Grand View Garden Research Articles

The influence of outdoor training on college students’ professional competitiveness: The mediating role of self-efficacy

To explore the relationship and mechanisms of outdoor training, self-efficacy, and professional competitiveness. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 120 college students who received outdoor expansion training for eight days and seven nights in Panlong Grand View Garden of Xiangtan City through the self-efficacy and professional competitive strength scales. The relationship between outdoor development training, self-efficacy, and professional competitiveness is statistically significant (r = 0.736, 0.821, 0.873, P < 0.01). Self-efficacy mediates outdoor training and professional competitiveness, with a mediation effect value of (0.339-0.537). Outdoor development training can directly affect professional competitiveness through self-efficacy. This study only takes the students of Hunan University of Science and Technology as the research object, and the representativeness of the student group needs to be improved. The questionnaire survey results are biased. The findings emphasize the value of outdoor development training. It is proven that outdoor development training not only has a direct impact on professional competitiveness but also has an indirect impact on professional competitiveness through self-efficacy. This study not only verifies the relationship between outdoor development training and professional competitiveness but also reveals the inner psychological mechanism of the influence of outdoor development training on professional competitiveness. Therefore, the results of this study can provide a theoretical basis for promoting college students' professional competitiveness.

Investigating tourists’ and local residents’ perceptions of a Chinese film site

Film tourism is a growing phenomenon worldwide. The shooting of popular films and TV series at a destination can be seen as a very efficient driver for attracting tourists. This study focuses on a Chinese film site, Grand View Garden, located in Beijing. As the existing studies focus mainly on Western film sites, this study fills the gap with respect to the lack of research in the literature focusing on Chinese film tourism. This article examines both tourists’ and local residents’ motives for using such attractions, as well as the attitudes residents have toward tourists, and suggests that residents play a role in the creation of a sense of place that is valued by tourists. By using qualitative methods, this article provides a comparative view between tourists’ and local residents’ perceptions. Tourists thought the Garden’s interpretation services were poor and questioned the authenticity of the site, while local residents were concerned more about the Garden’s basic services and facilities. However, both classes of visitor attached importance to the retention of the heritage and culture of the Garden.

Cao Xueqin’’ Acceptance of Taoism’s Nature Philosophy: On the Most Beautiful and the Most Tragic Aesthetic Features of A Dream of Red Mansions

A Dream of Red Mansions is a masterpiece of Chinese ancient novels.It is not baseless. The main reason for this novel was that the author Cao Xueqin absorbed, melted and utilized ancient Chinese Taoism in order to express his own ideal world. A Dream of Red Mansions presented the Taoist perfect “natural world” in the conception of Grand View Garden, so was reflected a binary whole of “the most beautiful” and “the most sad” in the aesthetic style.

Taking Confucian Thought Seriously for Contemporary Society: Rejoinder to Lauren Pfister, Ronnie Littlejohn, and Li Chenyang

This rejoinder focuses on a few points of disagreement that I have with Li Chenyang, Ronnie Littlejohn, and Lauren Pfister regarding their critical comments on my book Reconstructionist Confucianism. In response to Pfister’s concerns, I point out that my book attempts to base on classical, rather than other, Confucian sources in order to reconstruct the Confucian virtue-based, ritual-guided, and family-oriented view of life for contemporary society. In appreciating Littlejohn’s suggestion on Confucian environmentalism, I contend that a kind of Grand View Garden as we find in the Dream of Red Mansion would be a typical Confucian garden, manifesting the Confucian ideal of a family-oriented way of life that holds in harmonious relations with the rest of nature under the direction of the cosmic principles. Finally, I offer detailed replies to Li’s series of challenges to my view on li 禮, arguing for the essential constitutive nature of the Confucian rituals.

Interior display and its relation to external spaces in traditional Chinese gardens

Generally speaking, the arts associated with traditional Chinese gardens can be divided into three major divisions: the various arts of landscape construction, including the fashioning of hills and hydraulics; architectural works (including the carving and painting of such features as doors, windows and beams); and the art of interior display. Regardless of whether we are discussing an underlying artistic theme or a cultural ethos, these three divisions are intimately connected. In studies of Chinese gardens, garden construction and architecture were what attracted scholarly attention; component elements of interior display, such as furniture and bonsai (pen jing), also attracted research as an independent topic. Until now, however, very few scholars have treated interior display as a synthetic system of arts warranting study as a totality, and very few researchers have systematically examined the art of interior display as a significant expression of ideal human character and the relationship between interior display and the art of gardening, nor have they examined the deeper underlying relationships between the art of interior display and the entirety of Chinese art and culture — questions that this essay seeks to address. Because of the very long historical period over which the art of interior display developed, and the fact that most relevant materials are to be found scattered unsystematically in works of literature, biographies in official histories, paintings and the applied arts, I have chosen to focus this discussion on the art governing the arrangement and decoration of residences within the Grand View Garden (Da Guan Yuan) as described in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (Hong lou meng), hereafter Red Mansions. I hope that through a discussion of those scenes familiar to all who have read this Chinese masterpiece we will have a fairly convenient medium for examining these questions. I have adopted this approach not only because Red Mansions provides one of the most detailed documentary descriptions of Chinese classical gardens and residential art, but also because the novel profoundly expresses the humanistic spirit imbuing the Chinese arts of gardens and residences. Such an approach also allows us not to be limited to a pure discussion of various arts and crafts or merely to provide an historical introduction.

The "Family" under Western Threat: (Dis)continuity of Cultural Tradition in Ba Jin's Jia and Shimazaki Tôson's Ie

THE "FAMILY" UNDER WESTERN THREAT: (DIS)CONTINUITY OF CULTURAL TRADITION IN BA JIN'S JIA AND SHIMAZAKI TÔSON'S IE Siu Leune Li Two significant and influential modern writers of China and Japan, Ba Jin [Pa Chin] (born 1904) and Shimazaki Tôson (1872-1943), reUed a great deal on their Ufe experiences in their writings, and both evinced a great concern for, even obsession with, the famüy theme. Each ofthem wrote an important novel using the same Chinese character as title: Jia and respectively Ie, in transUteration, and The Family in EngUsh translation .1 There was no direct influence between the two writers, but their common interest in the famüy in the early twentieth century was by no means a mere coincidence. Although the two writers were separated by about one generation, they represented roughly comparable stages in the crisis ofthe traditional famüy system. The family as a social institution in China and Japan was rapidly caught up in the revolutionary flames of modernization in the early decades of this century. The old famüy system, as the arch-embodiment as well as the base and buttress of the cultural, social and poUtical system oftraditional China and Japan, was one of the first structures to come under the assault of the new inteUectuals , whose celebration of individualism was diametricaUy opposed to the oppressive, collective emphasis of traditional society. As Jay Rubin notes, in Ie "Tôson depicts the sufferings ofindividuals oppressed by the weight of the traditional family system, characterizing his two family heads as swindlers and carriers of venereal disease, and suggesting various iUicit Uaisons and uncontroUed primal urges" (214). The same can be said ofBa Jin's Jia: this novel also presents the elder members of the feudal famüy as hypocrites and dissipated knaves; at the same time, it emphasizes the passionate quest of its characters for individual freedom as a first step toward the denunciation of the larger national malaise. A further concern ofthe new inteUectuals in both countries was how to come to terms with an aggressive aUen culture which was backed up by müitary power, modern science and technology. Tôson's Ie (1911) teUs of the dramatic dissolution of two traditional famiUes (Koizumi and Hashimoto) from 1898 to 1910; old yet proud, both fail to reinvent for themselves a sociocultural space for survival in the new Japan. The institutional faUure of these two famiUes crushes the componing members—the innocent as weU as the guilty—with utter caUousness. Ie is, in this respect, one of the most unsparing condemnations of the traditional famUy system written in modern Japanese literature. Tôson's other monumental work, Yoake Mae (Before the Dawn, 1935), his last and possibly greatest novel, is a continuation of the famüy theme. This fictional biography ofhis father's generation is an attempt to provide not only the Shimazaki famüy but Japan as a whole Vol. 19 (1995): 114 THE COMPAKATIST with a usable past by way of a better understanding of the reasons for the coUapse of the famüy structures. Ba Jin's most popular work of fiction has been Jiliu sanbuqu (The Turbulent Stream Trilogy), which includes Jia (Family, 1931), Chun (Spring, 1938), and Qiu (Autumn, 1940). Ofthe three novels, Jia is the most successful and has received the most attention. It is arguably Ba Jin's best-known work, although his Hanye (Cold Nights) of 1946 has been considered by critics a more mature artistic achievement (Hsia 255; Mao 142). The trilogy is a stormy tale ofepic dimension about the decline and disintegration of a traditional scholar-gentry Chinese famüy in Chengdu, Sichuan, from 1920 to the autumn of 1923. Four generations of one famüy Uve under the same roof in a huge mansion with a vast garden reminiscent ofthe Daguanyuan (Grandview garden) in Honglou meng.4 Here, a society with a glorious past is engaged in a struggle for modernization as a way of strengthening itself in order to survive the threat posed by an inimical Other, Euro-American imperiaUsm and its industrial culture. In this society, the very existence of the traditional famüy is incompatible...