Suchergebnisse

At the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals had to respond to the dire situation of their country. Against this background, the leading intellectual Kang Youwei aimed to re-establish some traditional values. Although Yang Zhu had long been employed rhetorically in pre-modern China, Kang reconstructed Yang Zhu as an ancient master who had a coherent theory centered around two expressions: wei wo (serving one's own interest) and zong yu (indulging in desires). However, there is a tension in Kang's attitudes towards Yang Zhu: on the one hand, he criticizes Yang Zhu for when he reflects upon the despotic nature of Chinese governance; on the other hand, Kang sees the positive sides of wei wo and zong yu in the achievement of the Great Unity. Despite the ambiguity, Kang's choice of vocabulary still made an impact to the portrayals of Yang Zhu after his: his portrayal turned this master into someone highly relevant to modern China; he also showed the possibility of reading Yang Zhu in a positive light.

As of December 2014, there are three billion Internet users worldwide, of which 649 million are Chinese. This number will grow in the years to come. This technology, of course, possesses immense significance in our everyday life. What is currently new in international human rights practice is the trend of discussing Internet access as a potential human right. A BBC poll showed that of twenty-seven thousand interviewees worldwide, almost 80% believed that Internet access should be regarded as a fundamental right. The UN has been putting much effort into the spreading of telecom infrastructure. It also recently issued a report suggesting that Internet access should be regarded as a human right, which might entail intervention against a government that had arbitrarily cut off the Internet access of its citizens. Those proposals demonstrate the importance of the current social context, within which any proposal of Internet access as a fundamental human right has to be evaluated. However, despite the vigorous discussions in the legal-political arena, philosophical studies on the subject are still quite sporadic and preliminary. In this dissertation, I attempt to justify a human right to Internet access by referring to its instrumental value in promoting and protecting democracy. Therefore, I discuss not only the normative idea of democracy, but also how Internet use might contribute to its protection and promotion. The thesis consists of six chapters, dealing with several questions. First, I investigate the empirical evidence relating to Internet access and the protection and promotion of democracy (chapters I and II). Making the assumption that democracy is one of the important human rights, and considering the instrumental value of Internet access for democracy, I try to defend the thesis that Internet access should be seen as a derived human right (chapters III and IV). Since I am particularly interested in the role of Internet access in China, I study the extent to which Confucianism might play a role in ...

This article explores the chili pepper industry in Guizhou and how it intersects with a push toward high-tech, digital agriculture schemes as part of Guizhou's economic development driven by a data economy. State bureaus, tech companies, and research institutes around rural development cast digital, data-driven agriculture as a broadly positive development that will provide environmental sustainability and economic benefits to small farmers. In examining Guizhou's Chili Pepper City, I argue that such initiatives maintain state power through accelerating complexity and implementation of universalizing technologies. In the context of Guizhou, these universalizing technologies are intertwined with a legacy of China's own settler dynamics, the political uses of poverty alleviation and environmentalism to control land, and socialist legacies of using agricultural modernization toward nationalist ends. I draw on a multitude of news articles, journals, and secondary sources, as well as repeat site visits and interviews that I conducted in Guizhou from 2017 to 2019.