Introduction: Smoking has been considered as one of the leading preventable cause of lung disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer. China, has 20% of the population in the world, but consumes 30% of the world’s cigarette and has suffered 1 million deaths per year from tobacco use. The workplace is an important field for smoking control, but there are relatively few reports on the current situation of workplace smoking control with the exception of reports from North American countries. Objectives: This project aims to investigate the effectiveness of workplace smoking control policy on smokers’ behavior in Asian population, mainly the comparison of smoke free policy, smoke restriction ban with no smoking ban, and to identify the potential factors that associated with the compliance of smoking policy. Methods：Articles that are relevant to workplace smoking policy were searched and identified through PubMed and CNKI by using a combination of keywords. Articles that studied the effects of workplace smoking control policy on smoking behavior and the factors that associated the compliance of smoke control policy were included. All studies were conducted in the Asian countries and the outcome measures were current smoking prevalence, daily cigarette consumption, and willingness to quit smoking. Results: Of the 541 studies identified, 11 articles were identified to be relevant and included in this systematic review. Smoking-free policy was showed to be the most effective strategy to enhance the changes in smokers’ behavior. Eight of nine studies that compared smoke free with no smoke ban gave consistent conclusion that smoking free policy could reduce the prevalence of smoking dramatically. It was associated with higher willingness to quit smoking among smokers and could reduce the smokers’ daily cigarettes consumption by 3 to 4 cigarettes per day. There was limited evidence that smoke restriction policy could reduce the prevalence of smokers. Even though smoke restriction policy could reduce daily cigarettes consumption and increased the smokers’ willingness to quit smoking, but the effect was much lower than those in the workplace with smoke free policy. In addition, occupation, such as salesmen and marketing employee, the reason of implementing the smoke control policy(e.g. ‘workplace safety’, ‘maintain good air quality’, ‘reduce ETS in non-smokers’), and lack of knowledge of hazard in cigarettes were the factors contributed to the low compliance of smoke control policy. Conclusion: Overall, workplace smoke-free policy is the most effective way in changing smoking behavior. Workplace smoke-free should be implemented as a public health priority and accompanied with health education and smoking cessation service to assure the compliance. / published_or_final_version / Medicine / Master / Master of Public Health

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This thesis examines the diverse body of seafarers known as ‘lascars’. Scholarship devoted to lascars who were employed during the age of sail has tended to focus on the minority who stayed and settled in Britain. Studying lascars as migrants can have the effect of obscuring the time they spent afloat and often risks casting them in the role of victims. Historians have failed to address fully the issue of how these men resisted the oppressive conditions of their employment whilst at sea. This thesis draws upon a wealth of unused source material – including logbooks, seafaring diaries and judicial records – to reconstruct lascar unrest aboard British merchantmen operating in the Indian Ocean between 1780 and 1860. It uncovers a wide range of hitherto overlooked forms of agency amongst lascars. These include everyday acts of collective protest such as demonstrations, refusals to work, assaults on officers and disorderly religious festivals. Such tactics enabled lascars to exert considerable influence aboard ship by venting anger, resisting unpopular orders and gaining concessions from their superiors. They also serve to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a ‘mutiny’ and how this could vary considerably between different cultural contexts. This thesis also examines more serious forms of mutiny, during which lascar crews killed commanders, commandeered vessels, expropriated cargoes and overturned established shipboard social relations. Uprisings of this nature occupy an important place in the long history of lascar employment and add significantly to our understanding of the Indian Ocean world. The last eight decades of East India Company rule witnessed a spate of such incidents, before European expansion and steam navigation rendered them unfeasible. The documents generated by this form of mutiny also provide one of the very few means of recapturing a lascar voice from the archives. Mutiny in all its forms thus offers an unparalleled window onto the working lives of these seafarers and the unique wooden world they inhabited.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Philosophy

In 1126, the Song was invaded by the Jin, a northern enemy who sprang up to become a continuing lethal threat to the survival of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). The Song people, in the meantime, suffered an unprecedented humiliation when their two emperors were captured and taken as hostages to the north by the invading Jin army. As the Song regime was collapsing, Zhao Gou (1107-1187), later referred to by his temple name as Song Gaozong (r. 1127-1162), strove to ascend the throne and perpetuate the Song regime in the south--known to historians as the Southern Song (1127-1279). The process was difficult not only because the Song emperor himself was relentlessly pursued by the Jin army, but also because the Song itself could hardly decide on an appropriate policy regarding the invaders. It took nearly sixteen years for the Song to finally settle in south China and obtain formal recognition from the Jin as a sovereign state. This dissertation adopts a method which focuses on studying the interactions between Song Gaozong and his series of ten chief councilors in shaping the future of the Southern Song. The successive chief councilors, appointed by Song Gaozong, are studied based on the Song records with special attention to their interactions with the emperor in discussing important issues. The dissertation evaluates each chief councilor's performance and explains why some chief councilors stayed in power longer than others. The dissertation also expounds how the Song emperor maintained a balance between two conflicting factions and how he struggled to consolidate his power in adverse circumstances. By consideration of Gaozong and the influence of successive chief councilors, the author depicts a picture showing how the Southern Song was established.

This dissertation will argue that the founding and the existence of the Southern Song was not because of the emperor's willingness to accept the Jins' terms, but in spite of the emperor's attitudes. It was the general's successful resistance against the Jins that made it possible for the survival of the Southern Song. However, the founding of the Southern Song was never Han Shizhong's ideal. What he strove for was to defeat the enemies and to liberate the captured emperor and ex-emperor and to oust the Jins out of the Central Plain. The conflict between General Han Shizhong and Emperor Gaozong was focused upon the latter's goal of maintaining the reality of the Southern Song and realizing the former's ideal. The conflict intensified as the emperor quickened his pace of making peace with the Jins at the time when the Southern Song's military forces were in the offensive position. The emperor's efforts to restrict Han Shizhong within his own track, strengthened by the efforts of the imperial court to recover the national tradition of putting the military under civilian control, deprived Han Shizhong of the opportunity for the realization of his ideal.

The primary focus of this study is on the Sanya ("Three Headquarters Offices") commanders of the Northern Song, who commanded the three divisions of the Song imperial army, namely, the Infantry, Cavalry, and Palace Corps. The first three chapters examine the institutions pertaining to the selection and promotion of the Sanya commanders, concluding that the Northern Song selected and promoted for high army command ranks men whose loyalty to the throne had been tested and proven. It is further demonstrated that the Northern Song exercised effective control over its army commanders and had their powers scrutinized by civil officials, the majority being southern bureaucrats advanced through the civil service examinations. The two chapters that follow analyze the social and geographical backgrounds of the Sanya commanders, revealing that elite members of the Northern Song military in general enjoyed special ties to the emperors and the ruling house. Such imperial connections safeguarded their political and family fortunes from rapid downward sliding. The Northern Song elite, as such, was a self-perpetuating elite group, composed of predominantly northern military men who were closely associated with the dynasty's founding elite. The remaining chapter in the body text further sheds light on the super elite status of the Sanya commanders, attesting that they were among the highest paid office-holders in the Northern Song and were recipients of high political honors and privileges. This study calls into question the received view of the inferior status of the Northern Song military elite. I suggest that during the Northern Song period a unique and distinctive balance between aristocratic and bureaucratic forces was achieved whereby state power was split between the semi-hereditary northern military elite and the newly arisen professional, bureaucratic elite. The ruling class of Northern Song society was therefore neither thoroughly aristocratic nor thoroughly bureaucratic, contrary to the generally held assumptions about the nature of the Song elite. In my opinion, the rise of southern civil leadership in state and society around the mid-eleventh century challenged, for the first time in Chinese history, northern aristocratic monopoly of state power and eventually precipitated its demise by the Southern Song.

This thesis examines the emphasis Eastern Han (24 – 220 CE) men placed on mourning their mothers and peers within the context of ritual theory and practice. The ritual texts, used as the basis for an imperial ritual reform in 31 BCE, provided instructions on how to properly perform the mourning rites, as well as whom to mourn. Full mourning was to be worn for fathers and superiors, yet in the Eastern Han, many did not heed these prescriptions, choosing in addition to mourn their mothers, equals, or inferiors, thereby subverting the traditional patriarchal model. By examining theories of ritual current in the Han, the mourning prescriptions themselves, and introducing the concept of sincerity in ritual, I argue that the changes in mourning patterns during the Eastern Han are indicative of the beginnings of a fundamental change in beliefs towards ritual and the ancestors. / Cette thèse examine l'importance que les hommes des Han orientaux (24 – 220 EC) accordaient au deuil envers leurs mères et leurs semblables dans le cadre de la théorie et de la pratique du rituel. Les textes rituels, sur lesquels fut établie une réforme impériale du rituel en 31 AEC, fournissaient les instructions nécessaires pour déterminer comment performer correctement les rituels de deuil, de même que ceux et celles à qui ces rituels pouvaient être adressés. Le deuil complet devait être observé pour les pères et les supérieurs, mais chez les Han orientaux, plusieurs n'observèrent pas ces directives et choisirent plutôt de porter le deuil de leurs mères, de leurs égaux, voire de leurs subordonnés, renversant ainsi le modèle patriarcal traditionnel. Grâce à une analyse des théories du rituel pratiqué chez les Han, des directives relatives au deuil elles-mêmes, et en introduisant le concept de la sincérité dans le rituel, j'avance que les changements dans les structures du deuil au cours de la période des Han orientaux révèlent les premier changement fondamentaux dans les croyances envers le rituel et les ancêtres.

In this thesis, I discuss how practitioners of martial arts in the Republican era of China were engaged in a process of reinventing what embodied the field of martial arts during a time when physical culture was treated as an instrument of nation-building in response to colonial discourses and the process of modernization. Martial arts were repositioned from being a loosely associated field of practice for people who engaged with a set of combative skills that focused on weapons training that championed archery and spear fighting, towards being a recreational activity with a formalized body of knowledge, skills and practices imbued with a Chinese sense of identity suitable for the modern class of urban and educated Chinese citizens. It is my belief that these efforts were a very important factor in why the practice of martial arts today is so closely associated with concepts of self-cultivation. This repositioning of Chinese martial arts was driven by a schism between the traditionalists who defended the beliefs and practices from the imperial age of China, and the modernists who saw the complete adoption of Western technologies and concepts as the only course for the modernization of China. Due to the shifting politics around education, understandings of the body and its representation in society, the efforts to preserve traditional practices were complicated through the dynamics related to identity and state power. The field of martial arts was criticized by reformists and modernists such as those involved with the New Culture Movement, who argued that China needed to embrace scientific notions of the Western nations and abandon "feudal superstitions." Within this context, the field of traditional Chinese martial arts was stigmatized by associations with the failed Boxer Rebellion, the diversity of practices and the secrecy that existed between different schools of practice. In response to the modernity movements that criticized the traditional systems of belief that martial artists drew upon to substantiate their systems of practice as a recreational pursuit, associations such as the Jingwu Tiyu Hui and the Zhongyang Guoshuguan were formed according to Western institutional models as part of the effort to unify and "modernize" Chinese martial arts. The teachers and administrators involved with these institutions wanted to preserve the practice of martial arts, and to accomplish this they had to develop new ways to systemize the training methods, essentially reinventing them by promoting them to a new generation of students in a format that had never existed before. / À travers cet essai, j'examine la façon dont les pratiquants d'arts martiaux dans l'ère républicaine de la Chine étaient impliqués dans le but de réinventer ce qu'incarnait le domaine des arts martiaux à une époque où la culture physique était traitée comme un instrument de construction de la nation en réponse au discours colonial et au processus de modernisation. Les arts martiaux ont été repositionnés à partir d'un ensemble de personnes indirectement associés qui se livraient à un ensemble de combats et qui concentraient leurs compétences sur des entraînements aux armes encourageant le tir à l'arc et le combat à la lance, afin de devenir une activité de loisir avec un corps formalisé de connaissances, de compétences et de pratiques imprégnées avec une identité chinoise adapté à la classe moderne urbaine et de citoyens chinois éduquée. Ceci est ma conviction que ces efforts ont été un facteur très important dans la raison pour laquelle la pratique des arts martiaux aujourd'hui est si étroitement associée aux concepts de la culture de soi.Ce repositionnement des arts martiaux chinois fut motivé par le schisme entre les traditionalistes qui défendaient leurs croyances et leurs pratiques de l'époque impériale de la Chine, et les modernistes qui, eux, ont vu l'adoption complète de technologies et de concepts occidentaux comme le seul mouvement bénéfique à la modernisation de la Chine. En raison de la politique à travers l'éducation, la compréhension du corps et de sa représentation dans la société, les efforts visant à préserver les pratiques traditionnelles ont été compliquées par la dynamique liée à l'identité et le pouvoir de l'état. Le domaine des arts martiaux a été critiqué par les réformistes et les modernistes incluant ceux qui furent impliqués dans le « New Culture movement», qui a fait valoir que la Chine devait embrasser des notions scientifiques des pays occidentaux et abandonner leurs «superstitions féodales. » Dans ce contexte, le domaine des arts martiaux traditionnels a été stigmatisé par des liens avec la révolte des Boxers, la diversité des pratiques et la discrétion qui existait entre les différentes écoles de pratique.En réponse aux mouvements de modernité qui ont critiqué les systèmes de croyances traditionnels dont les pratiquants d'arts martiaux ont fait appel à l'appui de leurs systèmes pour justifier leur pratique comme une forme de loisir, des associations telles que les Jingwu Tiyu Hui et le Zhongyang Guoshuguan ont été formés selon les modèles occidentaux institutionnels dans le but d'unifier et de , en quelque sorte , moderniser les arts martiaux chinois. Les enseignants et les administrateurs concernés par ces institutions voulaient préserver la pratique des arts martiaux, et pour ce faire ils ont dû développer des nouvelles façons de systématiser les méthodes de formation, les réinventer en les promouvant à une nouvelle génération d'étudiants sous une forme qui n'avaient jamais existé auparavant.