Untapped Instrument. Sovereign Wealth Funds and Chinese policy toward the Central and Eastern European countries

Although there has been vivid academic debate as to what extent Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are motivated by political reasons, it is rather clear that countries can use state-owned investment funds as a tool of their foreign policy. Even Barack Obama, during his initial presidential campaign in 2008 commented: “I am obviously concerned if these… sovereign wealth funds are motivated by more than just market consideration and that’s obviously a possibility”. This book looks at SWF activities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to determine the main motives for SWF presence in CEE. Are the potential financial gains the only reason behind their investments? Are SWF activities in the region dangerous for the stability and security of the CEE countries? The book is pioneering analyses of SWFs behaviour in the region, based on empirical data collected from the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute Transaction Database, arguably the most comprehensive and authoritative resource tracking SWF investment behaviour globally.Rozdział pochodzi z książki: Political Players? Sovereign Wealth Funds’ Investments in Central and Eastern Europe, T. Kamiński (ed.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2017.This chapter aims at looking at the role of Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in China’s policy toward Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the 21st century, especially since the enlargement of the European Union (EU) in 2004. During this time, we could observe an increase of Chinese interest in the region resulting in growing trade, investments and number of contacts on all levels. China has used a wide array of different instruments to achieve its goals in the region: from a big political project such as the “16+1 format” to an unprecedented frequency of contacts between Chinese provinces and their European counterparts (Kaczmarski, Jakóbowski 2015). Despite a visible growth of economic ties, Beijing presented a very limited will to use investments as a political instrument. Even if Chinese investments in CEE are booming, they are possibly less politically biased and more market-driven than those in other developing countries, like African ones.This book was published in frames of project “Political significance of the Sovereign Wealth Funds’ investments in the Central and Eastern Europe”. The project was financed by the Polish National Science Centre (Decision no. DEC-2012/07/B/HS5/03797)

Ku zjednoczeniu państwa. Narzędzia chińskiej polityki wobec Tajwanu

Praca naukowa finansowana ze środków na naukę w latach 2010–2013 jako projekt badawczy własny nr N N116 273838. Grant przyznany na podstawie decyzji Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego nr 2738/B/H03/2010/3

The Notion of "holy" in Ancient Armenian Texts from the Fifth Century CE: A Comparative Approach Using Digital Tools and Methods

Religious studies have long discussed the comparative notion of "holy" beyond religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. In this book, the author conducts a diachronic comparison of the meaning and application of two notions and their related word fields that are commonly associated with a broader comparative notion of holy, namely the Ancient Armenian term "surb" and its related words and the English word field associated with "holy". To compare these two semantic fields, his methodological approach operates on the principle of distributional semantics and applies, among others, tools and methods from the field of corpus linguistics

The loss of grammatical gender and case features between Old and Early Middle English: Its impact on simple demonstratives and topic shift

In this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle English ϸe (‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties of the Old English demonstratives which distinguish number, gender, and Case features. This inflectional variety of forms allows the Old English demonstratives to be used independently and to show the anaphoric and discourse-linking properties of topics. Crucially, the same properties characterise also German and Dutch demonstratives that manifest Case and/or gender morphology overtly, which shows that the syntactic distribution of LIs and their morphological richness should be considered as intertwined. The above properties are then confronted with the determiner system in Early Middle English, whose forms undergo inflectional levelling producing the invariant ϸe/ðe form that loses its distributional independence and acquires the article status. The levelling process in question is argued to stimulate the shift of the [+ref/spec] feature from the formal to the semantic pole. This suggests that the Early Middle English ϸe form no longer counts as an appropriate anaphor in topic shift contexts owing to its indeterminacy of Case, gender, and φ-features, which means that it cannot satisfy the Full Interpretation requirement at the interfaces

Centrosomes in Cytokinesis, Cell Cycle Progression and Ciliogenesis: a Dissertation

The work presented here describes novel functions for centrosome proteins, specifically for pericentrin and centriolin. The first chapter describes the involvement of pericentrin in ciliogenesis. Cells with reduced pericentrin levels were unable to form primary cilia in response to serum starvation. In addition we showed novel interactions between pericentrin, intraflagellar transport (IFT) proteins and polycystin 2 (PC2). Pericentrin was co-localized with IFT proteins and PC2 to the base of primary cilia and motile cilia. Ciliary function defects have been shown to be involved in many human diseases and IFT proteins and PC2 have been implicated in these diseases. We conclude that pericentrin is required for assembly of primary cilia possibly as an anchor for other proteins involved in primary cilia assembly. The second chapter describes identification of centriolin, a novel centriolar protein that localizes to subdistal appendages and is involved in cytokinesis and cell cycle progression. Depletion of centriolin leads to defects in the final stages of cytokinesis, where cells remain connected by thin intercellular bridges and are unable to complete abscission. The cytokinesis defects seemed to precede the G0/G1 p53 dependant cell cycle arrest. Finally, the third chapter is a continuation of the cytokinesis study and it identifies pericentrin as an interacting partner for centriolin. Like centriolin, pericentrin knockdown induces defects in the final stages of cytokinesis and leads to G0/G1 arrest. Moreover, pericentrin and centriolin interact biochemically and show codependency in their centrosome localization. We conclude that pericentrin and centriolin are members of the same pathway and are necessary for the final stages of cytokinesis

The Notion of »holy« in Ancient Armenian Texts from the Fifth Century CE

Religious studies have long discussed the comparative notion of »holy« beyond religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. In this book, Thomas Jurczyk conducts a diachronic comparison of the meaning and application of two notions and their related word fields that are commonly associated with a broader comparative notion of holy, namely the Ancient Armenian term »surb« and its related words and the English word field associated with »holy«. To compare these two semantic fields, his methodological approach operates on the principle of distributional semantics and applies, among others, tools and methods from the field of corpus linguistics