Population aging is a common challenge faced by humanity in the 21st century. From the perspective of historical materialism, the overlap of the logic of capital and demographic transitions has generated an elderly population with relative surplus, exacerbating age discrimination and low productivity anxiety in aging societies. As a social demand to counter the risk of relative surplus of elderly population, the emergence of the discourse of productive aging is a result of the struggle between the expansion of capital power and the reverse social protection movement in the context of population aging. Productive aging is not only an important arena for the elderly to affirm themselves, but also a necessary path to eliminate the low productivity anxiety in aging societies. However, in the Western discourse, this strategy emphasizes economic priority and personal responsibility, which is actually a significant tool for the restructuring of the welfare state under the neoliberal system. It not only distorts the social value of the elderly, but also reproduces the inequality mechanism of aging societies. In China, it is necessary to take “the need for a better life” as the fundamental starting point for the governance of aging societies, affirming the needs of all citizens, including the elderly, and realizing their value in social life and historical development. In the process of localizing productive aging in China with Chinese characteristics, it is essential to transform the categories, structures, culture and systems of productive aging into Chinese advantages, and to make unique contributions to global aging governance.
党的十八大以来，加强基层治理、推动治理重心向基层下移成为推进国家治理现代化的重要举措。经过多年努力，基层治理体系得到完善，基层治理效能大幅提高。不过，基层治理中的权责失衡、形式主义、官僚主义、自治弱化、能动性不足等问题也逐渐凸显，尤其是面对突发应急状态，基层治理体系的表现还不尽如人意，暴露出不少结构性问题。为及时总结基层治理实践经验、反思其结构性困境，《探索与争鸣》编辑部于2022年10月8日召开了“基层治理的结构性困境与出路”圆桌论坛，探讨完善基层治理体系之道，本期刊发讨论成果，以飨读者。
如何寻求日常生活的逻辑与理性，在分歧中寻找共识，在实践中捍卫常识，成为我们日常交往与认知的重要内容。三年大疫给人们的生活带来太多改变，但日常生活积淀的那些恒久、坚实、朴素的道理，如尊重常识和科学、悍卫法治、守护良知、坚持理性、寻求共识等，它们在关键时刻守护着我们，也成了我们战胜疫情，度过至暗时刻的法宝，进而构成了现代文明的韧性又坚实的基座。
从本期起，本刊将在城市专题下新设“城与人：城市地理、百年文脉与城市精神”专栏（简称“城与人”），开栏之初主要聚焦上海，此后将逐渐扩展到其他城市。“城与人”专栏所要做的首先是回到城市历史现场。比如鲁迅之于北四川路，巴金之于武康路，王元化之于衡山路，施蛰存之于愚园路，比如李善兰之于墨海书馆，茅盾之于商务印书馆，再比如丰子恺的缘缘堂、丁悚的客厅，等等。
In November 2022, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, quickly became a global sensation, reaching over 100 million monthly active users in just two months. Its popularity attracted attention and fans from all walks of life, sparking discussions about its potential impact. Will ChatGPT’s disruptive potential bring about significant changes, and what kind of impact will it have on existing social development? How should we view this innovative technology? As we navigate through the age of big data and artificial intelligence, it is crucial to consider how we can make new technologies work for us instead of replacing us. In February 2023, we held a roundtable conference titled “Is the ‘Machine’ Too Smart? ChatGPT and New Changes in Social Development”. The conference aims to present a comprehensive view of the impact and challenges of ChatGPT on journalism, professional development, economy, copyright protection, information governance, education ecology and other fields. Professor Xiong Hongkai summarized the scientific ideas and core technologies behind ChatGPT, and further answered essential questions such as how to view knowledge and truth, how to view one’s own life, and how to view the lives of others under the wave of new artificial intelligence technology. Professor Yu Guoming proposed that ChatGPT has ushered in the era of intelligent interconnection, bringing about a profound transformation in the fields of society and communication, including the “sinking” of communication power, the algorithmization of the core logic of communication, the transformation of the media industry, and the migration of mainstream media roles. Professor Qiu Zeqi summarized that ChatGPT currently lacks some of the unique human abilities and can only replace some of the work of human professions. Professor Wang Qian advocated that the content autonomously generated by ChatGPT does not belong to “human” works and should not receive the incentive and protection of copyright law. Professor Yi Xianrong pointed out that ChatGPT is essentially a significant transformation of human society’s knowledge and information production, which will form a new social and economic operating ecology and herald the opening of a more mature, fair and innovative big data era. Professor Wu Xiaokun believes that the application of ChatGPT in the news production process has eliminated the field effect of news production. However, since the issues of information authenticity and ethics cannot be resolved, ChatGPT cannot replace good journalism. Professor Gu Xiaoqing believes that we should examine the ecological relationship between technology, society and education, meanwhile focus on what education is in the intelligent era. Professor Tang Jingtai pointed out that the development and application of ChatGPT have brought about the intelligent production and dissemination of rumors. Coupled with the inevitable “illusions” and translation problems of ChatGPT, these have brought severe challenges to the governance of rumors in the intelligent era.
Currently, building a disciplinary system, academic system and discourse system with Chinese characteristics has become a major theoretical and practical topic widely discussed by the academic community. In order to implement the new liberal arts construction initiative, Zhang Baoming and other scholars have jointly proposed the interdisciplinary construction of “humanistic semantics”. It attempts to break through the barriers of discipline solidification since modern times, focusing on issues such as “ancient and modern fractures” “misunderstandings between China and the West” “layer upon layer separations” in interlingual writing. Professor Zhang Baoming advocates that humanistic semantics focuses not only on language issues, but also on cultural and ideological issues. Professor Shen Weirong pointed out that humanistic semantics breaks down the boundaries between existing subjects such as literature, history and philosophy, and establishes a “cross-disciplinary” field compatible with the humanities. This is an inevitable direction for promoting the development and progress of current humanistic sciences. Professor Sun Jiang believes that using concepts as a medium can establish connections between various languages. Cross-language and cross-cultural conceptual history research can help enhance mutual understanding between different languages and cultures. Professor Pan Guangzhe pointed out that the “new terms” that emerged in modern China have become indispensable “keywords” in the public life. Professor Min Xiangpeng pointed out that the key difference between historical reality and textual reality lies in the deviation of semantic understanding. This inevitably makes it difficult for some historical texts to directly point to or explain the corresponding historical facts. Professor Zhou Cheng believes that studying humanistic semantics from the perspective of the social impact of technology is an interesting academic approach. The application of new technologies inevitably changes the semantics of many vocabulary terms. Professor Wang Zhongjiang took “nature” as an example to investigate the dual movement of continuous inheritance and change in the meaning and usage of language and word concepts since modern times. Associate professor Chu Jinyong pointed out that the seemingly ordinary language disputes in daily life involve a broad knowledge domain behind the phenomenon.
Human faces play dual roles in the social life: on the one hand, human faces provide accesses to other minds; on the other hand, they do block the accesses to other minds. All social activities are based on a subtle balance between the two functions of human faces. However, such balance is entirely ignored the hypothesis of transparency of human mind in Cixin Liu’s science fiction-The Three Body Problem, According to this hypothesis, any inhabitant in the three body world could see what happens in other minds without the media of faces. Coincidentally, ChatGPT is also “faceless”. Moreover, the facelessness represented both in Liu’s novel and ChatGPT could undermine scientific activities by marginalizing particular scientists’ contributions.
In order to construct a new form of human civilization, we must solve the fundamental problem of civilization, that is, to ensure the sustainable development and progress of human civilization. Why can some civilizations continue to progress while more civilizations disappear or stagnate in history? This involves the nature of civilization. There have always been two views on the essence of civilization: entity view and progress view. The view of entity implies the competition and conflict among civilizations, while the view of progress implies the sustainable intellectual development of civilization itself. From the perspective of progress view, it can be found that the historical development trend of human civilization is the evolution from violent society to intellectual society. The essence of civilization is a kind of knowledge structure condensed by human beings in the process of practice, which includes the knowledge of intelligence in the cognition of man and nature, the knowledge of good organization within human society and the knowledge of the beauty that embodies the combination of human creativity and harmony. The essence of the progress of human civilization lies in the realization of the sustainable development of knowledge structure in history. At the same time, we should answer the Mystery of Joseph Needham, the Question of North and solve the Problem of Governance and Chaos Cycle. The foundation of the construction of the new form of human civilization lies in the establishment of sustainable intellectual civilization oriented to wisdom, goodness and beauty, and its foundation lies in the establishment of an open, legal and balanced civilization system.
The expansion degree of urban civilization is one of the key indicators to measure the progress of human civilization modernization. The institutional attribute of collective fundamentally shapes the expansion path of modern urban civilization in China, and its form logic is specifically embedded in the interactive relationship between urban collectives and rural collectives. The collective external exclusivity makes the migration urbanization mode become the basic path for the further expansion of urban civilization in big cities. The compulsory distribution and external exclusivity of collective make the nearby urbanization model become the basic path for urban civilization to expand to county area. The cohesiveness of collective makes the local urbanization model become the basic path for urban civilization to expand to towns and villages.
The engineeristic state refers to a modern state shaped by infrastructure and political activities. Compared with ancient and traditional countries, the infrastructure construction of modern countries has been promoted by the political power on a large scale, and the national politics has built itself around the infrastructure. With strong national capacity, the engineeristic state has realized the discipline of national spatial by taking advantage of infrastructure engineering, providing necessary conditions for the extension of national will. Infrastructure also creates a visual political language for the engineeristic state, effectively promotes the shaping of national consciousness under the background of a large population base, and makes it possible for the lasting infiltration of state power into the grassroots society. However, the complexity of infrastructure operation also brings a lot of uncertainties to the human society and its power order, especially the impact of the “de-territorialization” of new infrastructure and the continuous growth of national governance load, so that the development of the engineeristic state is facing a series of new challenges.
E-CNY is at the intersection of technology, finance and law, and the elements of various dimensions are prone to confusion during cross translation. Consensus on conceptual terms is the premise, and we should take the official nature of accounting symbols and payment tools as the double definition standard, unify the terminology of “legal tender”, and clarify the connotation of relative internal and external norms. As legal tender, e-CNY is located at the top of the monetary hierarchy. It is the value anchoring standard and the initial credit source of other forms of currency.
From the perspective of social history, wealth has become an important factor connecting people’s social life. The virtue of wealth makes it possible for people to live together in “common work” and “common enjoyment”. Therefore, from the perspective of the whole history of human civilization, the value of wealth can be fully revealed, and the significance of common prosperity in the history of civilization can be demonstrated. Firstly, in the spiritual phenomenological dimension of human civilization, wealth has been upgraded from natural existence to a spiritual existence, becoming an “ethical universal”. Secondly, in the evolution of the social form of human civilization, the pursuit of wealth as the premise to meet human freedom and development has become a fundamental “civilization problem”, which is manifested in the form of natural civilization that is “having wealth but not being rich”, the form of capital civilization that is “rich but not noble”, and then the form of human civilization that is both material and spiritual. Thirdly, in terms of the community survival dimension of human civilization, common prosperity has revealed the survival wisdom of the community-from Utopia to the union of free people, from a well-off family to a harmonious world-everyone’s labor and enjoyment are the conditions of all people’s labor and enjoyment, thus expressing the ultimate pursuit of human civilization for the world.
“To sinicize cultural critique” is a crucial question in the cultural critique of contemporary China. The topic of “historical popular feeling” provides a possible way to realize the methodological innovation. It regards “people sense” as the subjectivity foundation of cultural critique, and emphasizes “people-world” “between people”, which is a subjective life space taken on lively material marks as well as concrete historical temperature, thereby shows ethical solicitude for dignity politics. Basically, “historical popular feeling” as a cultural critique method takes “internal connect of subjects” as an opportunity, and appeals for “history” and “popular feeling” to make a fertile spread in subjects’ feeling, cognition as well as will.
In the field of narrative sociology, the concept of deep story is a central aspect in personal narratives. It focuses on the depiction of subjective emotions and personal experiences. This paper presents a deep narrative approach, incorporating sociological perspectives, and revisits pivotal moments in an individual’s life. By revisiting the emotional turning points and the source of morality, the paper captures the essence of a person’s life experiences and the shared emotions that connect individuals. This approach delves into the complexities of an individual’s life, showcasing their profound and intimate experiences. The aim of using the deep story is to evoke the inner world of the reader and highlight the disparities in life experiences, leading to greater emotional resonance and public discourse.
Several competing narratives have developed around Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” in past decades, which has once again become a hot topic of academic discussion in recent years. Through the analysis and interpretation of Weber’s texts in his later years, this paper distinguishes between “disenchantment of the world” and “religious disenchantment”. It attempts to explain the relationship between disenchantment and concepts such as rationalization, secularization and value conflicts. And then it proposes a dynamic interpretation model based on the value sphere: when a value sphere “rises”, it gains dominance over other sphere, “sacralization” occurs; conversely, when a value sphere “declines” and loses the power to dominate other fields, “disenchantment” or “de-sacralization” occurs. In modern society, the sacred element often appears in a secular, non-religious form, and may even take the form of disenchantment. Thus, scholars have two directional choices, to disenchant the sacred, or to sacralize the secular.
There are two noteworthy political contexts in which the “lyrical tradition theory” was developed and extended. Firstly, due to the Cold War confrontation in the 1950s and the political changes in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, Pr??ek’s focus on the discussion of “lyricism” shifted from individualism to modernism. Secondly, tradition, ideal and life are three key words in the “lyrical tradition theory” in Taiwan region. These key words have an obvious inheritance relationship and a certain shift in emphasis compared with Shih-Hsiang Chen and Yu-kung Kao’s explanations of “lyrical tradition theory”. This selective inheritance and deviation respond to the special cultural consciousness and political psychology of Taiwan region in the 1970s. We find that the “apolitical” character of “lyricism” is only an appearance, and the “lyrical tradition” is generated in a clear political context. Moreover, the connotation of “lyricism” cannot be reduced to individualism or aestheticism, and its modernist elements deserve to be further explored.
In theory, the fourth wave of technological revolution led by digital technology could accelerate the realization of cosmopolitanism, or a Digital Babel. The misuse of digital technology, however, has been constantly threatening the very core of cosmopolitanism——national equality and worldwide peace. The reason is that the digital technology and capital forms a complex hegemony of technology-economy-politics, pushing forward the factual sense of globalization rather than normative cosmopolitanism. As for how to limit digital hegemony and create a positive connection between digital technology and cosmopolitanism, the technological approach believes that technical innovation itself can benefit international society while people’s spontaneous actions can hardly break through the domination of Big Tech. The political approach, taking EU digital sovereignty as an example, builds an institutional framework to restrict the misuse of digital technology while the democratic deficit within EU deepens the digital gap between countries.
For a long time, researchers of the Analyzation of Poem Expressing Ideal have focused on the academic methods in the field of classical studies. Actually, in Zhu Ziqing’s view, the classical studies always have a deep relationship with the modern life, and this idea is reflected in the discussion of poem expressing ideal. Considering the relation between the “poem expressing ideal” and the “lyrical tradition”, the characteristis and the meaning of the poem should be put into a longer historic period to survey. Inspecting the problems contained in the Analyzation of Poem Expressing Ideal, we will find the entanglement of lyricism and political education in the concept of poem expressing ideal, which is related to the idea of literary history and the method of explaining poems. This finding will then lead to the discussion about the lyrical tradition and the modernity of lyricism.
Interdisciplinary research is characterized as innovative and integrative. Interdisciplinary science is the new normal of scientific research in terms of objectives and organization. However, how to realize the deep intersection of interdisciplinary science and how to gather researchers from different disciplines to explore the same problem from multiple perspectives are faced with dual challenges from the internal cognitive structure and external social structure of scientific research. The two are often intertwined because of the network epistemology formed by interdisciplinary cooperation, which brings difficulties to the interdisciplinary science. The cognitive value pursued by different disciplines is different. The multiple objectives and cognitive values in interdisciplinary science cannot be restored to a single discipline. A successful interdisciplinary science should integrate expert networks rather than knowledge networks.
Contemporary Chinese youth is a generation shaped by structural tension. On the one hand, they benefit from the rapid development of society; on the other hand, they also bear the pressure from this. Their growth experience makes them always seek dynamic stability and balance in uncertainty. They can neither go all out nor give up completely in their daily life. So we call them “45° Youth”. They pay much attention to grand narrative or daily life, and ignore intermediate organizational forms such as family and unit. They are not willing to be organized in the social field, but showing outstanding organizational ability in the private field. In terms of values, nihility of value coexists with a high degree of self-will. Under the structural tension, there is a marked intragenerational differentiation among contemporary youth, consensus only exists within a certain range. They pursue stability, attach importance to individual rights and values, and take a more conservative attitude towards change.
