Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Ill., 1998. / Abstract. Lesson plans in appendices appear in English and Korean. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-112).

This thesis explores the mutual constitutions of visuality and empire from the perspective of gender, probing how the lives of China's ethnic minorities at the southwest frontiers were translated into images. Two sets of visual materials make up its core sources: the Miao album, a genre of ethnographic illustration depicting the daily lives of non-Han peoples in late imperial China, and the ethnographic photographs found in popular Republican-era periodicals. The study highlights gender ideals within images and aims to develop a set of 'visual grammar' of depicting the non-Han. Casting new light on a spectrum of gendered themes, including femininity, masculinity, sexuality, love, body and clothing, the thesis examines how the power constructed through gender helped to define, order, popularise, celebrate and imagine possessions of empire. In order to examine the visual transformations of images of non-Han, this study places the Miao albums and modern photographs side-by-side for comparison, revealing the different ways of seeing ethnic minorities when Han Chinese gender norms were de/reconstructed. The insights into the visual codes of gender also aim to place Chinese imperial models in a cultural context, testing how well the case of China fits into theories of empire generated mainly from European models. This thesis asks how imported imperial tools, in particular European technology and the science of human variations, were localised within the conceptualisation of nations in modern China. It also considers the relationship between text and image in historical analysis, uncovering the values of images to historians in novel ways. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis aims to contribute to the fields of gender, visual culture and imperial studies.

abstract: There has been a lot of work on the characterization of capacity and achievable rate regions, and rate region outer-bounds for various multi-user channels of interest. Parallel to the developed information theoretic results, practical codes have also been designed for some multi-user channels such as multiple access channels, broadcast channels and relay channels; however, interference channels have not received much attention and only a limited amount of work has been conducted on them. With this motivation, in this dissertation, design of practical and implementable channel codes is studied focusing on multi-user channels with special emphasis on interference channels; in particular, irregular low-density-parity-check codes are exploited for a variety of cases and trellis based codes for short block length designs are performed. Novel code design approaches are first studied for the two-user Gaussian multiple access channel. Exploiting Gaussian mixture approximation, new methods are proposed wherein the optimized codes are shown to improve upon the available designs and off-the-shelf point-to-point codes applied to the multiple access channel scenario. The code design is then examined for the two-user Gaussian interference channel implementing the Han-Kobayashi encoding and decoding strategy. Compared with the point-to-point codes, the newly designed codes consistently offer better performance. Parallel to this work, code design is explored for the discrete memoryless interference channels wherein the channel inputs and outputs are taken from a finite alphabet and it is demonstrated that the designed codes are superior to the single user codes used with time sharing. Finally, the code design principles are also investigated for the two-user Gaussian interference channel employing trellis-based codes with short block lengths for the case of strong and mixed interference levels. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2015

With the obvious evolution and acceleration of smart grid, it is crucial for its success to rely on a solid transmission protocol among its peripherals due to its real time streaming. TCP is the well known traditional transport protocol used for a reliable transmission, and is a major player for smart grid. However, it lacks a fault tolerance transmission method that overcomes potential failures which may mitigate smart grid progress and in its turn decrease its reliability. We propose that smart grid operators utilize SCTP as the principle transport protocol for their smart grid communications, by using the two very significant characteristics offered by SCTP multi-homing and multi-streaming respectively. Thus, we argue that they can override two major obstacles caused by TCP Head of Line Blocking (HLB) and the inability of handling automatically two or more paths to a final destination. Although SCTP resembles TCP in many aspects, SCTP can definitely play a dominant role in many current and future applications due to its key features that do not exist in TCP. We have used ns2.34 simulator as the tool whom we relied on to investigate whether or not smart grid may benefit over TCP by the two SCTP features, and have analyzed the output of simulated results by using other analytical tools. As we obtain results, we argue that smart grid operators should rely on SCTP as a feasible transmission protocol instead of TCP.

In November of 1965, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was launched in China when a Shanghai newspaper editor, Yao Wen-yuan, published an attack on the play which is translated here, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office. The fact that this event constituted the beginning of what later became a political struggle of vast proportions was recognized only belatedly by most Western analysts. When the Cultural Revolution moved into high gear with the launching of the Red Guard movement in the spring of 1966, vague references were made in some Western commentaries to the fact that the explosion seemed to have been ignited, by the public exposure of a drama which had purportedly satirized the Communist Party and Mao Tse-tung. No one appeared to have any certainty about exactly what the play had said and in what way it satirized Mao and the Party. As far as I am aware, this is the first translation of the entire text of the play, or any part of it, into English. Aside from simply translating the text of the play, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze the events of late 1965 and early 1966 and place them both in chronological order and in political perspective. In this way, it is clearly shown how the attack on Wu Han led to attacks on other "bourgeois" writers and intellectuals. Eventually, this latter group was linked to high officials in the Peking Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Finally, the "cultural" aspect of the Cultural Revolution gave way to a full-fledged political battle within the Party itself. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis will analyse the identity politics of the Chinese party-state’s nation-building project in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It will examine how the party-state intends to overcome the barrier of ethnic boundaries in the production of a shared sense of multi-ethnic, national belonging. Uyghurs and Han can be thought of as belonging to different civilisations (Chinese and Turkic-Islamic) but in modern times they are often thought of as divided by ethnic boundaries. The party-state’s idea of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua Minzu) is a nation-building project to eliminate these boundaries so as to produce a multi-ethnic nation. Fieldwork was conducted after the riots of July 2009 engulfed the region. Ethnically targeted violence against both Han and Uyghurs destabilised the city of Ürümchi and challenged the party-state’s vision of China as a unified and harmonious nation. The official Chinese explanation was that this was an internationally funded and synchronised terrorist attack but Uyghur rights groups have blamed tensions on government policy repressing Uyghur culture and stoking Han nationalism. The theoretical framework employed draws from the concepts of production and performativity in Post-Structuralist and Critical International Relations (IR) theory, particularly the work of Cynthia Weber (1998) and David Campbell (1998). The critical approach adopted here takes security as a process of performative enactment of identity, which produces the units we take for granted as worthy of security. The analysis will examine official performances of what it means to be Chinese and Uyghur. It will then ask how these performances are received and (re)performed by members of the postulated nation. The party-state seeks to include Uyghurs as Chinese but it also excludes and securitises Uyghur Turkic and Islamic identities as ‘outside’ threats to the unity of the nation. The research is a result of one year of fieldwork (September 2009-August 2010) in Ürümchi, the capital city of Xinjiang. This was the first ethnographic study of responses to the violence of July 2009. Furthermore, the incorporation of Han perspectives has been very limited thus far in the literature on Xinjiang. The analysis uses a top-down approach, which employs discourse analysis of official texts to understand what type of national identity the party-state seeks to produce. However, these methods are coupled with a bottom-up analysis using ethnographic methods, particularly detailed, semi-structured interviews, to explore how these official discourses are received. The perspectives of Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang can inform us how nation-building will unfold and what type of social dynamics it will engender. Analysing perspectives on the nation from below can help us understand the type of nation we expect to be produced in China rather than the type of nation the party-state narrates. The findings of this research demonstrate that both Uyghurs and Han are turning official Chinese nationalist discourses against themselves to articulate separate ethnic nations. Uyghurs frame China as an assimilationist transgression of ethnic boundaries for the benefit of the Han. Han frame their nation as under threat from Uyghurs and articulate China as a Han nation. The party-state’s nation-building project is unintentionally producing insecurity and reinforcing ethnic boundaries which remain obstacles to a shared sense of nationhood.

This project is a close study and translation of Heshanggong's Commentary on the Daodejing. The text, attributed to the "Old Man by the River" (Heshanggong) and dating from the Eastern Han (25-220 CE), remains one of the most historically influential readings of the Daoist classic the Daodejing. However, in modern times it has received little attention, being dismissed as a superstitious interpretation of the original. This dissertation seeks to amend contemporary scholarship and address the underlying theoretical categories responsible for this situation. These problems largely originate from a common scholarly view of Chinese civilization as foundationally monistic. Because of this bias, any hints of transcendence found in the commentary are read as later "religious" distortions of the original "philosophical" holism of the Daodejing. Rather than engaging with debates over whether Daoism is monistic or dualistic, philosophical or religious, this dissertation shifts focus away from those Western constructs. It instead draws on different binaries found within the commentator's own writings. In particular, the categories of yin and yang become central to a native reading of this tradition. Furthermore, I argue that Heshanggong's approach rests on subdividing both yin and yang into a causal relationship of mode and substance. I use this fourfold conceptual framework to analyze the key themes of the commentary, including cosmology, body, and state. So doing reveals the novelty of Heshanggong's responses to a range of conceptual and historical issues in Early China (6th century BCE-3rd century CE). First, the mode-substance reading of yin-yang challenges depictions of early Daoism as having a solely "correlative cosmos": uncreated, relativistic, and perfectly united through spontaneous resonance. Instead, it suggests a single cosmic substance originating from a first cause, the yin mode of the Way (that includes stillness, emptiness, darkness, and softness). Second, this means that contrary to the often-asserted historical split between monistic "philosophical" Daoism and dualistic "religious" Daoism, one finds a continuous tradition that seeks Heavenly spirit (yang substance) through stillness (yin mode). By excising monism and dualism from the discussion, a greater awareness of historical progression and cosmological nuance appears.

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The present works of reading Chinese poetry offers a biographic reading method, but it cannot fit for reading Han Shan’s poetry, as he had unclear recording in history. Focused on exploring the persona and religion in Han Shan’s poetry world, I examine reading Han Shan’s poems in Buddhist way. Chapter 1 provides the biography of Han Shan, and presents his vernacular expression as different from other poets in history. Chapter 2 introduces some new methods on reading poetry brought up by some literature critics. Chapter 3 presents the Buddhist reading method that I have adopted to read and understand Han Shan’s poems. This reading method is inspired by the similarity between Han Shan’s writings and Buddhist texts. Chapter 4 explains how to read Han Shan’s poems in the Buddhist way. In this chapter, I analyze the persona and Buddhist thinking in the world of Han Shan’s poetry with the explanation of Buddhist sutras and literatures.