Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) is China’s largest pop culture and entertainment community for young people. Founded in 2009, it used to be a platform for sharing social content like videos of virtual idol Hatsune Miku and animated series, but now it’s an online pop culture community that spans anime, cartoons, games, music, painting, fashion, life, technology, to name a few genres.
This month, The Beijing Center attended the IAJU 2022 Worldwide Assembly at Boston College. What a week! The International Association of Jesuit Universities was started in 2018 and approved by Fr. Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus – who also played a big role in TBC’s participation at the conference. After all, it was Fr. Sosa who personally recommended our Executive Director, Simon Koo, be a member of the Task Force on Peace and Reconciliation.
The Chinese social media ecosystem is fast evolving, but if you live outside of China, you’re probably using a different set of social media sites.
Chinese online culture is flourishing, with its own internet terminology and suite of apps that can help Mandarin learners improve their Chinese. Spending just a few minutes a day on your favorite Chinese social media app can help you improve your language skills.
In China, social media platforms perform comparable services to global platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube but in slightly different ways.
Wuxing (五行), also known as the Five Elements, is a traditional Chinese conceptual scheme. It is used to explain an array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs. It originally refers to the five major planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Mars, and Venus) that create the five dimensions of earth life. The 5 elements of it are jin (metal), mu (wood), shui (water), huo (fire), tu (earth). These elements are normally around 73 days each and are used to describe various states in nature.
In the mid-seventeenth century, as the first full atlas of East Asia became available on the European book market, a dramatic shift took place in textual and visual representations of the Far East. The atlas, Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655), was the product of a cooperation between Joan Blaeu (ca. 1599-1673), who headed one of Europe’s foremost commercial publishing houses, and Martino Martini, a prominent Jesuit missionary to China.
Yunnan – a province of forests fills with native rhododendrons and azaleas, towns full of mud–brick houses with sloping tiled roofs, jungles teeming with monkeys and elephants, and a population that includes dozens of different Chinese minority groups, each with its own unique traditions and customs. The weather is usuallybeautiful and spring-like, with warm days and cool, clear nights. Even the pace of daily life seems calmer and quieter than in other parts of China. Kunming, its capital, is anidyllic city of eternal spring.
If you ever wonder what staff at TBC are up to when it’s summer break and there’s no students, the answer is easy – talk about our students! These past two weeks I had the opportunity to talk about our Virtual Internship Program with an audience of international educators at NAFSA’s conference and with our fellows in the Jesuit community at a conference hosted by Universidad Iberoamericana and the AUSJAL (Association of Universities Entrusted to the Society of Jesus in Latin America).
At first, the weather on May 17 did not seem very good – typically English weather meant a grey and overcast sky and some sprays of rain. But closer to the end of the day, just before the sunset and “The Last Forest” movie screening as I stepped onto the beautiful Christ Church, University of Oxford campus, the sun shone again, and a rainbow seemed to descend with a blessing of the day.
The sixth solar term – “grain rain” or “guyu” (谷雨) in Chinese – usually falls on April 20, and marks the end of spring. The old saying goes “Qingming ceases snow, grain rain ceases frost” (清明断雪，谷雨断霜). When this term arrives, cold weather finally ends, and the temperatures start to rise.
The Chinese name of Grain Rain originated from a classic folk story. When Cang Jie (仓颉), an official in the Yellow Emperor period, was hard at work creating characters that make up the written Chinese language, many grains miraculously fell from the sky, as ifrain. As a result, the Yellow Emperor dubbed this day “Gu Yu”, as the Gu means grains, and Yu means rain.
Confucius sinarum philosophus, sive scientia sinensis latine exposita, published in 1687, is the first edition print of the three major Confucian classics to be published together in any language other than Chinese. It’s published in Latin, making it the first recorded example of Confucian texts published in any European language. The Latin title translates to “Confucius the philosopher of China, or, the knowledge of China translated into Latin.”