A scene of the conference Photo: Zhu Gaolei/CSST

On March 1, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) held a press conference in Beijing to publicize its major research achievements. Beginning this month, the top think tank will release recent research outcomes on major theoretical and practical issues, academic frontiers, and basic theories of different disciplines on a monthly basis.

The first conference unveiled three publications that won first prize at the 11th CASS excellent research outcome competition, namely The Path of China’s Peaceful Development, Institutional Experiments in the Agricultural Modernization of China: A Perspective on Changes in the State-owned Farms, and Nouns and Verbs. They represent CASS’s highest academic level in basic research on the humanities and studies of major theoretical and practical issues in China’s economic and social development.

Telling understandable China stories

The Path of China’s Peaceful Development, authored by Zhang Yuyan, a CASS Member and research fellow from the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWEP) at CASS, and Feng Weijiang, a research fellow at the IWEP, starts from the Chinese “dragon culture,” explaining why the external development goal of contemporary China is to promote and ultimately consolidate peace by maintaining peace.

Based on Chinese history and culture, the book is committed to telling China stories that are easily understood by the world. For example, it leverages the history of the dragon totem resulting from the blending of multiple totems to illustrate that Chinese civilization is rooted in the cultural genes of inclusiveness and openness, harmonious integration of diversity and unity, and pursuit of peace and equality.

Furthermore, it expounds on the relationship between Lord Laozi and Buddha in the monumental novel Journey to the West. The two figures belong to the Daoist and Buddhist worlds, respectively, which overlap nonetheless. Despite different beliefs, they share extensive and solid interests while cooperating closely. They have supernatural power of varying levels, yet their relationship is one of equality, rather than superior and subordinate. Through this example, the authors pin hopes on the China-US relationship in the long term.

The English, Spanish and traditional Chinese editions of the book have already been published. The Russian translation has been completed, and the Japanese and Arabic versions have been contracted.

Chinese agricultural modernization

Compiled under the chief editorship of Zhu Ling, a CASS Member and research fellow from the Institute of Economics at CASS, Institutional Experiments in the Agricultural Modernization of China: A Perspective on Changes in the State-owned Farms examines universal problems in agriculture around the world and observes similar difficulties in developing countries through comprehensive research of changes in Chinese State-owned farms.

Through the lens of thought history, the book compares the land reclamation and cultivation system in Chinese dynasties from the Qin and Han era onwards, and traces the roots of existing agricultural production and organization models from the history of world agricultural development.

Particularly, emphasis is laid on reasons for the inception and reform of State-owned farms since the founding of the PRC. From 2014 to 2017, the research team carried out field interviews and surveys on a total of 40 State-owned farms in 17 Chinese provinces. With valuable firsthand information, they conducted cross-sectional analyses of State-owned farms’ current operational system, focusing on land management, labor and social security as well as community-level fundraising systems for basic public services. They revealed a fundraising predicament regarding farms’ infrastructure, public services, and social security.

The work provides third-party information and policy alternatives for comprehensive reform of State-owned farms and accumulates theoretical materials for the public, academia, and decision-makers to explore the path to agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics.

Nouns containing verbs

Nouns and Verbs, written by Shen Jiaxuan, a CASS Member and research fellow from the Institute of Linguistics at CASS, elaborates the relationship between nouns and verbs in Chinese language, providing fresh frames of reference for grammatical theory research. Moreover, it discusses Chinese and Western categorial views through linguistic comparison, taking a solid step towards laying the foundation of Chinese philosophy in general linguistics theory.

The book organically collects dozens of Shen’s papers published between 2007–2016. It integrates expertise in cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, generative linguistics, psychological linguistics, and evolutionary linguistics, and refers to research of multiple other disciplines. Revisiting the pair of nouns and verbs, the most basic grammatical category, the work argues that relative to Indo-European languages which feature a “noun-verb separation” relationship with verbs at the center, Chinese has a “noun-verb containment” relationship with nouns as the base and verbs belonging to nouns.

The “noun-verb containment theory” attests to an essential fact of Chinese language. It is of referential significance to language teaching, speech technology, and cognitive science. The English, Japanese and Korean translations of the book will be published soon.