Editorial: China’s impacts on Africa’s development

Much has been made of China’s economic ascendency in Africa, most notably its overtaking of the US in 2009 to become the continent’s largest trading partner. Beyond trade, the broader contours of Chinese loans, export credits, investment, and aid have changed Africa’s economic landscape since 2000 when the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meetings were held. In the extensive discussions – in government meetings, the media, public fora, and academic settings – that have ensued, China has been portrayed in distinctly contrasting terms; on the one hand, as a responsible partner of the global south, creating new markets for African products and supplying affordable goods to African consumers, while on the other as a rapacious superpower plundering the continent’s resources and flooding its markets with cheap manufactures that further undermine local production. Consequently, the impacts of China on African economies and Africa’s development have become one of the most controversial topics in the wider and rapidly expanding field of Sino-African relations

Shifting Chinese South African identities in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa

Faculty of Humanities School of Social Sciences 9812254a [email protected] focus of this PhD thesis is the shifting identities of the approximately 12,000-strong community of South African-born Chinese South Africans during the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. This thesis begins with the assumption that social identities are constructed. It also assumes that identities are contested amongst the various social actors; that identities shift over time and across individual life spans; and that individuals have multiple, often overlapping identities. The three strands of identity that form the core of this thesis are racial, ethnic, and national identities; at any given time, due to specific historic circumstances, one or another of these identities has been more or less salient. This thesis used a combination of methodologies the address the key research questions. The primary research method was qualitative. In-depth interviews were supplemented by a survey, archival research, and participant observation. The principal social actors dominating the construction of Chinese South African identities were the Chinese South Africans, themselves, and the South African and Chinese states. Chinese history, myths about China, and Chinese culture were the primary building materials used in the construction of Chinese South African identities; however, these ‘materials’ could only be utilised within the constraints established by the apartheid system. From the 1960s, Chinese South Africans were singled from amongst the ‘non-whites’ to receive concessions and privileges; over time they came to occupy the nebulous, interstitial spaces of apartheid as unofficial ‘honorary whites’. South African state attempts to legally redefine the Chinese as ‘white’ failed because the Chinese South Africans were unwilling to give up their unique ethnic identity. Concessions and greater interaction with white South Africans had led many Chinese to conclude that their Chineseness had been ‘diminished’ and ‘lost’. What we witnessed, rather, was the selective incorporation of chosen aspects of Chinese culture and values into new Chinese South African identities. Because of the diminishing impact of apartheid legislation on Chinese South Africans, we were able to identify three distinct identity cohorts during the apartheid era: the shopkeepers, the fence-sitters, and the bananas. In the post-apartheid era, affirmative action policies, new immigration from China and Taiwan, and globalisation have influenced more recent constructions of Chinese South African identities. Keywords: Chinese, Chineseness, South African, apartheid, post-apartheid, identity, construction, ethnicity, ‘honorary white’, race

Dominik Kopinski, Andrzej Polus, & IanTaylor, (Eds.) China’s Rise in Africa. Perspectives on a Developing Connection. London & New York: Routledge, 2012.

Book review

Estimation of an Examinee's Ability in the Web-Based Computerized Adaptive Testing Program IRT-CAT

We developed a program to estimate an examinee s ability in order to provide freely available access to a web-based computerized adaptive testing (CAT) program. We used PHP and Java Script as the program languages, PostgresSQL as the database management system on an Apache web server and Linux as the operating system. A system which allows for user input and searching within inputted items and creates tests was constructed. We performed an ability estimation on each test based on a Rasch model and 2- or 3-parametric logistic models. Our system provides an algorithm for a web-based CAT, replacing previous personal computer-based ones, and makes it possible to estimate an examinee's ability immediately at the end of test

Editorial

China's impact on Africa's developmen

Recognition of partially occluded threat objects using the annealed Hopefield network

Recognition of partially occluded objects has been an important issue to airport security because occlusion causes significant problems in identifying and locating objects during baggage inspection. The neural network approach is suitable for the problems in the sense that the inherent parallelism of neural networks pursues many hypotheses in parallel resulting in high computation rates. Moreover, they provide a greater degree of robustness or fault tolerance than conventional computers. The annealed Hopfield network which is derived from the mean field annealing (MFA) has been developed to find global solutions of a nonlinear system. In the study, it has been proven that the system temperature of MFA is equivalent to the gain of the sigmoid function of a Hopfield network. In our early work, we developed the hybrid Hopfield network (HHN) for fast and reliable matching. However, HHN doesn't guarantee global solutions and yields false matching under heavily occluded conditions because HHN is dependent on initial states by its nature. In this paper, we present the annealed Hopfield network (AHN) for occluded object matching problems. In AHN, the mean field theory is applied to the hybird Hopfield network in order to improve computational complexity of the annealed Hopfield network and provide reliable matching under heavily occluded conditions. AHN is slower than HHN. However, AHN provides near global solutions without initial restrictions and provides less false matching than HHN. In conclusion, a new algorithm based upon a neural network approach was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the automated inspection of threat objects from x-ray images. The robustness of the algorithm is proved by identifying occluded target objects with large tolerance of their features

Les Chinois résidant temporairement en Afrique

La migration chinoise vers l’Afrique préoccupe l’Occident. La Chine pourrait prendre la place des États-Unis, du Royaume-Uni et de l’Europe en tant que force dominatrice postcoloniale. Les entreprises chinoises en Afrique sont taxées de “prédatrices” ou “néocoloniales”. La migration chinoise vers ce continent est souvent décrite comme une “inondation”, une “invasion” ou une “incursion”. L’utilisation excessive de ces termes favorise une perception exagérée de la présence chinoise en Afrique qui se caractérise par une grande mobilité