“a unified new culture” is put forward as a original and significant concept in Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, based on which the mission of building modern civilization of the Chinese nation is proposed. The birth of a unified new culture is a reflection of the self immunity of the Chinese cultural subjectivity after the Western colonial invasion in modern China. The “soul” of Marxism and the “root” of fine traditional Chinese culture, as well as their “two combinations” formed in the practice of revolution, construction, and reform, serve as the “source of life” of a unified new culture. From the perspective of Marx's theory of world history, the new unified culture of the Chinese nation extends to the cultural life of “world history”. It has obtained its world historical orientation by leading the new form of human civilization, enhancing the common values of all mankind, and promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Although Marx's discourse on culture is not very extensive, it has had a pivotal influence on the history of cultural criticism. In the context of historical materialism, Marx not only accurately reveals the realistic foundation, practical core and generative characteristics of culture, but also scientifically demonstrates the dialectical structure, behind the cultural category, of material and idea, dynamic and static states. In criticizing political economy, Marx creatively proposes the proposition that “capital creates culture”. In the era of capitalism, capital, according to its own features and requirements for proliferation, has created a corresponding culture. Such is essentially a proliferation-oriented or profit-making culture, which is manifested in the basic types of materialistic secular culture, homogenized mechanical culture, individual self-interested utilitarian culture, and formalistic hypocritical culture. Such a proposition is a theoretical identification of the dominant role of capital in the process of cultural creation and the social fact that culture is subordinate to capital. Marx's analysis on it is actually a cultural critique of the social and historical development. Marx's interpretation of culture has had a lasting and profound impact on the process of world civilization, and bears great enlightening significance for promoting the construction of socialist culture and the new form of human civilization in the new era.

As a material carrier to ensure the good operation of the state and society, public services have gradually become the legal basis of modern national governance. Faced with the practical requirements of meeting the growing needs of the people and the mission of promoting modernization of governance, public services are endowed with new connotations and requirements. The specific requirements and manifestations of this change, as well as the challenges it poses to the supply of public services, have not been fully discussed in current research. Based on the changes in the content system, supply side, and demand side of public services, combined with the basic process of public service supply, an analytical framework is constructed to understand the development requirements of public services under the modernization of governance. The requirements for the modernization of public services in the new era lie in achieving fairness and justice in service allocation, sustainability in service supply, and effective matching of service supply and demand. Under this, this paper rethinks the supply mode of public services and proposes spatial, financial, and technological paths for public services. The first is to scientifically allocate limited resources, optimize spatial functions and facility layout, reconstruct the spatial structure and order of public services, and respond to spatial justice through spatial resource allocation. The second is to clarify the responsibilities and roles of government, market, and society, improve the design of fiscal systems among hierarchical governments, and promote sustainable development through fiscal governance. The third is to create a digital public service scenario, optimize the identification and feedback mechanism of public service demand through digital technology, and achieve effective matching of supply and demand through technological empowerment.

Mega projects pose complex governance challenges due to their extremely large scale, thus requiring the comprehensive intervention and prudent management from the state. The case study of the West-East Gas Transmission shows that the scale of the mega project leads to issues of information gap for decision-making and vague plans, as well as governance challenges such as project integration interaction and dilemma of multi subject collaboration. To cope with such burdens, 1) China shapes the depth and social legitimacy of mega engineering strategies with the will of the country, through strategic framing and engineering goal construction; 2) China bridges the gap between the ideal optimal solution and group decision-making results with collective rationality, through optimal decision-making and group intelligence support; 3) China integrates fragmented governance authority through leadership group coordination, high-level authority promotion, and political coordination, thus forming an effective intergovernmental governance synergy; 4) the state power, through a state-led organizational network, is deeply embedded in the field of engineering construction, thus achieving management coordination through the active operation of state capabilities. The national governance logic of mega projects can be summarized as comprehensive intervention, strategic coordination, prudent management, and effective governance. Its research helps to expand the national theory of mega engineering governance and deepen the understanding of China's mega engineering governance and decision-making process.

Smart governance is a essential component of smart cities and a key point for improving the level of smart city construction. Smart cities focus on the overall intelligence of cities based on multiple aspects of function and action, and the social problems that arise in the operation and development of smart cities require the empowerment of smart governance. In the practice of smart governance by cities in China and various Asian countries, the macro empowerment mechanism and micro achievement path of smart governance empowerment have emerged. Specifically, smart governance empowers smart cities through a “dual intelligence” mechanism of “the release of technological intelligence in urban governance” and “the stimulation and amplification of human intelligence in urban governance by technology”. The micro path includes the following three aspects: “demonstrating the wisdom of agile and precise governance”, “enhancing the wisdom of multi-agent inclusivity”, and “responding to the human needs of cities”. It is not only the transformation of the “dual wisdom” mechanism at the practical level, but also the underlying support for empowering smart cities with smart governance.

In building a high-standard socialist market economy, with continuous leaps in the stage of economic development, the robust growth of new industries, formats, and models such as the digital economy and artificial intelligence, has led to changes in China's tax structure. Optimizing the tax structure and appropriately increasing the proportion of direct taxes, therefore, have become inevitable requirements for deepening China's tax system reform. China needs to adjust and optimize the tax source structure in a timely manner based on changes in the driving force of economic growth, and properly handle the relationship between investment and consumption in the tax source structure, thus ensuring the sustainability and stability of tax revenue. China should, under the premise of stabilizing macro tax burden, further strengthen the regulatory function of the tax system, enhance the regulatory function of the tax system in the field of social equity, continuously promote the functional role of direct taxation in regulating income distribution, promote moderate social mobility, effectively regulate income distribution issues related to data elements, and more effectively regulate regional tax distribution and maintain a unified national market.

Promoting the high-quality development of inclusive finance in rural areas so as to provide effective financial services for small and medium-sized enterprises and enhance the high-quality service of rural finance to the real economy is a key link in solving the problem of imbalanced and insufficient economic development in China. It is also necessary to achieve inclusive growth and promote social harmony and stability. By constructing an evaluation index system for rural inclusive finance and calculating the rural inclusive finance index based on data from 30 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the central government) in China from 2008 to 2018, and employing social network analysis (SNA) and spatial Durbin model (SDM) to analyze the spatial correlation network characteristics and driving factors of rural inclusive finance development, the study finds that: (1) The number of correlation relationships and network density in the spatial correlation network of rural inclusive finance show a shift from rising to declining, and the peak is available in 2011. The overall connectivity of the correlation network is good with a “hierarchical” network structure, and all network characteristic indicators are relatively stable. (2) The degree centrality, proximity centrality, and intermediate centrality in six regions in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Beijing, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Guangdong stay at the top and continuously in the core area of the spatial correlation network with stronger control and dominance abilities, thus bearing a strong siphon effect on financial resources in other regions, resulting in the agglomeration of rural inclusive finance. (3) The level of economic development, population density, degree of government intervention, industrial structure, and banking competition are five important variables that affect the development of rural inclusive finance. From the perspective of direct effects, economic development, high population density, and moderate banking competition all promote the development of rural inclusive finance; from the perspective of indirect effects, population agglomeration, a high proportion of the primary industry, and intense banking competition all inhibit the development. In addition, increasing government fiscal expenditure on a certain area also bears a positive spillover effect on its surrounding areas.

To build an efficient, standardized, and unified national market open to competition is an institutional advantage in enhancing the level of green technology innovation. Based on the data from the prefecture level and the provincial level in China from 2007 to 2019, by employing factor analysis to measure the degree of national unified market, this empirical research thus conducted finds that a unified market has a significant promoting effect on both the quantity and quality of green technology innovation. The mechanism test results indicate that such a market can drive green technology innovation through digital effects and R&D investment effects. Further investigation reveals that this enhancement effect is more pronounced in the eastern region, exhibiting a non-linear characteristic of “gradual increase” under different levels of industrial upgrading, and a significant spatial spillover effect. In exploring the path of regional green technology innovation and upgrading in the future, it is necessary to establish a unified market foundation system and focus on creating a high-quality data element market, keep the channels smooth for green innovation cooperation between China's eastern, central, and western regions, promote the high-end transformation of industries and the integrated development of secondary and tertiary industries, with a aim to make greater contributions to urban green development.

The metaverse is the future form of digital information technology development. Its inherent advantages such as digital avatar collaboration assistant, co-existence of virtual and real scene, super strong social network system, and interconnected & shared data resources are applied in classroom teaching, which will promote the formation of collaborative and precise teaching paradigms, render deep immersion in teaching styles, stimulate multi-dimensional and three-dimensional teaching communication forms, and meet the needs of diversified intelligence teaching evaluation. At the same time, the metaverse may also bring challenges such as inadequate teacher competence, difficulty in adapting to teaching situations, emotional alienation in teacher-student communication, and a lack of humanistic dimension in teaching evaluation. To address such challenges, it is necessary to vigorously enhance the digital competence of teachers, strengthen their ability to adapt to multiple scenarios, shape their rational teaching and communication behaviors, promote the integration of “qualitative” and “quantitative” evaluations, and enhance the humanistic care of teaching evaluations.

As an emerging technology, artificial intelligence in education (AIED), though with its advantages, gradually reveals many ethical issues. The ethical issues and avoidance strategies of AIED technology in the United States, a pioneer country in AIED technology, are more typical. Various biases and discrimination have emerged: it is difficult to hold accountable for errors and technical vulnerabilities in intelligent systems; massive data collection may infringe on students' various rights; students' long-term use of intelligent systems may face obstacles to development, thus a value conflict between “gaining success” and “being human”. To avoid such ethical risks, the United States has formulated relevant standards, strengthened the algorithms supervision, introduced data protection guidelines and bills, and standardized the application of intelligent technology in education. China should learn from the governance strategies adopted by the United States, formulate and improve the corresponding policies, establish a full-staff collaborative supervision mechanism throughout the whole life cycle, develop an ethical framework of educational artificial intelligence, and cultivate and improve the artificial intelligence literacy of teachers and students.

In the context of the digital transformation of education, the application of digital textbooks has become an endogenous variable in teaching practice, and is an important way to improve the quality of education and implement the task of moral education. The transition of textbooks from “paper” to “digital” in the historical change is the result of the comprehensive effects of institutional innovation, spatial overlap, and individual needs. Starting from this, the combination of sharing teaching resources, reshaping the teaching ecosystem, and focusing on teaching reality constitutes a comprehensive understanding of the value logic of digital textbook application. However, in reality, behind the application are the risks of technological dependence, scenario solidification, and imbalanced relationships hidden. To avoid these risks, teachers should response from three aspects: the integration of external and internal forces, the integration of technology and value, and the aggregation of relationships and functions, and further explore the action direction of digital textbook application.

In the history of world currency, the paper currency invented by the Chinese is significant, bearing historical prominence. However, traditional Chinese paper currency, whether it was the official “jiaozi” and “huizi” issued in the Song Dynasty, the “baochao” issued during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, or the “yinpiao” or “qianpiao” issued by non-governmental organizations, none of them later survived and developed into modern currency, a destiny which is well summed up as “early sprouted but not fully developed”. Though with such regrets, its rise and circulation have played a promoting role in the emergence of paper currency in West Asia and Europe, thus gaining global influence.

In recent years, research on corporate history has drawn increasing attention from the academic community. Without breakthroughs in research perspectives and methods, relevant research still remains within the frameworks and structures such as property rights, governance structure, and surplus distribution although a large amount of historical data has been excavated and sorted out. Researchers repeat the problems and even conclusions of their predecessors. Specifically, previous studies on corporate history are blocked by the research themes and paradigms of economic history, neglecting the fact that the primary driving force of a company, as an organization, is self-sustaining, and its primary goal is profitability. In order to further promote the study of corporate history, it is necessary to take the enterprise and its development & evolution as the core, i.e. a historical writing style that focuses on the enterprise as the main driving force, and that we call it the corporate history.