces on the one hand, and social isolation on the other. It proceeds from Xu Fuguan’s interpretation of the origins of a traditional Chinese concept of “concerned consciousness” (youhuan yishi 憂患意識). The author shows that this concept can be compared to the feeling of anxiety, but highlights important differences which separate it from the anxiety as developed and understood in the framework of modern Western philosophy. The paper aims to provide some preliminary answers to the questions of whether and in what way such a traditional feeling of anxiety in the sense of a “concerned consciousness” manifested itself in the period of social isolation that was implemented as a part of the government measures for the COVID-19 pandemic in China. These questions are being investigated through an analysis of philosophical studies on concerned consciousness on the on hand, and a contemporary case study on the other. The results show that the specifically Chinese kind of anxiety, which is rooted in concerned consciousness, is tightly linked to the relational nature of Chinese ethics and the corresponding understanding of individual identity. In addition, it is connected with the traditional understanding of human destiny, which is not fatalistic or determinist, but rather based on autonomous decisions based on the social responsibilities of a free human self.

For several decades, we have been witnessing a profound renewal in our understanding of the “New Culture Movement”. However, the aptness of “new culture” as a proper translation for xin wenhua 新文化 has almost never been discussed. The present paper argues that uniformly translating xin as “new” and wenhua as “culture” tends to blur the picture instead of making it clearer, for by so doing one unconsciously endorses the narrative of radical Chinese intellectuals while silencing other voices. Furthermore, the article puts forward the idea that terms such as wenhua 文化 encompassed a “multiplicity of potential readings” that have much to do with the transformation of Chinese language at the beginning of the 20th century, and with the emergence of a new conceptual repertoire. In their attempts to appropriate xin wenhua and turn it into a seemingly coherent movement with an agenda, Chinese intellectuals were fighting a war over the topic of “civilization/culture”, but also, and perhaps primarily education. Yet, by employing the term “culture” in academic writing today, we tend to produce a historical dissonance for their use of this term is not our own: we thus fall into the trap of semantic transparency, and forget that the concept of “culture” has a problematic history in both China and the West. By questioning the use of wenhua with regard to the May Fourth Movement, I provide evidence that the accepted translation of culture can be problematic if one does not clearly spell out the meaning located behind it, as the Chinese wenhua often did not mean “Chinese culture” in our modern, all too modern, anthropological sense.

China is presently embarking on the huge task of realizing what President Xi Jinping recently called the Chinese Dream. China is officially Marxist, and Marx thus inspires this dream in his assigned status as the “official guide” to the ongoing Chinese Revolution. This paper will focus on the crucial relation between Hegel and Chinese Marxism. Marx is a key Hegelian, critical of, but strongly dependent on, Hegel. Since the Chinese Dream is not Hegelian, but rather anti-Hegelian, it is unlikely, as I will be arguing, to be realized in a recognizably Marxian form.