Image, Precariousness and the Logic of Cultural Production in Hong Kong

Interpretations of culture in Hong Kong have tended to portray the city in terms of the vanishing present, in some combination of the instant, fleeting and disappearing. This article redresses such language of lack to consider instead how the idea of precariousness in the realm of the cultural has been less a condition of cultural production than a cultural strategy. Street art, including alternative performance art and political graffiti, has made the city itself the site of roving cultural production: walls, street surfaces and passageways accommodate forms of expression that the city’s cultural institutions have only more recently and uneasily embraced. In these different modes of time-space, contemporary alternative art occupies transitory territory and locates its ‘precariousness’ in lack of definitive status and uncertain future – mimetic conditions of defining culture in Hong Kong society itself. Its measures, by contrast, emerge in Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible: the ways in which they render what is visible, knowable and ultimately sayable. As objects generating negotiation, such contemporary cultural projects anticipate instabilities of the present, identify hegemonic political economic logics and seek modes of resistance. Within these perspectives, this discussion juxtaposes two simultaneous events: the exhibit ‘Memories of King Kowloon’ on the historic graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, and the stenciled graffiti of Ai Weiwei in public space during April and May 2011

Particularities and Complexities: Unpacking State Policy in Local China

In this issue, Provincial China features work by UTS China Research Centre scholars and associates. The four articles together problematize another assumption about political economy in China – the idea that state policy is top-down, unidirectional, and omnipresent. Working on different topics and from different disciplinary perspectives, each author analyzes a specific state policy to reveal how, rather than supporting a monolithic state structure, policy dynamics demonstrate regional particularity, temporal variability, and institutional complexity. The spatial conditions of policy dynamics vary regionally as well as in relations of scale, i.e., between national interests and their relations with provincial, urban, and local governments. Since China’s developmental model had depended on a strong state, how should we understand conditions of particularity and complexity in state policy? How should we potentially reconsider understanding the state in light of policy variation? These articles generate insightful outcomes

TLR7-mediated skin inflammation remotely triggers chemokine expression and leukocyte accumulation in the brain

Background: The relationship between the brain and the immune system has become increasingly topical as, although it is immune-specialised, the CNS is not free from the influences of the immune system. Recent data indicate that peripheral immune stimulation can significantly affect the CNS. But the mechanisms underpinning this relationship remain unclear. The standard approach to understanding this relationship has relied on systemic immune activation using bacterial components, finding that immune mediators, such as cytokines, can have a significant effect on brain function and behaviour. More rarely have studies used disease models that are representative of human disorders. Methods: Here we use a well-characterised animal model of psoriasis-like skin inflammation—imiquimod—to investigate the effects of tissue-specific peripheral inflammation on the brain. We used full genome array, flow cytometry analysis of immune cell infiltration, doublecortin staining for neural precursor cells and a behavioural read-out exploiting natural burrowing behaviour. Results: We found that a number of genes are upregulated in the brain following treatment, amongst which is a subset of inflammatory chemokines (CCL3, CCL5, CCL9, CXCL10, CXCL13, CXCL16 and CCR5). Strikingly, this model induced the infiltration of a number of immune cell subsets into the brain parenchyma, including T cells, NK cells and myeloid cells, along with a reduction in neurogenesis and a suppression of burrowing activity. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that cutaneous, peripheral immune stimulation is associated with significant leukocyte infiltration into the brain and suggest that chemokines may be amongst the key mediators driving this response

Between Big City and Authentic Village: Branding the Small Chinese City

While recent academic research has already produced an impressive corpus on big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, the small Chinese city has been mostly ignored. In this article, I suggest that consideration of the small city can bring a new perspective on the wider urban fabric of which it is an element. Although small city governments have embraced urban entrepreneurialism with the same enthusiasm as China’s big cities, different configurations of space, branding and the everyday have nevertheless resulted. My case study of Kaili in Guizhou province indicates that the small city exists in a complex relationship with the big city and the village; it is pulled towards large-scale urbanization while simultaneously attempting to construct a unique city image based upon the evocation of rural cultural practices. The perspective from the small city thus suggests the need to consider the rural-urban divide – long a dominant geographical imagination of China – alongside other geographies, including a triad of the small city, the village and the big city

Origins and Evolution of a Geographical Idea The Macroregion in China

Questions about the evolution of paradigms in the academy are intriguing because their development may reflect prevailing social formations as much or more than new discoveries or truths, particularly in the humanities and in branches of the social sciences in which epistemologies reflect how scholars choose to assemble and construct knowledge. In the field of China studies, the situation is more complex; even while acknowledging debates over the social construction of knowledge, historians of China have arguably treated paradigm shifts as if scientific methods from the “natural sciences provide a model of knowledge, research, and explanation ” (Dirlik, 1996: 245). But translating scientific theory into humanistic research creates particular epistemological problems for paradigm development. In area studies research, epistemological divides between the disciplines and area studies, as well as between empirical work and theoretical applications, can obscure a paradigm’s origins and complicate its evo