An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of Chinese Students’ Satisfaction with Postgraduate University Study and Life in New Zealand

<p>Chinese students are one of the largest groups of international students studying in New Zealand. The wellbeing of Chinese students in the New Zealand educational context has aroused interest from educators from both China and New Zealand. This research explores the satisfaction of Chinese students from a cultural perspective. It adopts an interpretive phenomenological approach to investigate Chinese students’ definitions of satisfaction and the role of Chinese culture values, particularly, renqing, guanxi, mianzi in influencing their experience of satisfaction while they living and studying in New Zealand. Data were collected through six in-depth interviews with Chinese postgraduate students at one university. Based their experience studying and living in New Zealand, most of the participants reported very individualized understandings of the term “satisfaction”, They also, described their experiences of adjustments in living and learning, their mismatched expectations and how their life attitudes had affected their experience in New Zealand. While the students do not explicitly acknowledge Chinese values, their influence can be seen in the way the students experience satisfaction with their study in New Zealand. This has implications for institutions in New Zealand as these insights have a potential to inform practices to support these students.</p>

An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of Chinese Students’ Satisfaction with Postgraduate University Study and Life in New Zealand

<p>Chinese students are one of the largest groups of international students studying in New Zealand. The wellbeing of Chinese students in the New Zealand educational context has aroused interest from educators from both China and New Zealand. This research explores the satisfaction of Chinese students from a cultural perspective. It adopts an interpretive phenomenological approach to investigate Chinese students’ definitions of satisfaction and the role of Chinese culture values, particularly, renqing, guanxi, mianzi in influencing their experience of satisfaction while they living and studying in New Zealand. Data were collected through six in-depth interviews with Chinese postgraduate students at one university. Based their experience studying and living in New Zealand, most of the participants reported very individualized understandings of the term “satisfaction”, They also, described their experiences of adjustments in living and learning, their mismatched expectations and how their life attitudes had affected their experience in New Zealand. While the students do not explicitly acknowledge Chinese values, their influence can be seen in the way the students experience satisfaction with their study in New Zealand. This has implications for institutions in New Zealand as these insights have a potential to inform practices to support these students.</p>

Land use in remote areas: socio-economic prospects

Okinsky district (the Republic of Buryatia, Russia) is characterized by entanglement of heterogeneous economies formed by the global demand for gold, Chinese values of jade, remnants of Soviet planning systems at the local and municipal level, traditional Soyot and Buryat land use practices, and nascent extreme and recreational tourist flows. In a situation when most of the economic and social relations remain informal and rarely captured in the official documents, landscapes become the most visible marker of changes and intersecting and sometimes conflicting networks of diverse multiscale relations. Using the interviews and in-situ observations we collected and analysed data on the pertinent social, cultural, and professional ties and examined local expectations on education, living conditions and economic prospects. Networking as a key conception has been used to untangle the complexity of the studied systems, interconnections and interdependencies of the system components. A new draft network model stimulates experts to assess if the changes planned for the regional development really benefit people in local communities, nation in whole and in global scale. In addition, the new discourse of ecosystem services motivates experts to discuss the prospects for the ecological specialization of the territories from different angles while preserving biodiversity.

Qipao: The Carrier of Chinese Cultural and Philosophical Symbols

The qipao has become the symbol of identity for Chinese women. It is a tight-fitting dress with a standing collar, an asymmetric left-over-right opening and two-side slits. Chinese knot buttons are also an essential part of the qipao. While the garment serves to express Chinese values and has philosophical connotations, its colour, fabric pattern and Chinese knot buttons express wishes for happiness, luck, fortune, longevity as well as a yearning for peaceful interpersonal relationships and harmony with nature. The qipao was developed not only from a traditional gown used by the Han (the majority Chinese ethnic group), but also integrated minority cultural elements and has recently added Western sartorial patterns. This has resulted in a national dress that is more harmonious with contemporary aesthetics, manifesting the adaptability, versatility and inclusiveness of Chinese culture.

A Comparison of Your Better Life Index and Its Antecedents Across Two Chinese Cultures

OECD identified 11 topics in Your Better Life Index (YBLI). YBLI is generally accepted as an essential indicator of material living conditions and quality of life. This study compared YBLI in two predominantly Chinese regions, i.e., Macau (a former Portuguese territory in China) and Zhuhai in the Greater Bay Area in the southern part of the People’s Republic of China. Data were collected from 446 (231 Macau and 215 Zhuhai) ethnic Chinese residents in the two regions. Results revealed the Macau residents to be much more satisfied with life (significantly higher ratings on more YBLI topics) than their Zhuhai counterparts. Regression analyses revealed Chinese Values and Family Emotional Support to be strong predictors of YBLI in Zhuhai, while Future Prospects and Self-Efficacy explained most variance for YBLI in Macau. The results of the comparisons are discussed in terms of seminaries and differences in the cultures and economic development of the regions.

China's great transformation: from duty to personal rejuvenation and well-being

If the freedom to choose is important for personal well-being, what happens when there are drastic restrictions on personal choice? China represents an opportune case to explore this question. Its fifty-plus years of experimenting with a redistributive command economy, combined with periodic bursts of political fever, made extreme egalitarianism more important than other Chinese values recognising individual merit, vision, and achievement. Throughout much of Chinese history, these values were widely shared; but in the current era, an alternative cultural model was stressed: social responsibility for the community and nation. Individuals were ideally expected to de-emphasise their individuality in favour of "the common good". In China, the juxtaposition of the two competing value systems—extreme egalitarianism versus individual choice, responsibility, and personal achievement—engendered confusion, anger, angst, and unhappiness. In China, from 1949 to 1976, this accounts, in part, for much of the suffering people experienced in living their lives. In this article I examine the Chinese cultural model for life satisfaction or wellbeing in two different eras: work unit (danwei), socialism (1981–1983), and market reform (1987–2000). My sample was found in Hohhot, the provincial capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China, where I lived from 1981 to 1983; six months in 1987; five months in 2000 (a total of 35 months). I will also examine the ways Chinese sought well-being in four different domains: friendship, family, occupation, and fun activities. By analysing how Chinese conceptualised their lives over time, I will identify the conceptual frameworks individuals used to assess their relative well-being.

Scriptural Reasoning in China

Interreligious learning through cross reading the Scriptures, including the Christian Bible, has been a long-standing cultural phenomenon in China. The essay looks at the recent reception and experimental practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) in China in the last twenty years, and the extensions of SR made by Chinese scholars, for instance, the transformation of SR to a discipline of Comparative Scripture, the integration of SR with ancient Chinese values of deep learning in border crossing, and an inclusion of Chinese religious Scriptures in SR, etc. A report and evaluation of a ten-month experimental practice of SR at Minzu University of China follows. And finally, the essay identifies some prospects for SR in China, including promoting the practice of SR among religious communities, developing a systematic interpretation of sacred texts with the inspiration from SR, and a deep combining of SR, methodologically and theoretically, with the study of history of Chinese religions.

THE POTENTIAL OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PECINAN GLODOK AREA OF NINE PLACES AS A CULTURAL TOURISM IN CHINA

<p>Glodok China Town area is one of the majority ethnic Chinese populations. Glodok Chinatown is also one of the important trade and economic centers in Jakarta. This area is thick with Chinese values and culture from building architects and, the life of the Chinese people who live with trading reason to this day in this area.</p><p>This research was carried out starting at the 2571 Cap Go Meh Festival in 2020 which was held at Pancoran China Town. Researchers conducted descriptive qualitative research and in the collection techniques conducted were interviews, observation and documentation. Interviews were conducted by interviewing several informants such as local government, business actors, tourists and the community. This research aims to get to know the Glodok Petak Sembilan Chinatown area and to know various views and evaluations of informants about this area.</p><p>The government, business actors, the community and tourists agree and support the making of the Glodok Petak Sembilan Chinatown as Chinese cultural tourism in Jakarta. The positive impact is that the presence of tourists is able to enliven the area and make the area better known by the wider community and help the economy of the business community surrounding the area. However, the negative impact found was a traffic jam or lack of traffic order. With the high interest of tourist arrivals, the parking facilities provided are inadequate with existing tourists, this is also one of the causes of lack of orderly traffic in this region.</p>

Maat and Tianxia: Building World Orders in Ancient Egypt and China

Ancient China and pharaonic Egypt were two of the most long-lived polities of the ancient world. Both of them succeeded in integrating a diversity of regions and peoples under a single monarch and in creating unique self-referential cultures, which survived periods of political fragmentation and of conquest by foreign peoples. Under these conditions, key concepts emerged that served to express order, justice, harmony, and good government. They provided an indispensable ideological tool to legitimize royal authority as well as a world view that helped define Egyptian and Chinese values when compared to neighboring areas and peoples, usually regarded as the “Other.” Two of these concepts, Egyptian maat and Chinese tianxia, may prove particularly useful for comparing the very particular ways in which Egyptian and Chinese leaders thought about their role in the world, both as builders of cosmic order and as efficient rulers that held together the peoples they governed.

Ritual Spaces, Governmentality and Cultural Governance in Urban Development: The Case of Shenzhen

Recently, the concept of “cultural governance” has gained analytical traction in research on Chinese urban development. This is mostly diagnosed as a top-down process of defining and imposing cultural forms in government-led projects, such as in tourism. We argue that the case of Shenzhen manifests important differences, and is highly significant, considering the national and international status of this mega-city. Based on detailed field studies, supplemented with information about other cases, we show that in Shenzhen local cultural forms show resilience and increasing public presence, while also being shaped by inclusive cultural policies that are informed by the national drive towards reinstating traditional Chinese values as part and parcel of national identity. One manifestation is the enactment of the traditional ritual space of the village in urban architecture, such as the duality of ancestral hall and village temple, often at so-called “cultural squares,” and the expression of territorial ambitions of lineages in competitive projects of redevelopment. We suggest enhancing the concept of cultural governance by the concept of governmentality to grasp these phenomena analytically.