The first book that systematically explores the manifold aspects of divination and prognostication in traditional and modern China.

From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

Spanning antiquity until the present, Zhao Lu analyses the eclectic and fictitious representations of Confucius that have been widely celebrated by communities of people throughout history. While mainstream scholarship mostly considers Confucius in terms of his role as a celebrated man of wisdom and as a teacher with a humanistic worldview, Zhao addresses the weirder representations. He considers depictions of Confucius as a prophet, a fortune-teller, a powerful demon hunter, a shrewd villain of 19th century American newspapers, an embodiment of feudal evils in the Cultural Revolution, and as a cute friend. Zhao asks why some groups would risk contradicting the well-accepted image of Confucius with such representations and shows how these illustrations reflect the specific anxieties of these communities. He reveals not only how people across history perceived Confucius in diverse ways, but more importantly how they used Confucius in daily life, ranging from calming their anxiety about the future, to legitimizing a dynasty, stereotyping Chinese people, and even to forging a new sense of history.

This double volume book set constitutes the refereed proceedings of 4th International Conference, AI-HCI 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which was held virtually in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The first volume focuses on topics related to Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, explainability, transparency and trustworthiness, ethics and fairness, as well as AI-supported user experience design. The second volume focuses on topics related to AI for language, text, and speech-related tasks, human-AI collaboration, AI for decision-support and perception analysis, and innovations in AI-enabled systems.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture represents the first English anthology that delves into the fascinating and thought-provoking relationship between the Chinese language and culture, exploring various macro and micro perspectives. Chinese culture boasts a history of ten thousand years, while the Chinese language’s recorded history spans at least three thousand years, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). This handbook is comprised of 17 chapters from 18 scholars including Victor Mair and William S-Y. Wang. Many chapters approach their respective topics with a comprehensive and historical outlook. Certain extensive subjects are addressed in multiple chapters, complementing one another. These topics include: The languages and peoples of China, and the southern Chinese dialects Mandarin’s evolution into a national language and its related writing reforms Language as a propaganda tool in the Cultural Revolution and in contemporary China Chinese idioms and colloquialisms This book offers an approachable exploration of the subject, appealing to both specialists and enthusiasts of the Chinese language and culture.

The essays collected in Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination deal with the philosophical, psychological, gender and cultural issues in the Chinese conception of fate as represented in literary texts and films, with a focus placed on human efforts to solve the riddles of fate prediction. Viewed in this light, the collected essays unfold a meandering landscape of the popular imaginary in Chinese beliefs and customs. The chapters in this book represent concerted efforts in research originated from a project conducted at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Contributors are Michael Lackner, Kwok-kan Tam, Monika Gaenssbauer, Terry Siu-han Yip, Xie Qun, Roland Altenburger, Jessica Tsui-yan Li, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung, Nicoletta Pesaro, Yan Xu-Lackner, and Anna Wing Bo Tso.

In Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination, Anne Schmiedl analyses the little-studied method of Chinese character manipulation as found in imperial sources. Focusing on one of the most famous and important works on this subject, the Zichu by Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672), Schmiedl traces and discusses the historical development and linguistic properties of this method. This book represents the first thorough study of the Zichu and the reader is invited to explore how, on the one hand, the educated elite leveraged character manipulation as a literary play form. On the other hand, as detailed exhaustively by Schmiedl, practitioners of divination also used and altered the visual, phonetic, and semantic structure of Chinese characters to gain insights into events and objects in the material world.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Culture offers an in-depth discussion of cultural aspects of China from the ancient period to the pre-modern era, lasting over 5,000 years, comprised of 7,000 word pieces by more than 20 world-leading academics and experts. Addressing areas such as China studies, cultural studies, cultural management, and more specific areas – such as religion, opera, Chinese painting, Chinese calligraphy, material culture, performing arts, and visual arts – this encyclopedia covers all major aspects of traditional Chinese culture. The volume is intended to be a detailed reference for graduate students on a variety of courses, and also for undergraduate students on survey courses to Chinese culture.

Informative and eye-opening, the Handbook on Religion in China provides a uniquely broad insight into the contemporary Chinese variations of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. In turn, China's own religions and transmissions of rites and systems of divination have spread beyond China, a progression that is explored in detail across 19 chapters, written by leading experts in the field.