Rhetoric and Politics of the Female Body and Sex in Two Contemporary Chinese TV Drama Serials: \u3cem\u3eThe Place Where Dreams Start\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eBlow the North Wind\u3c/em\u3e

The discourse of body and sex has long been a taboo subject for Chinese females from time immemorial, and despite the Chinese Communist Party’s stated policies and legislation of “female equality”, the situation for females after the communist takeover improved only marginally and was most often just ‘window-dressing’. However, with the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of reforms to ‘open up China’ and the growing importance of modern Western cultural thought, there appeared a gradual change in the Chinese people’s attitude towards discussions on body and sex. People began to understand the ideas of femininity, female desire and sensuality. Writers and filmmakers began to challenge the orthodox or established imagination and expectation of female desire, female body and sex and to use these new topics of body politics to question the rationale of the socialist political agenda. This paper critiques two modern Chinese popular TV drama serials: The Place Where Dreams Start (1999 dir. Ye Jing) and Blow the North Wind (2009 dir. An Jian) and examines the rhetoric and “politics” of the female body and sexuality in socialist revolutionary context. The emphasis is on the body and sexual pursuit of the “revolutionary” female and her relationship and interactions with the revolution. This paper will adopt a feminist perspective, and it will examine how the female figures in these stories participated in and devoted themselves to the Revolution and how, despite their devotion to the Revolution, they were rejected by the Revolution. It will show that a feminist view that incorporates female desire, body and sexuality generates an alternative perspective from which to view the Chinese revolutionary discourse. In the texts examined, women are manipulated, abused and betrayed by the Revolution and its revolutionary principles, and eventually their ideas are renounced and discarded by the Revolution

A Cultural Reading of a Chinese White-Collar Workplace Bestseller and its Filmic Adaptation: Li Ke’s A Story of Lala’s Promotion and Go Lala Go!

In 2007, Li Ke’s novel A Story of Lala’s Promotion (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji) became a bestseller among Chinese white-collar workers in foreign-owned (Western) companies and struck a chord with the Chinese middle class. The novel revolves around office politics, Western company culture and the white-collar lifestyle, the ‘shelved ladies’ phenomenon and middle-class aesthetics. To decipher the embedded cultural codes of this book, this study undertakes a textual analysis of the plots of A Story of Lala’s Promotion and its filmic adaptation, Go Lala Go! (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji dir. Xu Jinglei, 2010). This paper conducts a trans-media adaption study (from fiction to film) to examine three interrelated themes in the novel and the film. First, focusing on the influence of Western corporate culture on Chinese white-collar workers under economic globalisation, the widely circulating rules of Western workplaces are interpreted, clarifying the acculturating process of Western culture over its Chinese counterpart. The paper further explains that on the platform provided by foreign companies, and with the influence and training of Western corporate culture, intelligent and diligent young Chinese aspirational women struggle and realise their dreams in the workplace. Second, employing a feminist perspective, an attempt is made to address the situation of contemporary Chinese white-collar women represented by the contemporary social phenomenon of the ‘shelved ladies’, which also serves as an emblem of female independence and individualism. Third, through an analysis of the filmic adaptation, which focuses on the white-collar female’s lifestyle and consumption habits, the paper also highlights the contemporary Chinese population’s pursuit of a middle-class identity and aesthetic that mirrors the overwhelming consumerism of post-socialist China

Micelles of Different Morphologies - Advantages of Worm-like Filomicelles of PEO-PCL in Paclitaxel Delivery

Worm-like and spherical micelles are both prepared here from the same amphiphilic diblock copolymer, poly(ethylene oxide)-b-poly (ε-caprolactone) (PEO [5 kDa]-PCL [6.5 kDa]) in order to compare loading and delivery of hydrophobic drugs. Worm-like micelles of this degradable copolymer are nanometers in cross-section and spontaneously assemble to stable lengths of microns, resembling filoviruses in some respects and thus suggesting the moniker filomicelles . The highly flexible worm-like micelles can also be sonicated to generate kinetically stable spherical micelles composed of the same copolymer. The fission process exploits the finding that the PCL cores are fluid, rather than glassy or crystalline, and core-loading of the hydrophobic anticancer drug delivery, paclitaxel (TAX) shows that the worm-like micelles load and solubilize twice as much drug as spherical micelles. In cytotoxicity tests that compare to the clinically prevalent solubilizer, Cremophor® EL, both micellar carriers are far less toxic, and both types of TAX-loaded micelles also show 5-fold greater anticancer activity on A549 human lung cancer cells. PEO-PCL based worm-like filomicelles appear to be promising pharmaceutical nanocarriers with improved solubilization efficiency and comparable stability to spherical micelles, as well as better safety and efficacy in vitro compared to the prevalent Cremophor® EL TAX formulation

SAR2EO: A High-resolution Image Translation Framework with Denoising Enhancement

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to electro-optical (EO) image translation is a fundamental task in remote sensing that can enrich the dataset by fusing information from different sources. Recently, many methods have been proposed to tackle this task, but they are still difficult to complete the conversion from low-resolution images to high-resolution images. Thus, we propose a framework, SAR2EO, aiming at addressing this challenge. Firstly, to generate high-quality EO images, we adopt the coarse-to-fine generator, multi-scale discriminators, and improved adversarial loss in the pix2pixHD model to increase the synthesis quality. Secondly, we introduce a denoising module to remove the noise in SAR images, which helps to suppress the noise while preserving the structural information of the images. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct experiments on the dataset of the Multi-modal Aerial View Imagery Challenge (MAVIC), which consists of large-scale SAR and EO image pairs. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework, and we win the first place in the MAVIC held in CVPR PBVS 2023

A Cultural Reading of a Chinese White-Collar Workplace Bestseller and its Filmic Adaptation: Li Ke’s A Story of Lala’s Promotion and Go Lala Go!

In 2007, Li Ke’s novel A Story of Lala’s Promotion (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji) became a bestseller among Chinese white-collar workers in foreign-owned (Western) companies and struck a chord with the Chinese middle class. The novel revolves around office politics, Western company culture and the white-collar lifestyle, the ‘shelved ladies’ phenomenon and middle-class aesthetics. To decipher the embedded cultural codes of this book, this study undertakes a textual analysis of the plots of A Story of Lala’s Promotion and its filmic adaptation, Go Lala Go! (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji dir. Xu Jinglei, 2010). This paper conducts a trans-media adaption study (from fiction to film) to examine three interrelated themes in the novel and the film. First, focusing on the influence of Western corporate culture on Chinese white-collar workers under economic globalisation, the widely circulating rules of Western workplaces are interpreted, clarifying the acculturating process of Western culture over its Chinese counterpart. The paper further explains that on the platform provided by foreign companies, and with the influence and training of Western corporate culture, intelligent and diligent young Chinese aspirational women struggle and realise their dreams in the workplace. Second, employing a feminist perspective, an attempt is made to address the situation of contemporary Chinese white-collar women represented by the contemporary social phenomenon of the ‘shelved ladies’, which also serves as an emblem of female independence and individualism. Third, through an analysis of the filmic adaptation, which focuses on the white-collar female’s lifestyle and consumption habits, the paper also highlights the contemporary Chinese population’s pursuit of a middle-class identity and aesthetic that mirrors the overwhelming consumerism of post-socialist China

PhD

dissertationGlycosaminoglycans (GAGS), including hyaluronic acid (HA), heparin, heparan sulfate (HS), chondroitin sulfate (CS), dermatan sulfate (DS), and keratan sulfate (KS) are natural polysaccharides widely distributed in the extracellular matrix (ECM), cell surface, and the basement membrane. GAGs bind numerous proteins, which integrate them into many essential biological pathways. Therefore, studying GAGs and their binding proteins is important for the application of GAGs in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical fields. This dissertation mainly discusses HA and heparin, with some biochemical studies with their binding proteins and potential applications to develop wound-healing biomaterials. An HA binding protein, RHAMM (receptor of HA-mediated motility), was engineered to generate a recombinant protein (HB3) with excellent heparin affinity and specificity. Therapeutically relevant heparin (both unfractionated and low molecular weight) can be measured using HB3 protein in a competition assay modified from an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). This heparin assay has advantages in high consistency and low cost over current methods of activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) and anti-Xa assays. Another important HA binding protein, SPACRCAN (sialoproteoglycan associated with cones and rods) in retinal areas, was found to bind with heparin and CS. The binding domain was identified to be RHAMM-like BX