How cultural identities are constructed in China's national holiday blockbuster : a perspective from political discourse analysis

The recent Chinese national blockbuster My People, My Country (MPMC), a movie consisting of 7 stories recounting 7 memorial moments and events since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, has evoked strong emotions among domestic Chinese citizens as well as Chinese diasporas overseas (Hou, 2019). Based on data by Maoyan’s website (2019), MPMC is ranked in the top ten of highest-grossing films in mainland China. As a propaganda film, the huge success of MPMC encourages us to wonder: why is it so successful and why did it receive such strong emotional responses? This question merits investigation as the answer will shed light on how cultural production is to create a shared national identity and further to serve political purpose in uniting populace in today’s new era (Gramsci, 1985; O’shannassy, 2008). Echoing the claim that MPMC was “aiming to awaken the shared memories of Chinese people around the world” (“China Focus”, 2019), I will take the approach of political discourse analysis (PDA) to probe into two specific questions: what strategies are used in constructing cultural identities? And how is MPMC different from past propaganda films, which, according to Teo (2019) and Veg (2012), directly extoll the virtues of the State and belong to high culture? In order to assess the effectiveness of the strategies employed in the movie in constructing national identities, I conducted a small-scale (25 samples) questionnaire survey among Chinese diasporas overseas to understand their feelings towards and comments on the movie (Hall, 2014). The questionnaire consists of 5 open questions investigating the participants’ feelings of this movie as well as which stories they liked/disliked the most. It was administered among 25 Chinese students studying at Ghent University. Feedback suggests that the audience is particularly impressed by elements they share affinity and familiarity with. For instance, the national anthem and theme song of the film (also entitled My People My Country) represent a shared memory: most, if not all, Chinese people, especially those born in 1980s and 1990s, were taught this song repeatedly in their school and university years. Interestingly, apart from these two general shared memories, smaller-scale but more targeted cultural content is employed too, such as the different dialects spoken by different characters throughout the narratives in the movie. These dialects represent the most spoken dialects in China. By employing cultural elements that are familiar to audience, MPMC manages to create proximity and further evoke a highly affective reaction with the participants. Moving to the second research question, I will particularly focus on examining the topics and structures of the 7 seemingly independent stories in the movie, both of which are considered important in PDA (Dunmire, 2012; van Dijk, 1997). The topics featuring the 7 stories vary but share several commonalities—all related to political events and ideologies, and are unfolded in a highly similar structure: all 7 stories end with success and happiness, at the expense of personal sacrifice. Based on such findings, I will further compare MPMC with previous nationalist films, such as Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea, both of which are among top ten highest-grossing films and typical patriotic styles, as well as The Founding of a Republic, a tribute to the 60th national anniversary of People’s Republic of China. The comparison suggests an apparent shift from a focus on high-level or remote figures, such as soldiers from a special force or navy, to an emphasis on the popular culture in fostering patriotism. For example, inviting popular celebrities to act and seeing historical events from citizens’ perspectives are among the used strategies. The findings will enable us to better understand how cultural contents are used as tools for political purposes, such as creating unified national identity and maintain cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1985)

Measuring reproducibility of high-throughput experiments

Reproducibility is essential to reliable scientific discovery in high-throughput experiments. In this work we propose a unified approach to measure the reproducibility of findings identified from replicate experiments and identify putative discoveries using reproducibility. Unlike the usual scalar measures of reproducibility, our approach creates a curve, which quantitatively assesses when the findings are no longer consistent across replicates. Our curve is fitted by a copula mixture model, from which we derive a quantitative reproducibility score, which we call the "irreproducible discovery rate" (IDR) analogous to the FDR. This score can be computed at each set of paired replicate ranks and permits the principled setting of thresholds both for assessing reproducibility and combining replicates. Since our approach permits an arbitrary scale for each replicate, it provides useful descriptive measures in a wide variety of situations to be explored. We study the performance of the algorithm using simulations and give a heuristic analysis of its theoretical properties. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in a ChIP-seq experiment.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS466 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Pressure-driven 4f4f localized-itinerant crossover in heavy-fermion compound CeIn3{\mathrm{CeIn}}_{3}: A first-principles many-body perspective

The localized-itinerant nature of Ce−4f valence electrons in heavy fermion compound CeIn3 under pressure is studied thoroughly by means of the combination of density functional theory and single-site dynamical mean-field theory. The detailed evolutions of electronic structures of CeIn3, including total and partial density of states, momentum-resolved spectral functions, and valence state histograms, are calculated in a wide pressure range where the corresponding volume compression V/V0∈[0.6,1.0] (here V0 is the experimental crystal volume) at T≅116 K. Upon increasing pressure, two strong peaks associated with the Ce−4f states emerge near the Fermi level, and the c−f hybridization and valence state fluctuation are enhanced remarkably. Moreover, the kinetic and potential energies rise, while the occupancy, total angular momentum, and low-energy scattering rate of the Ce−4f electrons decline with respect to pressure. All the physical observables considered here exhibit prominent kinks or fluctuations in V/V0∈[0.80,0.90], which are probably the desired fingerprints for the Ce −4f localized-itinerant crossover

Unraveling exotic 5ff states and paramagnetic phase of PuSn3_3

Plutonium-based compounds establish an ideal platform for exploring the interplay between long-standing itinerant-localized 5$f$ states and strongly correlated electronic states. In this paper, we exhaustively investigate the correlated 5$f$ electronic states of PuSn$_3$ dependence on temperature by means of a combination of the density functional theory and the embedded dynamical mean-field theory. It is found that the spectral weight of narrow 5$f$ band grows significantly and remarkable quasiparticle multiplets appear around the Fermi level at low temperature. A striking $c-f$ hybridization and prominent valence state fluctuations indicate the advent of coherence and itinerancy of 5$f$ states. It is predicted that a 5$f$ localized to itinerant crossover is induced by temperature accompanied by the change in Fermi surface topology. Therefore itinerant 5$f$ states are inclined to take in active chemical bonding, suppressing the formation of local magnetic moment of Pu atoms, which partly elucidates the intrinsic feature of paramagnetic ground state of PuSn$_3$. Furthermore, the 5$f$ electronic correlations are orbital selective manifested themselves in differentiated band renormalizations and electron effective masses. Consequently, the convincing results remain crucial to our understanding of plutonium-based compounds and promote ongoing research.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure