Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-348).

To what extent does students' perceived parental cultural capital affect support for students' music listening and students' instrumental learning?;A mixed-method sequential research study, consisting of two distinct phases - quantitative and qualitative - collected data form junior secondary school students in grades seven to nine in eight secondary schools in Beijing and nine in Hong Kong. Survey questionnaires and individual interviews were conducted from mid-June to September 2015, and from April to May 2016, respectively. Completed questionnaires (n=3,288 - 1,674 from Beijing and 1,614 from Hong Kong) complemented by interviews involving 56 respondents (28 students from each region), provided nuanced insights on the interplay between parental cultural capital and parental support, and on how parental support influenced students' participation in music activities.;This study found students in both Beijing and Hong Kong perceived their parents to be generally more supportive of their at-home music activities, and that parental support, both physical and personal, enhanced their motivation to participate in music activities. The perceived degree and perceived importance of parental support for student's music activities were positively associated. Moreover, the study also found that while parental cultural capital may not predict students' musical listening preferences, it may inform the frequency and types of parental support offered, which mediates the intergenerational transmission of musical preferences. This study found Beijing and Hong Kong parents generally exerted similar parental influences on students' music activities; however, Beijing students generally perceived their parents to offer greater physical and mental support than did their Hong Kong peers, and to have greater influence over their music listening. This study also found differences between the types of support Beijing and Hong Kong parents offered for students' instrumental learning.;Secondly, the study shows parental cultural capital predicts the level and types of parental support offered for students' music activities, in both Beijing and Hong Kong. Parents with greater cultural capital may be more capable of providing more musical support and a musical home environment for students' music listening and instrumental learning, which may help cultivate students' cultural capital, particularly in terms of their musical development and enrolment into instrumental class.;This study argues and further complements Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1973, 1986), which holds the intergenerational transmission of musical disposition, namely musical listening preference and musical knowledge, is facilitated by parental support and mediated by the home music environment, both of which are governed by parental cultural capital. This study implies the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital may not be a direct process, and parental support is necessary to impart parental cultural capital into students' cultural capital. This study further supplements Bourdieu's theory that parental support for their children's music activities reproduces parents' cultural capital as students', in the Chinese context. It found that parental cultural capital informed the types and extent of parental support for students' music activities, which may, in turn, have enhanced students' motivation for participating in music activities. This study argues that the mechanisms for intergenerational transmission of musical dispositions - i.e., musical preferences and musical knowledge - were facilitated by parental support and mediated within a musical home environment, both of which were governed by parental cultural capital. The study suggests a close collaboration among parents, school educators (including school music teachers), and instrumental instructors would best facilitate students' music learning, by providing a more comprehensive and immersive music education to students in their daily life.

The built environment has long been considered as a potentially influential factor in shaping and changing people’s travel behaviour. However, many gaps still exist in the understanding of the direction, size and mechanism of this influence. This thesis explores the complexities in the influence of the built environment on daily travel using a behaviour-oriented, activity-based modelling approach based on the notion of utility maximisation. The model simulates the full process of decision making in daily activity participation and travel, which involves the decisions on the type and frequency of activity participation, the sequence of activities, the choice of destinations and the time and mode of travel. Moreover, the thesis also addresses the lack of understanding on the influence of the ‘third dimension’ of the built environment — the street facades. A machine learning-based method is proposed to automatically evaluate the qualities of street facades from street view images. Scenario analyses using the proposed model show that, both commute and non-commute travel are more sensitive to the built environment in proximity to home (in my experiment, 500 metre buffer zone). In the context of Beijing, the total car use and commute car use of a person is significantly affected by the level of land use mix and the continuity of street facades around home, among all built environment features. Non-commute car use is significantly affected by employment density, retail density, accessibility to commercial clusters, bus coverage, road density and the quality and continuity of street facades. Similar effects on the final outcomes of travel behaviour (such as total car use) by different built environment features can happen through diverse processes and have different implications for people’s actual experience and the urban system. Some of the results are consistent with theoretical assumptions and some are not, which provides alternative insights into the relationship between the built environment and travel behaviour.

The dissertation studies the fictional journey of Zhang Xianliang from the viewpoint of political unconscious. Zhang has been under different kinds of labour reform and re-education in mainland China for twenty-two years. The experience is too painful to recall, yet too feared to be forgotten. The repressed trauma of Zhang is therefore displaced and disguised in the fictional language of reform, remembrance, love, sex and death. Each language fulfils one layer of Zhang's hidden wishes. Yet the desiring chain moves on with new forms of substitutions until death. The study investigates his unconscious psyche from the Historical subtexts of conflicting impulses between body and mind, self and Other, individual and socialist Ideological State Apparatuses, and the residual, dominant and emerging modes of production.

The main intentions of this thesis are to analyse and explain changes in the function and graphic components of Beijing s wayfinding systems and to explain how the systems construct multiple cultural and political identities at different historical periods and in changing local/global contexts. In the thesis, the oversimplified one-way theory of the global-local dichotomy, in which the global power of the West is overwhelming and constantly dominant, and the local system of non-Western countries is passive and fragile, is challenged. Instead, this thesis seeks to examine the interactivity and correlation of the local and the global from two perspectives: mobility and reversibility. Looking at mobility is to consider the local and global and their nexus as different interconnections and networks that are constantly and unevenly changing. Reversibility, with which this thesis is most concerned, deals primarily with the reversible relationship of the local and global, namely, that either the local or the global can be dominant. This point is well illustrated by the evolution of Beijing s graphic wayfinding systems function and appearance. Beijing, as the capital of China, has undergone a radical transformation from the fall of the last Empire Qing (1912) to the establishment of the People s Republic of China (1949). The meaning of Beijing varies in accordance with the changes in its political and social structures. There have been five phases in Beijing s development: a well-planned imperial city; a capital city with a republican spirit; a totally industrialised but relatively isolated capital of a socialist country; an open and modernised Chinese-style socialist city; and a cosmopolitan city. In the course of this metamorphosis, what took place was a series of collisions, exchanges, fusions, and re-collisions between local power and global power. Along with the immense changes in Beijing, the role and appearance of the graphic wayfinding systems have also changed, especially those of road signs and doorplates, whose roles have been transformed from that of initial household register to orientation reference, to effective propaganda tool, and then on to the regeneration of a city. Finally, Beijing s graphic wayfinding design within its urban development has been reconfirmed as a useful instrument to support the new forms of visual narratives and consolidate the city brand of Beijing in the 21st century. This study probes into the political and cultural significances behind the changes of the graphic wayfinding systems of Beijing, as well as the interaction between the local and the global as reflected in the formation of these findings. The mutable and reversible relationship between the local and the global is illustrated and clarified through analysis and comparison of various functions and visual elements between Beijing s present graphic wayfinding systems and its early wayfinding signs, as well as decoding the different mainstream political or cultural ideologies that have deeply affected the function and design of Beijing graphic wayfinding systems at different periods.

This thesis examines the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, which was an unprecedented effort by the Chinese Party-state to reinvent Chinese national culture for consumption at home and abroad. Director Zhang Yimou delivered a spectacular event – three-thousand chanting Confucian scholars, two-thousand Ming Dynasty sailors, a grid of giant dancing printing blocks and an endless display of fireworks presented a sensational spectacle of Chinese culture and history. How should we interpret these symbols representing a romantic Chinese past? I argue that the “ancient” history on display in the Opening Ceremony is actually a product of China’s recent past: its interactions with the West, revolution, nationalism and communism, and the turn toward capitalism and authoritarianism. This thesis pulls the Opening Ceremony back into this historical context, closely examining three of its most prominent symbols: Zheng He and his voyages to the Indian Ocean, the Four Great Inventions, and Confucius. My results show that, 1) far from being a product of China’s history alone, these symbols are a co-production of China and the West, in which both identities were mutually constituted; 2) they are created in the context of political power, and take on different meanings in response to political shifts; 3) they suggest a state desire for power and status rather than simply a revival of cultural heritage. This research will contribute to an understanding of the modern political uses of Chinese history. / Graduate

Dans cette thèse, le sujet que nous avons souhaité traiter est celui de la représentation et des transfigurations de la ville étrangère dans l’écriture française. Nous avons ainsi choisi les œuvres de Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, Pierre-Jean Remy et Suzanne Bernard, afin de pouvoir expliquer le sujet à l’aide d’exemples concrets, c’est-à-dire en analysant l’image de la ville de Pékin dans les œuvres françaises du XXe siècle. Au cours de cette étude, nous abordons en profondeur l'image de Pékin et en particulier son évolution historique chez les auteurs des différentes périodes que nous avons présentées. Nous étudions cette évolution de l’image de Pékin à partir de trois dimensions. La première dimension est celle de l'histoire citadine, ainsi que celle de sa présence dans le texte littéraire et de son influence sur la représentation. Il s'agit d’une approche plutôt géocritique qui examine les relations entre les espaces humains et la littérature. La deuxième dimension est celle du Pékin des signes. Nous étudierons les textes dans une optique imagologique, en nous focalisant sur la manière dont l’écrivain transcrit le réel, ainsi que sur la représentation de l’objet d’étude. Enfin, la troisième dimension porte sur l'évolution des formes et de l’écriture romanesques. / In this thesis, the subject we wanted to discuss is that of the representation and transfigurations of the foreign city in French writing. We have chosen the works of Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, Pierre-Jean Remy and Suzanne Bernard, in order to explain the subject with the help of concrete examples, that is to say by analyzing the image of the city of Beijing in different French works of the twentieth century. During this study, we take a deep look at the image of Beijing, and especially at its historical evolution, as described by the authors of the different periods that we have presented. We chose to study this evolution of Beijing's image from three dimensions. The first dimension is that of the city history, as well as that of its presence in the literary text and its influence on representation. This is a rather geocritical approach that examines the relationships between human spaces and literature. The second dimension is the Beijing signs’ dimension. We will study the texts according to an imagological perspective, focusing on how the writer transcribes reality, as well as on the representation of the object of study. Finally, the third dimension is about the evolution of novelistic forms and writing.

För en alltmer globaliserad värld innebär potentiella virusutbrott större sårbarhet, vilket ökar vikten av fortsatt forskning på pandemiers samhällsekonomiska effekter. Syftet med denna studie är att studera ekonomiska effekter av SARS-utbrottet och dess smittskyddsåtgärder på Beijing med hjälp av syntetisk kontrollmetod. Utifrån ett urval av kinesiska regioner skapas ett utfall för hur Beijings ekonomiska tillväxt hade sett ut om viruset inte brutit ut och politiska åtgärder för smittskydd aldrig införts. Resultatet visar på en svagt negativ effekt i den observerade utvecklingen efter SARS inträde, däremot kan ingen statistisk signifikans utläsas. Det faktum att tidigare studier har lyckats visa på negativa ekonomiska effekter från SARS, bidrar till uppfattningen om att kvartalsvis data möjligen hade kunnat ge mer precisa resultat. Att inkludera en längre tidsperiod innan inträdet av SARS hade ökat trovärdigheten hos resultatet och genererat ett mer precist mått för effekternas signifikans.

Observations in a number of developed countries have shown a stagnating or declining trend in the level of car use and sparked a heated debate on whether such trend would persist into the future. While arguments over the potential causes of this trend remain largely unsettled, the crucial implications of the long-term trends on the strategic development of transport infrastructure as well as the long-term planning schemes in the transportation sector are generally agreed upon. This study aims at providing evidence of the changing trends in an under-researched area with historically limited car dependence and distinct cultural and social characteristics through disaggregate analysis on several large-scale datasets. Three separate case studies were carried out to identify the changes in car ownership, activity-travel behavior, car use, and personal attitudes towards cars in different Chinese cities, namely Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Beijing. Statistical modeling approaches were applied for the disaggregate analysis at the household and individual levels. Findings in the case study of Hong Kong suggest that the level of car ownership and car use has shown indications of levelling-off and even a certain degree of decrease in the past decade, despite the low level of car dependence for the entirety of the city's history. Results in the case of Shenzhen, on the other hand, indicate a surging car ownership rate in recent years, which is in contrast with the situation in its neighboring city of Hong Kong. The interactions between built environment and travel behavior have also changed significantly in Shenzhen, a city undergoing rapid expansion. The third case study reports that the level of auto-mobility has increased significantly during the past decade in Shenzhen and all age groups and cohorts experienced similar uptrends in car ownership and car use. In addition, analysis on the dataset from Beijing suggests that young adults do not evaluate private cars and their functions as favorably as the middle-age adults. Findings in this study contribute to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on the recent changes in car ownership, activity-travel behavior, and attitudes towards private cars in the Chinese context. This study also highlights the importance to expand the range of research attention out of the developed and motorized countries in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics in travel behavior and auto-mobility around the world. Findings also have important policy implications in curbing auto-dependence in daily travel and planning and managing future transportation.

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy