Chinese Culture Subjectivity Research Center (CCS) has endeavored outstanding research highlights and successfully brought international attention from 2018 on by holding events like “International Summit of Sinophone Culture Studies,” “NCCU Lecture on Chinese Culture” and “Master Class.” Our research performance includes holding more than two hundred academic events, publishing research efforts, implementing the “Digital Work Platform for Humanity” and the “Virtual School for Sinophone Culture Studies”, and publishing a series of books on “Chinese Cultural Subjectivity Research.”

Our research goal since 2020 is to establish models for “Sinophone Studies in Anthropology,” “Sinophone Studies in Plurality,” “Sinophone Studies in Practice,” and “Sinophone Studies in Digital Realm.” Our research plan includes Sinophone analogical reasoning, field research on Southeast Asian Chinese religions and cultural diversity, Chinese religious ethics and philosophy of caregiving. We have also carried out our research project on the Digital Work Platform for Humanity featuring the Image Retrieval Tool Based on Automatic Image Annotation.

The research center has held the “Southeast Asia Summit of Sinophone Culture Studies” and the “Euro-American Summit of Sinophone Culture Studies” respectively in 2018. The former has been attended by ten important institutes for Sinophone culture studies from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. The latter has been attended by seven representative institutes from France, Russia, Great Britain, Hungary and Slovenia. Through these two international meetings, we have initiated the interaction with the international community for Sinophone culture studies, and we have also conveyed our messages on international research collaboration. Later in 2019, We continued to hold the “International Conference on Southeast Asia Chinese Culture” and “Sinophone Studies in Europe and the Americas: International Young Scholars Conference.” In the former conference, we have reached a consensus with the participants about holding the “Forum on Southeast Asian Chinese Culture” in Southeast Asia every year in the next 3 years, so as to build the international research network for Southeast Asian Chinese culture studies. The proposal has received tremendous feedback. University Tunku Abdul Rahman from Malaysia has agreed to collaborate with our research center to hold the very first “Forum on Southeast Asian Chinese Culture” in Malaysia in 2020. As for the “Sinophone Studies in Europe and the Americas International Young Scholars Conference,” we received applications from 66 young scholars from more than 30 countries around the globe after the conference information was released. Eventually we invited 16 young scholars from more than 10 countries, including ones from the University of Oxford, to come participate in the conference in Taiwan. This academic activity has received attention and support from the National Library, which co-organized the conference with us. We hope to create such occasions for international young scholars in Sinophone Culture Studies to come to Taiwan and have discussions with local research students. Building mutual contact as early as possible can increase Taiwan’s influence in the international community for Sinophone Culture Studies.

Internationally, every university with a long history and rich academic resources creates its representative lectures, to express their concerns for human civilization and to reflect on contemporary issues. For example, the Gifford Lectures, created in the University of Edinburgh in Great Britain, keep investigating natural theological questions essentially important to the western culture in its history of over 100 hundred years. Harvard University, Stanford University and Yale University take turns in holding the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which cultivates numerous elites in contemporary philosophy. Many important contemporary trends and thoughts derive from the lectures. Our university has established the Chinese Culture Subjectivity Research Center (CCS), which is funded by the Higher Education Sprout Project of the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. We take our responsibility to create the lectures specially designed for Chinese Culture, in order to raise the global visibility and enhance academic quality of Chinese culture studies. We also hope to create new and creative ways of thinking in the Chinese academic community. For this very purpose, the research center has created “NCCU Lecture on Chinese Culture.” We hope to invite locally and internationally renowned scholars who have distinctive insights in Chinese culture subjectivity research to give a series of five lectures respectively. The content of lectures will be collected and published in order to further promote international exchange and to enrich the database of Sinophone Culture Studies.

From 2018 to 2019, the research center has held NCCU Lectures on Chinese Culture. The lecturers and the topics are carefully selected as below:

• (1) Prof. Günter Senft, a senior investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany, gave five lectures on “Languages and Cultural Subjectivity.”
• (2) Prof. Yang Rur-Bin from the Institute of Philosophy, National Tsing-Hua University, gave five lectures on “Confucianism and Modern China.”
• (3) Prof. Dr. Lau Kwok-Ying from the Philosophy Department, CUHK, gave five lectures on” Phenomenology and the Practice of Intercultural Understanding.”
• (4) Prof. Fenggang Yang from Purdue University, USA, gave five lectures on “Research on Religion in China: Deepening Explorations in Theory and Method”.
• (5) Prof. Haun Saussy from the University of Chicago, USA, gave five lectures on “The Nine Relays: Literary Communication Across Premodern Asia.”

The research center invites one to two internationally renowned scholars to open courses in NCCU, so as to renovate the course planning and to broaden the horizon of our students. So far, we have invited Prof. Tze-wan Kwan from Chinese University of Hong Kong to do a research exchange at our center for three months in 2018. We also asked him to give a master class titled “Chinese Language and Script in Philosophical Perspective” during the exchange. In 2019, Prof. Kawai Kozo, a Japanese emeritus professor from Kyoto University, was invited to open a master class on “Chinese Poetics.” Through this activity, students can observe closely those masters’ way of doing research, and they can also systematically learn from international scholars their important research findings.

From 2018 to 2019, the research center has implemented the Digital Humanities Research Platform of Luo Chia-Lun’s documents (http://lcl.ssicrd.nccu.edu.tw/) and also the Universal Type Digital Humanities Research Platform on Chinese Ancient Books (http://ming.ncl.edu.tw/). To facilitate the educational use of the Digital Humanities Research Platform, the research center has created the “Digital Humanities Platform on Chinese Culture Subjectivity” (http://dhccs.ccstw.nccu.edu.tw/), featuring three computational tools invented by our research assistants: “Image Retrieval Tool Based on Automatic Image Annotation,” “Observation Tool of Viewpoint Migration” and “Ancient Chinese Sentence Segmentation System.” In addition, we collaborate with the University of Malaysia to build the “Database of Southeast Asian Chinese Culture.” We have also bought databases such as “China and the Modern World” and “Gale Scholar－Archives Unbound.” An international digital platform for Sinophone culture studies is expected to be implemented in the near future with abundant resources and advanced technology.

The research center continues to record “NCCU Lecture on Chinese Culture,” “Master Class” and other academic conferences. The videos will be released online to the public, so people who are interested in Sinophone Culture Studies around the globe can learn the newest research through the website of our research center. With the online courses of the Virtual School for Sinophone Culture Studies, Taiwan can contend with the Confucius Institutes founded by China around the world and fight for the right to interpretation of Chinese culture.

To allow scholars to efficiently learn about the research on Chinese cultural subjectivity, we will plan the publication of a series of research papers on Chinese cultural subjectivity. A thorough and complete series of books can serve as a reference database of Sinophone culture studies.