published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

 In the aftermath of the Second World War the possession of aerospace technology—missiles, rockets and civil and military aircraft—was one of the hallmarks of a powerful nation, as well as an important diplomatic tool. Britain had a tremendous amount of expertise in these fields. The rise of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had transformed the international political and strategic situation. How would Britain use her technology to safeguard her interests in these changed circumstances? How and why did she fall behind? This thesis sets out to investigate these questions and determine the role aerospace played in influencing Britain’s relations with allies and neighbours in a new age. It looks at how she faced up to the dilemma of deciding whether to forge ever closer links with her transatlantic ally or overturn centuries of history by entering Europe. The study examines major British aerospace projects, their relative success or failure and their political legacy. It also looks at some of the personalities involved in the story, to illustrate attitudes to technology in Whitehall, the boardroom and the drawing office. Ultimately, it seeks to explain how the decisions that were made in the post-war decades shaped the country’s eventual destiny. / published_or_final_version / History / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis is a study of a recurring figure or trope of post-war British school stories wherein a ‘radical’ character enters a school or classroom setting to introduce an alternative concept of learning or education. The radical may be a teacher or a student. Teacher types include the tyrannical pedagogue; the ostentatious but ultimately self-serving teacher-sophist; the charismatic, benevolent Master; and the predatory teacher. Representations of the pupil include the loving disciple; the disloyal pupil; the autodidact; and the student-creator whose steals the Master’s knowledge and runs, fashioning new worlds from it. While these types vary from story to story, all modern classroom radicals challenge the way teaching and learning are practised in their educational institutions. In doing so, they reflect on the purpose of schools and the political ambitions behind knowledge construction. The post-war British school story classroom radical asks perennial questions about the modern site of pedagogy. What gives one the right to teach? Why must one be taught? What is true teaching? How should one educate and to what end? This thesis begins with a historical overview of British school story fiction, and argues that this flamboyant school-story character emerges from the debris of World War Two. My thesis moves on to focus on eight key novels, plays and autobiographies: Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954), To Sir, With Love (E.R. Braithwaite, 1959), Forty Years On (Alan Bennett, 1968), Black Teacher (Beryl Gilroy, 1976), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1981), Another Country (Julian Mitchell, 1981), The History Boys (Alan Bennett, 2004) and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005). Chapter One focuses on radical dissent in the 1930s classroom, using Spark’s and Mitchell’s retrospective accounts. Chapter Two considers black teacher radicalism from the late 1950s to the 70s, using Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love and Gilroy’s Black Teacher. Chapter Three takes the reader up to the 1980s, analysing the containment of radicalism in the figure of Alan Bennett and his work. Chapter Four discusses the limitations of classroom radicalism and the future of the school story radical in contemporary fiction, by examining the earliest and latest of the school stories selected for attention, Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). In the former radicalism is punished but idealised. The latter imagines a future of such a level of institutionalisation that radicalism in the classroom or elsewhere will have been rendered simply unthinkable. This thesis demonstrates that the radical in the classroom narrative trope is always didactic. Whether or not one is encouraged to agree with the radical, the implicit role of the radical character in the British school story is to educate the reader to think critically about the world and their place within it. Paradoxically, repeated textual examples of the radical’s failure and/or incorporation into the establishment point a type of critical pedagogical radicalism that is inherently conservative. This summation is supported by a brief genealogy of educational discourses and debates in Britain post-World War Two. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

In the 1970s, Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC),suffered a series of diplomatic setbacks. Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 preluded the normalization between the United States (US) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as the estrangement between the Republic of China (ROC)and the US. A year before, Taiwan was forced to withdraw from the United Nations (UN). Many countries then ceased to cooperate with Taiwan and turned to the PRC. This made Taiwan the “Orphan of Asia”. To survive and prevent further isolation, Taiwan rallied support from the international community, especially the US, its old ally. It strengthened propaganda in the US and attempted to build a prosperous and democratic image of itself. It sought to appeal to the American public. This thesis investigates Taiwan’s propaganda activities in the US and explores how the Kuomintang (KMT) government built a favorable image of Taiwan during the 1970s. The most notable propaganda organization of the ROC was the Government Information Office (GIO). The GIO’s overseas branch in New York, the Chinese Information Service, launched propaganda campaigns in the US through organizing political, economic and cultural activities. Although the GIO was centrally responsible for propaganda, the execution of the campaigns was a product of collaboration between various government organizations. This thesis analyzes the GIO’s responsibilities within this network of collaboration. The thesis then explores the variety of Taiwan’s propaganda strategies. The KMT tried very hard to solicit support from different sectors in the US. They appealed to the general public by launching advertising campaigns, cultural exhibitions and art performances. Apart from the general public, they also targeted reporters, members of Congress and scholars by offering material benefits including free trips to Taiwan and academic funding. Several public relation firms were also hired to publicize Taiwan in the US media. Some of these publicity campaigns were even illegal. The overseas Chinese formed a large constituent to the Taiwan government’s propaganda efforts. However, the overseas Chinese were not a singular group of people and recognizing this, the GIO tailored their campaigns accordingly. Taiwan wooed Chinatown leaders by giving them financial benefits and educated Chinatown residents through controlling the Chinese media and Chinese language schools. Meanwhile, the KMT threatened and punished Taiwan Independence Movement supporters in American universities. They also made attempts to re-educate these supporters and their families in and out of Taiwan. Through these activities, Taiwan hoped to create an illusion that the KMT supporters were not limited to people in Taiwan, but included the majority of Chinese around the world. By examining Taiwan’s propaganda organizations and strategies in the 1970s, the thesis aims to expand our knowledge of US-PRC-ROC relations in the 1970s, and show how Taiwan adapted to the changing international environment. / published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study provides a critical inquiry into the textual (self-)representations of Chinese females’ perception and experience of “women’s liberation” in 1949-1966 Chinese women’s autobiographical and fictional writings. Through historical and textual analyses, it looks into Chinese women’s multiple textual/discursive practices and their subjectivities constituted in the process. These narrative practices are treated as salient sites of women’s struggle for self-understanding, self-liberating as well as self-inventing in their own specific social and cultural conditions. The study aims to disclose the complexity of the discursive field centering on the topic of socialist women’s liberation and the dynamic interplay between different female authors and the socialist political/gender discourses within 1949-1966 socialist cultural public sphere. The thesis first examines the autobiographical, first-person female narratives appeared on three Fulian(Women’s Federation)–sponsored national and local women’s magazines: Women of China (中国妇女), Beijing Women (北京妇女), and Modern Women (现代妇女). It probes into how female narrators, from different social backgrounds, understand and restructure in their writings their past and present lives in terms of (public) labor, female freedom and new social identification. Secondly, the thesis investigates fictions and plays by female writers, which provide historically-specific gendered perspectives to the issue of “women’s liberation” as well as women’s position in and their relationship with socialism. It explores women’s perception of public and domestic labor, their formation of collective identities in the process of socialist construction, their gender struggle with and contestation to the persistent ideology of patriarchy in the new social order, all of which are revealed in their literary practices. This thesis argues that in these different sorts of writings, the representations of experience of “women’s liberation” are intimately related, but not identical, to the state-sanctioned conceptual and discursive framework. Socialist political and gender discourses actually exert unpredictable, diffuse, locally and individually contingent effects on Chinese women who actively engage in different forms of writing. The self-perception and self-fashioning represented in these women’s cultural practices are enabled by, but may also go beyond, the revolutionary language or state-inflected discourses, indicating more complicated and specific meanings of Chinese socialist ideologies and practices for individual women. Different writers choose or abandon, appropriate or dis-employ, embrace or interrogate, be close to or keep at a distance certain socialist political and gender discourses, in order to forge and interpret women’s experience from their own specific contexts. They may be empowered by the revolutionary discourses and rhetoric, yet they do not identify themselves as mere passive beneficiaries of the socialist regime, but as active agents in their self-liberation and self-transformation. It is in this process that their different subjectivities are constituted, their agency created and asserted. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The thesis was an in-depth study of the poetics and poetry of Jing School京派in modern Chinese literature. Jing School was a loosely formed but comprehensive and influential literary school emerged in Beijing in the early 1930s. It was an all-round literary school, which produced almost all kinds of literary works, including literary critic, fiction, prose, drama and poetry. However, only few studies focused on its achievements in the field of poetry. This study was undertaken to provide some insights into the poetic nature of Jing School and its contributions to the development of modern Chinese poetry. Unlike the Leftist and Right-wing writers in the same period, poets of Jing School persisted in composing pure poetry, which was advocated by the French symbolists. However, it was also the main aesthetic feature of traditional Chinese poetry, especially the poetry in the late Tang period. In this way, poets of Jing School successfully integrated the modern techniques and ideas employed in the western symbolist poetry, such as symbols, metaphors and synaesthesia, with those traditional artistic conceptions used in classical Chinese poetry. As a result, their works stayed away from political topics and emphasized on literary techniques. Together with poetry of other literary schools, they thereby created the golden age of modern Chinese poetry in the mid-1930s. To fully explicate the poetic nature of Jing School, the first chapter of the thesis reconstructed the background, the memberships as well as the literary pursuits of Jing School by analysing their publications on journals and supplements of newspapers that edited by Jing School members. The literary salons held by inspiring leaders of Jing School, Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 and Lin Huiyin 林徽因 had also been re-examined. The following two chapters looked into the characteristics and significances of poetry and poetics of Jing School respectively. Poems of Feiming 廢名 and Bian Zhilin 卞之琳, poetics of Zhu Guangqian, Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱, Feiming and Lin Gen 林庚 have been taken as examples for further exploration of the aesthetic pursuits of Jing School. The last chapter proceeded to examine the fate of Jing School during and after the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945). During the war time, some poets of Jing School shifted their lyrical writing style to realistic and political writing style. Among them, He Qifang 何其芳 was the most prominent figure and his case has been studied thoroughly in this chapter. Besides, the decline of the aesthetic pursuits of Jing School has also been reflected in the failure of resuming the publication of Wenxue Zazhi 文學雜誌, the most important journal of Jing School, after the victory. In short, the most distinguished feature of the poetics and poetry of Jing School was the flawless integration of the essence of western modernity and that of Chinese tradition. The significance of the integration and the controversial issues aroused by this aesthetic pursuit have been scrutinized and summarized in the concluding chapter. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy