This impressive study and analysis by Dr. Minghao Li and Dr. Wendong Zhang, entitled "Finding Firmer Ground" adds a significant analytical element to the effort to enhance the Sino - American relationship through increased “Agricultural Cooperation” here in the Heartland of America, the part of the United States that has such a long and illustrious history of leadership in building connections between the Chinese and American peoples.

The U.S.-China educational exchange began auspiciously after a 30-year hiatus in 1978 when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping announced his strategic decision to send 5,000 students and scholars from China each year to further their education. 1 Then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter famously responded, “Tell him to send 100,000.” This was the launch of educational exchange as a core pillar of the U.S.-China relationship. Until the 40th anniversary of the normalization of U.S.-China relations and U.S.-China educational exchange in 2019, there was general agreement that the exchange of students and scholars benefited both countries. There was recognition that the enormous increase in personal interaction and friendships — and knowledge about each other’s society, culture, economy, and government — strengthened understanding, trust, and cooperation. At a time when U.S.-China relations are at its lowest point since the normalization of relations, the benefits of educational exchange are being questioned, if not under assault. Few could have predicted that Chinese students would be weaponized by both sides, caught up in the political and security disputes between the two governments. A trade war, political tensions, concerns about academic espionage and influence operations, rising incidents of anti-Asian hate, and a global pandemic have created a perfect storm to stir up distrust as well as retaliatory measures that restrict student mobility on both sides of the Pacific. After years of fast growth, the number of Chinese students and researchers coming to the U.S. has slowed. China is still the largest source of international students in the U.S., accounting for about one-third of the total, but America’s appeal is weakening. Is this shift toward declining numbers an overdue correction to better protect America against academic espionage and influence operations and prevent China from capitalizing on American know-how to accelerate its own progress? Or is this decline in numbers an unnecessary and damaging hit on American universities’ preeminent position in global higher education and its open science model, leading to loss of U.S. competitiveness and international prestige? This report more broadly, is an attempt to discern the benefits, risks, and challenges of U.S.-China educational exchange and determine how educational exchange can advance the interests of both the U.S. and China going forward.

This annual report on U.S.-China Relations is a project of The Carter Center with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the National Association of Chinese Americans in Atlanta. The Grandview Institution, a think tank based in Beijing, is a partner for this project.  For more information on the Carter Center, please check its website at https://cartercenter.org/.  For more information on the Grandview Institution, please check its website at http://www.grandview.cn/. For media inquiries or questions, please contact [email protected]. URLs for The Carter Center websites on U.S.-China relations are:  English Language website: https://uscnpm.org/  Chinese

W. V. Quine was the most important naturalistic philosopher of the twentieth century and a major impetus for the recent resurgence of the view that empirical science is our best avenue to knowledge. His views, however, have not been well understood. Critics charge that Quine's naturalized epistemology is circular and that it cannot be normative. Yet, such criticisms stem from a cluster of fundamental traditional assumptions regarding language, theory, and the knowing subject - the very presuppositions that Quine is at pains to reject. Through investigation of Quine's views regarding language, knowledge, and reality, the author offers a new interpretation of Quine's naturalism. The naturalism/anti-naturalism debate can be advanced only by acknowledging and critiquing the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view. Gregory argues that the responses to the circularity and non-normativity objections do just that. His analysis further reveals that Quine's departure from the tradition penetrates the conception of the knowing subject, and he thus offers a new and engaging defence of Quine's naturalism.

This volume of essays by Naomi Scheman brings together her views on epistemic and socio-political issues, views that draw on a critical reading of Wittgenstein as well as on liberatory movements and theories, all in the service of a fundamental reorientation of epistemology. For some theorists, epistemology is an essentially foundationalist and hence discredited enterprise; for others-particularly analytic epistemologists--it remains rigorously segregated from political concerns. Scheman makes a compelling case for the necessity of thinking epistemologically in fundamentally altered ways. Arguing that it is an illusion of privilege to think that we can do without usable articulations of concepts such as truth, reality, and objectivity, she maintains (as in the title of one of her essays) that epistemology needs to be "resuscitated" as an explicitly political endeavor, with trustworthiness at its heart. While each essay contributes to a specific conversation, taken together they argue for addressing theoretical questions as they arise concretely. Truth, reality, objectivity, and other concepts that problematically rest on shifting ground are more than philosophical toys, and the ground-shifting these essays enact is a move away from abstruse theorizing-analytic and post-structuralist alike. Following Wittgenstein's injunctions to just look, to attend to the "rough ground" of everyday practices, Scheman argues for finding philosophical insight in such acts of attention and in the difficulties that beset them. These essays are an attempt to grasp something in particular, to get a handle on a set of problems, and collectively they represent a fresh model of passionate philosophical engagement.

Two heroines grapple with their own history and the ominous spread of a far-reaching power-drain in at least two known universes. Lona, acyborg T-9 stumbles from one misadventure to the next, the Mia, a highly evolved member of a series fights her way out of imrisonment on her home planet. And then there is Leri... Anyone wishing to dream with the machines is invited on a light-speed journey into the far reaches of space and the workings of borg neuronia as well as the age old struggle between the sexes.

The spellbinding story of the original werewolf, woven against an amazing historical backdrop with a supernatural twist