Exchanges: Reconciling Confucianism and Socialism?

Today China Beat would like to introduce our new “Exchanges” feature, which we hope will become a regular item on the blog. The debate below, between Daniel A. Bell and Michael Walzer, was originally printed in the Winter 2010 issue of Dissent, and is reposted here with permission. We’d like to invite our readers to share their thoughts on this discussion, and will run a response from Daniel Bell in the coming weeks. Please send your comments and questions to thechinabeatgmail.com

Imperial Ways

I am a big fan of Jonathan Spence’s works. His books bring to life some of the great and not-so-famous characters in Chinese history and they read like novels. When I was told that he had delivered a lecture on “Confucian Ways” for the BBC, I was very curious, and clicked on the link with great anticipation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to download the programme here in Beijing, but I did print out the transcript. That’s what I’ve just read. The lecture was delivered at the British library, and the host Sue Lawley opens by noting that the library houses the oldest book in the world, printed in 868 AD in China. Professor Spence adds that he is pleased to start his lecture “in the British library with its immense holdings of Asian books and manuscripts.” How did the British library secure those books, I wonder? Surely the weren’t willingly handed over to British imperial forces. I live right next to the Yuanmingyuan here in Northwest Beijing, the Old Summer Palace that was burnt down in 1860 by rampaging British and French forces. The ruins are visited by Chinese tourists, who view them as a symbol of China’s “century of humilitiation” at the hands of foreign powers. Perhaps the books were taken from the Yuanmingyuan? Or maybe the Chinese handed them over in exchange for the opium that they were forced to buy from British merchants? I somehow thought that such questions might be answered by one of the Western world’s most eminent historians of China. Why else bring up the fact that so many of China’s treasures are held in Britain? Seems to be rubbing salt in the wound. Imagine if, two centuries from now, China manages to buy (or steal) British national treasures, and then brags about it when a Chinese professor of British history gives a talk on John Locke at the national library in Beijing. How would the British feel

Imperial Ways

I am a big fan of Jonathan Spence’s works. His books bring to life some of the great and not-so-famous characters in Chinese history and they read like novels. When I was told that he had delivered a lecture on “Confucian Ways” for the BBC, I was very curious, and clicked on the link with great anticipation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to download the programme here in Beijing, but I did print out the transcript. That’s what I’ve just read. The lecture was delivered at the British library, and the host Sue Lawley opens by noting that the library houses the oldest book in the world, printed in 868 AD in China. Professor Spence adds that he is pleased to start his lecture “in the British library with its immense holdings of Asian books and manuscripts.” How did the British library secure those books, I wonder? Surely the weren’t willingly handed over to British imperial forces. I live right next to the Yuanmingyuan here in Northwest Beijing, the Old Summer Palace that was burnt down in 1860 by rampaging British and French forces. The ruins are visited by Chinese tourists, who view them as a symbol of China’s “century of humilitiation” at the hands of foreign powers. Perhaps the books were taken from the Yuanmingyuan? Or maybe the Chinese handed them over in exchange for the opium that they were forced to buy from British merchants? I somehow thought that such questions might be answered by one of the Western world’s most eminent historians of China. Why else bring up the fact that so many of China’s treasures are held in Britain? Seems to be rubbing salt in the wound. Imagine if, two centuries from now, China manages to buy (or steal) British national treasures, and then brags about it when a Chinese professor of British history gives a talk on John Locke at the national library in Beijing. How would the British feel

Learning With the Kids

China, as everybody knows, is not a politically free country. There are constraints on political activity and many social critics fall afoul of the system. The foreign press often reports on those cases, leading to the impression that it’s impossible to do any good outside of official channels. What is less well known, however, is that some areas of social life that were once politically taboo – such as the plight of migrant workers and environmental concerns – are now openly discussed in the Chinese media. There are also a growing number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that do good work in those areas. One such NGO in Beijing is called Xiezuozhe 协作者 (Facilitator) which came into being in the spring of 2003, when the SARS crisis hit Beijing. Today, it focuses mainly on the plight of migrant workers in large Chinese cities. Its methods are transparent and non-confrontational and it aims to be a constructive force for social change. The NGO gets funding from Chinese philanthropists and large Western companies, and a couple of years ago I joined my wife – a Chinese national who works for one of their donors – on an outing in a poor district in the outskirts of Beijing. I was impressed by what I saw – highly intelligent and sensitive young people clearly moved by the plight of migrant workers, listening to the workers and their children with respect and no hint of condescension, and thinking of practical ways of ameliorating their situation. So when I heard that they might be looking for English teachers to help with lessons for the children of migrant workers in the small lanes (hutong) of central Beijing, I jumped at the opportunity. My 14-year-old son Julien was also willing to help, and we volunteered as a father-son team. We contacted the head of Xiezuozhe, who eventually put us in touch with a sweet and intelligent 23-year-old volunteer named Wang Lihong, a recent graduate in social work from Changsha University. She said that we could do four sessions, each one lasting an hour and a half, with about 15 kids aged 9-13. It was my son’s first teaching experience, and I had never taught English, so we planned four themes in advance. Wang Lihong wanted to know more details of what we would teach and how we would do it, and I wasn’t used to such “interventionist” methods but I did my best to explain

The U-band Galaxy Luminosity Function of Nearby Clusters

Despite the great potential of the U-band galaxy luminosity function (GLF) to constrain the history of star formation in clusters, to clarify the question of variations of the GLF across filter bands, to provide a baseline for comparisons to high-redshift studies of the cluster GLF, and to estimate the contribution of bound systems of galaxies to the extragalactic near-UV background, determinations have so far been hampered by the generally low efficiency of detectors in the U-band and by the difficulty of constructing both deep and wide surveys. In this paper, we present U-band GLFs of three nearby, rich clusters to a limit of M_U=-17.5 (M*_U+2). Our analysis is based on a combination of separate spectroscopic and R-band and U-band photometric surveys. For this purpose, we have developed a new maximum-likelihood algorithm for calculating the luminosity function that is particularly useful for reconstructing the galaxy distribution function in multi-dimensional spaces (e.g., the number of galaxies as a simultaneous function of luminosity in different filter bands, surface brightness, star formation rate, morphology, etc.), because it requires no prior assumptions as to the shape of the distribution function. The composite luminosity function can be described by a Schechter function with characteristic magnitude M*_U=-19.82+/-0.27 and faint end slope alpha_U=-1.09+/-0.18. The total U-band GLF is slightly steeper than the R-band GLF, indicating that cluster galaxies are bluer at fainter magnitudes. Quiescent galaxies dominate the cumulative U-band flux for M_U<-14. The contribution of galaxies in nearby clusters to the U-band extragalactic background is <1% Gyr^-1 for clusters of masses ~3*10^14 to 2*10^15 M_solar.Comment: 44 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Multipartite fully-nonlocal quantum states

We present a general method to characterize the quantum correlations obtained after local measurements on multipartite systems. Sufficient conditions for a quantum system to be fully-nonlocal according to a given partition, as well as being (genuinely) multipartite fully-nonlocal, are derived. These conditions allow us to identify all completely-connected graph states as multipartite fully-nonlocal quantum states. Moreover, we show that this feature can also be observed in mixed states: the tensor product of five copies of the Smolin state, a biseparable and bound entangled state, is multipartite fully-nonlocal.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Version published in PRA. Note that it does not contain all the results from the previous version; these will be included in a later, more general, pape

Behavior of nozzles and acoustic liners in three dimensional acoustic fields

Theoretical values of the admittances of various nozzles were computed and compared with the corresponding experimental values. The existing data reduction scheme was corrected and all available experimental data has been rechecked and corrected whenever necessary; the updated experimental admittance values are presented. An analysis associated with the frequency sensitivity of experimental admittance values was initiated and the analog-to-digital Data Reduction Program which has become operational is discussed. Fourteen nozzle tests were conducted during this report period

And yet it moves: The dangers of artificially fixing the Milky Way center of mass in the presence of a massive Large Magellanic Cloud

Motivated by recent studies suggesting that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) could be significantly more massive than previously thought, we explore whether the approximation of an inertial Galactocentric reference frame is still valid in the presence of such a massive LMC. We find that previous estimates of the LMC's orbital period and apocentric distance derived assuming a fixed Milky Way are significantly shortened for models where the Milky Way is allowed to move freely in response to the gravitational pull of the LMC. Holding other parameters fixed, the fraction of models favoring first infall is reduced. Due to this interaction, the Milky Way center of mass within the inner 50 kpc can be significantly displaced in phase-space in a very short period of time that ranges from 0.3 to 0.5 Gyr by as much as 30 kpc and 75 km/s. Furthermore, we show that the gravitational pull of the LMC and response of the Milky Way are likely to significantly affect the orbit and phase space distribution of tidal debris from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (Sgr). Such effects are larger than previous estimates based on the torque of the LMC alone. As a result, Sgr deposits debris in regions of the sky that are not aligned with the present-day Sgr orbital plane. In addition, we find that properly accounting for the movement of the Milky Way around its common center of mass with the LMC significantly modifies the angular distance between apocenters and tilts its orbital pole, alleviating tensions between previous models and observations. While these models are preliminary in nature, they highlight the central importance of accounting for the mutual gravitational interaction between the MW and LMC when modeling the kinematics of objects in the Milky Way and Local Group.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 16 pages, 11 figure

All quantum states useful for teleportation are nonlocal resources

Understanding the relation between the different forms of inseparability in quantum mechanics is a longstanding problem in the foundations of quantum theory and has implications for quantum information processing. Here we make progress in this direction by establishing a direct link between quantum teleportation and Bell nonlocality. In particular, we show that all entangled states which are useful for teleportation are nonlocal resources, i.e. lead to deterministic violation of Bell's inequality. Our result exploits the phenomenon of super-activation of quantum nonlocality, recently proved by Palazuelos, and suggests that the latter might in fact be generic.Comment: 4 pages. v2: Title and abstract changed, presentation improved, references updated, same result

Lorentz transformations of open systems

We consider open dynamical systems, subject to external interventions by agents that are not completely described by the theory (classical or quantal). These interventions are localized in regions that are relatively spacelike. Under these circumstances, no relativistic transformation law exists that relates the descriptions of the physical system by observers in relative motion. Still, physical laws are the same in all Lorentz frames.Comment: Final version submitted to J. Mod. Opt. (Proc. of Gdansk conference