A longitudinal study about Chinese students’ experiences in Germany

This dissertation explores the changing identity and sense of belonging of a group of master’s students from the People’s Republic of China during their stay in Germany. Its main purpose is to understand how the students perceived their attachment to China politically, culturally, and ethnically and how these perceptions gradually changed during their experiences in Germany, where they developed different strategies to negotiate their identity and belonging. The study applied a combination of a longitudinal method and a biographical narrative interview method to track 25 Chinese students’ lived experiences and their change processes from their first semester in Germany until after they graduated, in order to capture critical moments in their transitions. The dissertation provides longitudinal evidence that reveals the complex and multi-layered nature of the changing progress of these students’ identities. It also supports the idea that the students’ transcultural experiences in Germany may have helped them to “unlearn” a normalized concept of “Chineseness,” which was partially imbued by the Patriotic Education Campaign in China from the 1990s, and to go beyond their state-bound national loyalty to postulate a potential transcultural position in today’s world.2022-01-1

Study of Gaussian Relay Channels with Correlated Noises

In this paper, we consider full-duplex and half-duplex Gaussian relay channels where the noises at the relay and destination are arbitrarily correlated. We first derive the capacity upper bound and the achievable rates with three existing schemes: Decode-and-Forward (DF), Compress-and-Forward (CF), and Amplify-and-Forward (AF). We present two capacity results under specific noise correlation coefficients, one being achieved by DF and the other being achieved by direct link transmission (or a special case of CF). The channel for the former capacity result is equivalent to the traditional Gaussian degraded relay channel and the latter corresponds to the Gaussian reversely-degraded relay channel. For CF and AF schemes, we show that their achievable rates are strictly decreasing functions over the negative correlation coefficient. Through numerical comparisons under different channel settings, we observe that although DF completely disregards the noise correlation while the other two can potentially exploit such extra information, none of the three relay schemes always outperforms the others over different correlation coefficients. Moreover, the exploitation of noise correlation by CF and AF accrues more benefit when the source-relay link is weak. This paper also considers the optimal power allocation problem under the correlated-noise channel setting. With individual power constraints at the relay and the source, it is shown that the relay should use all its available power to maximize the achievable rates under any correlation coefficient. With a total power constraint across the source and the relay, the achievable rates are proved to be concave functions over the power allocation factor for AF and CF under full-duplex mode, where the closed-form power allocation strategy is derived.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication