Internet as an ideology nationalistic discourses and multiple subject positions of Chinese internet workers

Ideology works. This article examines how the Internet as a capital actor has become a nationalist ideology in China. Disclosing how nationalism serves to facilitate the expansion of China-based Internet platforms in the age of informational capitalism, we directly confront the Chinese Internet as an ideology apparatus that works to fulfill a dual logic of capital and territorial power. This article contributes to the study of three types of Chinese Internet workers: programmers, white-collar employees (excluding programmers), and assembly-line workers, and focuses on how nationalist discourses are created, which enthrall but at the same time are questioned by different workers who help fabricate nationalism as well as challenge it. We conceptualize topos of threat and referential strategy of collectivization as cultural and media tactics, driven by the nationalistic sentiments that form part of the “common sense” of Chinese users. We further analyze the multiple subject positions of Chinese Internet workers into hegemonic position, negotiated position, and oppositional position to discover the complexity of labor subjectivity which may create discrepancy or sometimes even challenge the Chinese Internet as an ideology. This study sheds light on how subject positions could disrupt a homogenous process of merging nationalism with populist sentiments, a conservative ideology that is prevalent in today’s China

The role of the state, labour policy and migrant workers' struggles in globalized China

Special issue on globalization(s) and labour in China and India, guest edited by Paul Bowles and John Harriss2009-2010 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Challenging Digital Capitalism: SACOM’s Campaigns against Apple and Foxconn as Monopoly Capital

“Utopia or dystopia—to where will the ‘digital revolution’ lead human society?” is a question that remains unanswered. Negotiating between two opposing standpoints, this article, looking at a form of trans-border activism originally driven by suicides and protests of Foxconn workers who produce iPhones, iPads and many other i-gadgets for the world’s consumers, is an attempt to explore a politics of online/offline resistance against anti-digital capitalism. Based in Hong Kong (HK), SACOM is a leftist student group which works to support Chinese workers in campaigning against corporate power and generating trans-border networks through media exposure, international activism, and localized organization. Combining online and offline activism, SACOM strives to extend the reach of their worker-consumer campaign to the worldwide audience by transgressing the Chinese state’s dominance of capital and political control. The most intriguing question to us is could this proactive activism be possible and, if so, how could it act at the grid of China’s transformation and incorporation into global capitalism

Gender and class : women's working lives in a dormitory labor regime in China

2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Interrogating child migrants or ‘Third Culture Kids’ in Asia: an introduction

No description supplie

Holographic-(V)AE: an end-to-end SO(3)-Equivariant (Variational) Autoencoder in Fourier Space

Group-equivariant neural networks have emerged as a data-efficient approach to solve classification and regression tasks, while respecting the relevant symmetries of the data. However, little work has been done to extend this paradigm to the unsupervised and generative domains. Here, we present Holographic-(V)AE (H-(V)AE), a fully end-to-end SO(3)-equivariant (variational) autoencoder in Fourier space, suitable for unsupervised learning and generation of data distributed around a specified origin. H-(V)AE is trained to reconstruct the spherical Fourier encoding of data, learning in the process a latent space with a maximally informative invariant embedding alongside an equivariant frame describing the orientation of the data. We extensively test the performance of H-(V)AE on diverse datasets and show that its latent space efficiently encodes the categorical features of spherical images and structural features of protein atomic environments. Our work can further be seen as a case study for equivariant modeling of a data distribution by reconstructing its Fourier encoding

Thin accretion disks onto brane world black holes

The braneworld description of our universe entails a large extra dimension and a fundamental scale of gravity that might be lower by several orders of magnitude as compared to the Planck scale. An interesting consequence of the braneworld scenario is in the nature of the vacuum solutions of the brane gravitational field equations, with properties quite distinct as compared to the standard black hole solutions of general relativity. One possibility of observationally discriminating between different types of black holes is the study of the emission properties of the accretion disks. In the present paper we obtain the energy flux, the emission spectrum and accretion efficiency from the accretion disks around several classes of static and rotating brane world black holes, and we compare them to the general relativistic case. Particular signatures can appear in the electromagnetic spectrum, thus leading to the possibility of directly testing extra-dimensional physical models by using astrophysical observations of the emission spectra from accretion disks.Comment: 37 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in PR

Technology, creativity and the media in engineering China’s future

Political, economic and intellectual elites in China have for some time been in the grip of ‘futurology’ as they reflect on thirty years’ of extraordinary economic development and ask ‘what next’? China has a dream, in fact it has many visions of what it may become, reflecting robust debate and competition to define the nation’s future course of reform and development (Callahan, 2013). On assuming the top party and state positions in October 2012 Xi Jinping quickly unveiled the China Dream (Zhonguomeng) as the maxim for his leadership. Although specification of what the dream will entail is yet to be fully explicated, one thing is certain: low-cost production and outsourcing more advanced economies’ dirty jobs is neither the subject of China’s dream nor is it any longer considered the means to delivering it. The ‘world’s factory’ model that facilitated China’s remarkable economic growth has come under pressure from all sides, as the party acknowledges its unsustainability and people deal with the consequences. Party elites and policymakers have taken significant steps toward a different and more sustainable model to secure long term growth and it is hoped that low-end manufacturing will give way to a service based economy and consumer culture facilitated by urbanization, migration and developing greater creative capacity. These plans are underpinned by the ambition to become an ‘innovative nation’ (chuangxinxing de guojia), to develop soft power resources to go with economic might, and to raise the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of the people. As the three books covered in this review essay demonstrate, technology, culture and the media are closely implicated, and closely controlled, in the Chinese state’s quest for development