I examine the state of Tibetan Buddhism that exists in China in the 21st century and what are the best methods to increase religious freedom and political autonomy. I look at what cause China and Tibet to reach this point, and why do the respective nations do what they do. Man people fundamentally misunderstand the reasons why the Chinese Communist Party oppresses Tibetan Buddhism; they aren't concerned with eradicating religion, they want to simply maintain longterm political legitimacy in Tibet.

Design management has not previously been taught in China and the courses are largely ‘imported’ from the west. The transfer of knowledge to a culturally different context must consider a range of aspects which impact upon design management education. This research study aims to conduct an intensive investigation into the transferability of postgraduate design management education (Pg DME) system and programmes from the UK to China. The key objectives are to identify key issues of design management knowledge and its education in a Chinese context; and understand the impact of findings on the interaction in Chinese social, industrial and educational environments. The following areas were reviewed to inform the key theoretical context of Pg DME development in China: 1) the essential issues of knowledge transfer; 2) the theory of design and design management; and 3) the strategic content of design management education and its implications. Through the literature review, the themes of the research were finally indentified: differences in culture, economic drivers and education systems make the transfer complex, thus requiring interpretation as well as translation in Chinese Pg DME 1) policy making; 2) curriculum development; and 3) teaching & learning strategies. This research project is based upon an innate belief in the subjective nature of reality from within the interpretive paradigm. Therefore the research is exploratory with an inductive approach. The 3-phased multi-method comparative research study includes a design management 1) education related policy study; 2) curriculum development study; and 3) is comprised of 18 semi-structured qualitative interviews; providing three distinct but comparable data sets, allowing investigation of the research objective from strategic, tactical and operational perspectives. Models have also been developed in this study, where each level has been designated an essential framework for the healthy development of Pg DME in China. The main findings of the research study highlight Pg DME as an enabling discipline where the needs to be satisfied are internal to the design manager and external to the market and social environment. This necessitates consideration of the appropriate level of understanding of culture background; business & market awareness; and professional practice under the influence of globalisation and knowledge transfer for the society; industries; HEIs; academics and students. It also provides a deeper understanding of cultural aspects of design management provision, enabling the understanding of knowledge transfer, curricula, and teaching & learning across cultural borders.

This project is a translation of Liu Qingbang's novella 'Shénmù' from Chinese into English. It is also accompanied by an analysis of the text and Li Yang's movie 'Blind Shaft', which was based on the novella.

This thesis explores domestic violence (DV) on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, in Qinghai province of the People's Republic of China (PRC). (See Appendix 1 for maps of the study region.) It is based on fifteen months of fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, and upon interviews with 100 women and men, participant observation, and a reading of local proverbs, song, and popular literature. As this is a thesis by publications, three stand-alone articles dealing with selected aspects of domestic violence (DV) in the study region, plus two articles dealing with social phenomena closely related to DV, are included.

In this study, an experiment was conducted to compare the three teaching methods: the inferring word-meaning method, the morpheme-based teaching method, and the word-based teaching method. The results showed that students taught by the inferring word-meaning method outperformed both the students taught by the morpheme-based method and the word-based method in terms of word retention. The possible reason is that the inferring word-meaning section enabled students to pay attention to and spend more time on each word. On the other hand, the disadvantage of the inferring word-meaning method is that it might not be an efficient way to teach a large amount of new vocabulary because it requires sufficient time for students to get involved with the context and the discussion of guessing words. Another drawback is that textbooks are seldom designed for the purpose of inferring word-meaning from context, which means that the teacher has to spend a substantial amount of time editing the dialogues or reading material from the textbook in order to give students more information to help them guess the meaning of each target word. For the morpheme-based teaching method and the word-based teaching method, there were no statistically significant differences observed. Students from both test groups achieved the same percentage of word retention.

Kaidan is a genre of supernatural tales that became popular during Japan’s Edo period. In 1627, Hayashi Razan translated numerous supernatural tales from China and collected them in five volumes in a work known as Kaidan zensho, the “Complete Collection of Strange Works.” Hayashi Razan was an influential Neo-Confucian scholar and was instrumental in establishing Neo-Confucianism as a dominant ideological force in Tokugawa Japan. As his teachings and stories reached a wide audience, and the government was supportive of Neo-Confucian ideas in Japan, his Kaidan tales, which contained subtle didactic elements, enjoyed success. However, Kaidan zensho was never translated into English. Many of the tales within the Kaidan zensho expressed didactic messages by using supernatural depictions of animals as narrative devices. The animals usually were caricatures of a person or group, and were furthermore depicted in a negative fashion. These animals were shown to be unable to act in a moral manner, so their purpose in these tales was to highlight the moral decisions made on the part of the stories’ protagonists. Chapter one of this thesis introduces the kaidan genre, provides context for 17th century Japan, and how Neo-Confucianism influenced Tokugawa government and culture. Chapter two analyzes the Kaidan zensho tales for their use of animals, grouping the stories by theme – benevolence, ingratitude, fear of women, and impermanence. It explains what the animals represent and how they highlight the moral of the story. Chapter three is my original translation of fifteen tales focusing on animals found in Kaidan zensho, with notes to provide context to the stories.

Shan’ge 山歌 is a collection of popular songs in Wu dialect by the late Ming scholar Feng Menglong 冯梦龙 (1574-1646). Due to a lack of detailed literary analysis of the songs, and a lack of appreciation of these songs from the perspective of rhetorical aesthetics, I aim to provide a close reading of the siqing (私情) songs in Shan’ge. With the intention to offer a fresh perspective into the depiction of emotions and sentimental feelings, as well as the various ways of presenting the people’s perception of love and sexual desire in these songs, I endeavor to both enrich the understanding of Shan’ge and call critical attention to the subject mater of siqing. In my thesis, I argue that these Siqing songs are strong spokesmen and representatives of genuineness promoted by Feng Menglong in the preface of Shan’ge. I will examine how genuineness was promoted by the late Ming scholars and particularly, how Feng Menglong views genuineness and how he utilizes genuineness in the songs as a means to promote vernacular literature. The representative siqing songs will be categorized and explored in three sections, with the purpose of answering the following questions: How could Feng’s promotion of these popular songs be situated in the late Ming discourse of genuineness? How does Shan’ge vividly create a world that not only celebrates true and romantic love but also allows the display of the vent of irresistible desire, and the rustic expression of sex? How are carriers of genuine qing explicitly portrayed in these songs through their ingenious conversations and tricks in love affairs? And lastly, how do the songs in different ways showcase a vivid and dynamic picture of a sexually liberate and joy-oriented late Ming Suzhou?

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing push for foreign language teachers to use a communicative approach to language instruction. One area this can be seen is through role-plays, activities where students take on a persona other than themselves to complete a task in the target language. Despite the growing popularity of role-play, there has been little empirical research looking at the impact of role-play on students. In particular, the differences between large group and small group role-plays remain virtually unstudied. This thesis looks at role-play in Chinese language classrooms from the perspectives of both teachers and students. To obtain the teacher perspective educators throughout Massachusetts were surveyed about their attitudes and approach to using role-play. To better understand student attitudes towards role-play, a wide variety of role-plays were observed and data was collected from the participants. Observations of over fifty role-plays showed that large group role-plays have a wide variety of benefits including: increasing student enjoyment, providing more opportunities for peer learning/teaching, and enabling teachers to give more immediate feedback. These implications as well as other suggestions for how to successfully use role-play in the language classroom are explored more fully later in the thesis. In order to make role-play more accessible to foreign language teachers, a series of role-play lesson plans based on the principles discussed are also provided in the appendix.

The imagistic language of Tang poetry can be defined as the language of Tang poetry that presents directly the immediate sensory/emotive experience, which is the early, unprocessed inner response of an external experience that involves what is previously unknown. The primary purpose of my thesis is to explore a theoretical definition of two characteristics: “now-ness” and “continuity” in the immediate sensory/emotive experience as well as to explore how the two characteristics are generally demonstrated in the imagistic language of Tang poems. Through the demonstration of seven individual analyses of Tang poems and their translations from the perspective of now-ness and continuity, this thesis also intends to foster now-ness and continuity as a particular perspective that assists us with the reading, understanding and translation of the imagistic language of Tang poetry.

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of three Chinese modal auxiliary verbs: NENG, HUI, and KEYI by English-speaking learners who study Chinese as a foreign language and attempts to examine the following issues. 1) Are English-speaking learners able to distinguish the semantic difference between NENG, HUI and KEYI and realize their corresponding syntactic constraints? Does leaner’s acquisition of these three auxiliary verbs increase with the improvement of their Chinese proficiency level? Can these three auxiliary verbs be mastered completely by English-speaking leaners? 2) What is the acquisition order when they are learning NENG, HUI and KEYI? Furthermore, what is the acquisition order of the multiple semantic meanings within one single Chinese modal auxiliary verb? 3)What is the relationship between English-speaking learners’ comprehension and production, in regard to their performance on learning these three auxiliary verbs? 4) whatpedagogical implication does this study reveal? This research is composed of a comprehension test and production analysis. A questionnaire is designed to test English-speaking learners’ comprehension of NENG, HUI and KEYI, including fourteenmultiple choices questions. In addition, 275 essays from the participants are collected anonymously as production database to be analyzed. In total, 90 English-speaking learners who enrolled in Chinese courses at University of Massachusetts Amherst in Spring 2019 were participated, and they were divided into three experimental groups: beginning level, intermediate level, and advanced level. 60 native Chinese speakers were also invited into this research, served as a control group. The result in this research shows that 1) English-speaking leaners’ acquisition of NENG, HUI and KEYI do not always increase with the improvement of their Chinese proficiency level. Both HUI and KEYI present the same trend, which rises rapidly and significantly after experiencing a relatively flat stage, while the development of NENG is shown by U-shape learning curve. 2) For English-speaking learners, the acquisition order is(from the easiest to hardest): HUI > KEYI > NENG. 3) English-speaking learners’ production of NENG, HUI, and KEYI is not always parallel to their comprehension. Also, some implications for teaching NENG, HUI and KEYI are discussed in this thesis.