It’s Just History: Patriotic Education in the PRC

It’s now a year since Chinese nationalism had its last big public outing. On April 19, 2008, twelve days after pro-Tibet protesters in Paris tried to grab the Olympic flame from a wheelchair-bound Chinese paralympian, patriotic civilians began mobilising protests around the French embassy in Beijing, and outside Carrefours in at least four different Chinese cities. “Protect Our Tibet! Bless Our Olympics! Boycott Carrefour!” declared banners at demonstrations on the northeast coast. “Say No to French Imperialists!” As popular outrage grew about perceived anti-Chinese bias in Western reporting on the riots in Tibet and opposition to the torch relay, more than ten members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China are said to have received death threats. “People who fart through the mouth will get shit stuffed down their faces by me!”, “Foreign reporters out of China!” two postings on a popular news site owned by the People’s Daily pronounced. “These bastards make me want to throw up,” ran another. “Throw them in the Taiwan Strait to fill it up. They’re like flies – disgusting.” Although the content of the rage wasn’t new, its distribution had a certain novelty. As it travelled through the opposed ranks of the pro-Tibet and pro-China lobbies in France, England, the U.S. and Australia, the torch relay turned Chinese nationalism into a headline story in these countries’ media. Those without firsthand experience of or interest in China now encountered (either physically or on primetime news slots) files of red-flag wavers occasionally prepared to kick and punch advocates of Tibetan independence. Things looked particularly ugly in clashes between Chinese and pro-Tibetan demonstrators at Duke University in the U.S., where one Chinese student who suggested dialogue between the two sides received death threats from compatriots. It was not a good PR moment for the PRC. For a while – until the Sichuan earthquake revived global sympathy for China – dyspeptic chauvinism jostled to become the international face of this imminent superpower

Filthy Fiction: The Writings of Zhu Wen

Chinese fiction of the 1990s was not short on shock value. If we think of the decade’s cultural tone being set by Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 command to unleash commercial forces, then the years that followed proved rich in works that would have done the old man proud. Quick off the mark was Jia Pingwa, who triumphantly became one of the earliest, most notorious cases of a serious writer surrendering to lurid populism, with his 1993 novel, The Ruined Capital (Feidu): a best-selling, soft-pornographic tale of a male writer’s travails through the corruption of contemporary China. Things were not looking much more restrained by 1999, when Weihui, in Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei), had her young heroine Coco jettison her dreamy Chinese artist boyfriend for a torrid affair (featuring a hard-to-forget toilet sex scene) with a German accountant called Mark. Just halfway between these two literary moments came the quiet publication of something genuinely outrageous. In 1996, a 28-year-old thermal engineer-turned-avant-garde novelist called Zhu Wen produced a novella, around 150 pages long, entitled Didi de yanzou. Translating the title alone makes me blush, though I will do my best to gloss its subtleties. An unimaginatively literal rendering would make it “My Little Brother’s Performance”, but in Chinese “little brother” (didi) happens also to be one of the language’s many slang usages for penis. If I were then to add that it’s set in a university (in east-coast Nanjing) and features a cast of late adolescent, sex-starved male undergraduates, you might reasonably infer that the story is a Chinese first-cousin to the Western teen-sex comedy — American Pie and its many sequels and spin-offs. It certainly enjoys a good share of the genre’s gross-out crassness. Here’s a basic summary. The novella starts as it means to go on, with its unnamed narrator meandering through campus in an ill-fitting suit that he has mortgaged off a random fellow-undergraduate with his penultimate condom, looking for girls in short shorts and aimlessly shouting “copulate!” outside classrooms full of diligent students. Our narrator’s roommates are a similarly disreputable lot. There’s Zhou Jian, whose first contribution to the group is to offer them the sexual services of his older cousin (without mentioning this to her in advance). “She must have been frigid,” reasons the narrator, after she has refused every one of them.[1] In one uplifting scene, they take her out for a graduation dinner in the anticipation of getting her so drunk they can all, one by one, have their way with her. (Unfortunately for the hopefuls, they fail to regulate their own intake, and wind up biliously under the table, while she remains decorously compos.) Then again, there’s the spineless Haimen, as desperate to join the Communist Party as he is to ingratiate himself with his degenerate classmates; or the subnormal Lao Wu, who gets put away for attempted rape in the middle of his academic career. The best of the bunch is probably the narcoleptic Jian Xin, whose sole, lofty ambition is to sleep his way through university

Undesired outcomes: China’s approach to border disputes during the early Cold War

This article will explore the evolution of China’s border policy through the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on newly available archival sources and recent secondary literature, it will argue that during the early Cold War, the PRC leadership lacked a clear sense of the concept of national sovereignty, and often attempted to use territorial negotiations with China’s neighbours to bargain for broader foreign policy objectives. The article will also examine the historical and political assumptions underlying Mao Zedong’s approach to border questions, suggesting that Mao combined longstanding imperial assumptions about universal emperorship with the modern, Marxist idea of a world revolution

Artefacts and biases affecting the evaluation of scoring functions on decoy sets for protein structure prediction

Motivation: Decoy datasets, consisting of a solved protein structure and numerous alternative native-like structures, are in common use for the evaluation of scoring functions in protein structure prediction. Several pitfalls with the use of these datasets have been identified in the literature, as well as useful guidelines for generating more effective decoy datasets. We contribute to this ongoing discussion an empirical assessment of several decoy datasets commonly used in experimental studies

Draw me a picture, tell me a story: Evoking memory and supporting analysis through pre-interview drawing activities

In interviews for interpretive inquiry or interpretive case studies, researchers hope to grasp participants’ perspectives and learn about the nature and meaning of their experiences. There are many challenges or requirements for useful or successful interviews. In this paper we identify important aspects of interviews and examine the helpful contributions of using pre-interview activities. Pre-interview activities were drawings or diagrams that participants completed about the experiences of interest. Participants brought the completed drawings to their interviews and the interviews commenced with presentation and discussion of these visuals. This paper presents four studies that illustrate how the use of pre-interview activities can support participants in identifying central ideas in their experiences. In the interviews, the participants spoke at length about the visual representations they produced and in these reflections they identified central ideas or key themes in the experiences. Some drawings were a source of visual metaphors for discussing the experience and some highlighted whole-part relationships that informed interpretation. The findings contribute to conversations about how to “invite stories” rather than “request reports” from participants, how images other than photographs can serve as evocative and potent visuals to support memory and reflection in interviews, and how researchers can better or more directly access a participant’s meaning.Lors d’entrevues dans le contexte d’enquêtes interprétatives ou d’études de cas interprétatives, les chercheurs espèrent comprendre les perspectives des participants et de se renseigner sur la nature et le sens de leurs expériences. Les entrevues utiles ou réussies impliquent de nombreux défis et plusieurs exigences. Dans cet article, nous identifions certains aspects importants d’entrevues et examinons les contributions utiles des activités pré-entrevues. Les activités pré-entrevues consistaient en des dessins ou des diagrammes complétés par les participants et portant sur des expériences qui les intéressaient. Les participants sont arrivés aux entrevues avec leurs dessins terminés; les entrevues ont débuté par une présentation et une discussion de ces illustrations. Cet article présente quatre études qui illustrent la mesure dans laquelle l’emploi d’activités pré-entrevues peut appuyer les participants dans l’identification des idées qui sont centrales à leurs expériences. Lors des entrevues, les participants ont longuement parlé au sujet des représentations visuelles qu’ils avaient produites; au cours de leurs réflexions, ils ont identifié les idées centrales, ou thèmes clés, de ces expériences. Certains dessins étaient sources de métaphores visuelles servant d’appui à l’expérience; d’autres mettaient l’accent sur les relations partie-tout qui éclairaient leurs interprétations. Les résultats viennent contribuer aux conversations sur la façon d‘inviter les participants à « raconter des histoires » plutôt que de leur « demander des rapports », sur le rôle que peuvent jouer les images (autres que les photos) comme illustrations évocatrices et puissantes qui appuient la mémoire et la réflexion lors d’entrevues, et sur les moyens pour les chercheurs d’avoir un meilleur accès, ou un accès plus directe, au sens que veulent communiquer les participants

Aseptic meningitis in a patient taking etanercept for rheumatoid arthritis: a case report

Background \ud We report a case of a 53 year old lady recently commenced on etanercept, an anti-TNF (tumour necrosis factor) therapy for rheumatoid arthritis presenting with \ud confusion, pyrexia and an erythematous rash. \ud \ud Case presentation \ud A lumbar puncture was highly suggestive of bacterial meningitis, but CSF cultures produced no growth, and polymerase chain reactions (PCR) for all previously reported bacterial, fungal and viral causes of meningitis were negative. \ud \ud Conclusions \ud This case report describes aseptic meningitis as a previously unreported complication of etanercept therapy, and serves as a reminder of the rare but potentially lifethreatening risk of serious infections in patients taking anti-TNF therapy for a variety of conditions

Predicting Risk of Emerging Cardiotoxicity

Smoking, hypercholesterolemia, hyperlipidemia, obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance and family history all are well established general risk factors broadly associated with injury in the cardiovascular system. Similarly, echocardiography, electrocardiography, MRI, PET scans and circulating biomarkers like cardiac Troponin (cTn) provide indications that injury has occurred. Traditionally, cardiovascular injury has been attributed to conditions that exacerbate the potential for ischemia, either by producing excessive metabolic/work demands or by impairing the perfusion necessary to support the metabolic/work demands. This review summarizes additional factors that are underappreciated in contributing to the risk of injury, such as iatrogenic injury secondary to treatment for other conditions, infection, environmental exposures, and autoimmune processes

The uses of foreigners in Mao-era China: ‘Techniques of Hospitality’ and international image-building in the People’s Republic, 1949-1976

This article focuses on the inner workings of Mao-era China’s ‘Foreign Affairs’ system (waishi xitong): the complex, comprehensive web of bureaucracy woven after 1949 to monitor and control Chinese contact with the outside world. It explores one of the channels along which the People’s Republic between 1949 and 1976 tried to project international, soft-power messages beyond conventional diplomatic channels: the inviting of so-called ‘foreign guests’ (waibin) on carefully planned tours around China, often with all or at least some expenses paid. Earlier accounts of this hospitality have evoked a machine of perfect control, carefully judged to manipulate visitors and rehearsed to ensure flawless performances by Chinese hosts. Using memoirs and Chinese archival documents, the article discusses the attitude of top-level leaders to such visits, the way in which trips were prepared and planned, and the successes and weaknesses of the system. It argues that the PRC’s hosting programme had a domestic as well as an international purpose. Although foreigners were the official target (and indeed, Maoist China’s ‘techniques of hospitality’ garnered some rich international political dividends) the government also used the preparation for and execution of hosting duties to underscore at home the triumph of the revolution

Explaining the rise of 'human rights' in analyses of Sino-African relations

Popular perceptions of China and its global role are often shaped by two words: 'made in'. Yet this vision of China that focuses primarily on Beijing as a coming economic superpower is relatively new, and it is not that long ago that two other words tended to dominate debates on and discourses of China: 'human rights'. To be sure, real interest in human rights in China was never the only issue in other states' relations with China, nor consistently pursued throughout the years (Nathan, 1994). Nor did human rights totally subsequently disappear from the political agenda.1 Nevertheless, the rhetorical importance of human rights - perhaps best epitomised by the narrow defeat of resolutions condemning Chinese policy in 1995 at the Human Rights Council in Geneva - stands in stark contrast to the relative silence thereafter as the bottom line of most states' relations with Beijing took on ever greater economic dimensions