Post-socialist femininity unleashed/restrained: reconfigurations of gender in Chinese television dramas

In post-socialist China, gender norms are marked by rising divorce rates (Kleinman et al.), shifting attitudes towards sex (Farrer; Yan), and a growing commercialisation of sex (Zheng). These phenomena have been understood as indicative of market reforms unhinging past gender norms. In the socialist period, the radical politics of the time moulded women as gender neutral even as state policies emphasised their feminine roles in maintaining marital harmony and stability(Evans). These ideas around domesticity bear strong resemblance to pre-socialist understandings of womanhood and family that anchored Chinese society before the Communists took power in 1949. In this pre-socialist understanding, women were categorised into a hierarchy that defined their rights as wives, mothers, concubines, and servants (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). Women who transgressed these categories were regarded as potentially dangerous and powerfulenough to break up families and shake the foundations of Chinese society (Ahern). This paper explores the extent to which understandings of Chinese femininity have been reconfigured in the context of China’s post-1979 development, particularly after the 2000s

Echoes of family : Chinese-Australian belonging(s) in Perth, Western Australia

This is a study about belonging(s), entangled ones that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries. It is about the processes through which a diasporic community - the Chinese in Perth, Western Australia (W.A.) - struggle to become a part of their adopted land. It is also about the ways in which the Perth Chinese have actively engaged their quest for Chinese-Australian belonging(s) by (re-)interpreting, posturing and positioning their Chinese-ness. Belonging(s) is an issue that underlines recent discussions on cultural hybridisation, race and Australian national identity within 'Asian-Australian' communities, a category the Chinese in Perth (and the Chinese in Australia, for that matter) are seen to be a part of. I hope to contribute to these discussions, particularly in illuminating the negotiations that take place within the community in their struggle to find an acceptable cultural location of belonging(s), both for wider Australian society and themselves. In focussing on the internal processes through which the community seeks to resolve its quest for belonging(s), I hope to provide a bottom-up approach to the study of a particular Asian-Australian community

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Traction : mobility, religion and patriarchy in Shanghai

Since the 1980s sizeable communities of 'overseas Chinese' (ethnic Chinese with citizenship rights in countries other than China) have formed in China's major cities. This influx is typically taken as evidence of an enduring relationship between the overseas Chinese and China. However, this perception obscures the ways the overseas Chinese are re-imagining their relationship with China and its people. It also belies the fact that very little is known about how the overseas Chinese structure their lives in reform-era China. This thesis is a study of cosmopolitanism as a way of life in the Circle of Joy, a Christian sisterhood for overseas Chinese women in Shanghai, one of China's biggest and most cosmopolitan cities. Most of these women are upper middle class housewives who entered China accompanying spouses drawn to the country for economic reasons. Everyday life in the sisterhood is orientated by a cosmopolitan logic that draws from deep understandings of what it means to be a woman, diverse notions of Chineseness and the experiences of having lived in multiple places. Focussing on the practices of faith in the Circle of Joy, I explore the ways a distinctive Chinese cosmopolitanism is lived out in the lives of highly mobile women. In particular, I show how the women operationalise cosmopolitan logics through their faith, using Christianity to interpret and cope with dilemmas posed by lives of perpetual movement, cultivating an ethical frame and displaying virtue. Building on Anna Tsing's notion of 'friction', I use the term traction to describe the women's everyday attempts to wrestle with the forces of mobility. They use their religion to gain a communal hold on the ground of Shanghai and fight the disintegrating forces in their lives. The power exerted through this traction defends the rights and privileges of the women as wives as it entrenches particular understandings of what it means to be a woman in a mobile patriarchal order. In examining the ways a cosmopolitan logic is lived out in an overseas Chinese community, this thesis departs from assumptions of an inescapable diasporic yearning for China as homeland and details an alternative imagining of the relationship between the overseas Chinese and the country. In putting forth the realities of life in reform era China for the overseas Chinese, I stress the struggles and contestations over class, race and international politics that underlie idealisations of cosmopolitanism rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as a means of enacting a universal global ideal. When lived, the logic of cosmopolitanism is always a matter of practical connections. By examining these connections, I speak to anthropological debates over concepts like cosmopolitanism, globalisation and diaspora

GUIDING THE THREAD : CHINESE WEDDING SPECIALISTS PAST AND PRESENT

Bachelor'sBACHELOR OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (HONOURS

Clinical Characteristics and Long-Term Outcomes of Patients With Differing Haemoglobin Levels Undergoing Semi-Urgent and Elective Percutaneous Coronary Intervention in an Asian Population.

INTRODUCTION: This study aimed to investigate the impact of anaemia on long-term clinical outcomes in patients who underwent semi-urgent and elective percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in an Asian population. Although the effects of anaemia on outcomes in Asian patients are well studied for acute coronary syndrome, its impact on Asian patients undergoing semi-urgent and elective PCI is unclear. METHODS: This was a retrospective cohort study of patients who underwent semi-urgent and elective PCI from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2015, at a tertiary academic centre. A total of 1,685 patients were included. They were stratified into three groups: normal (≥12 g/dL), intermediate (10-11.9 g/dL), and low (<10 g/dL) haemoglobin levels. Demographics, risk factors, and end-points including the 5-point major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) (all-cause death, subsequent stroke, myocardial infarction, congestive cardiac failure, and target lesion revascularisation), cardiovascular death, and bleeding events were analysed. RESULTS: Patients in intermediate and low haemoglobin level groups were older with more comorbidities. Compared to the normal haemoglobin level group, low haemoglobin level group patients were associated with an increased risk of composite endpoints of all-cause death, subsequent stroke, myocardial infarction, congestive cardiac failure, and target lesion revascularisation [adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) 1.89, 95% confidence interval (CI):1.22, 2.92; p = 0.004]. This was driven by the increased risk of target lesions revascularisation observed in the low haemoglobin level group compared to the normal haemoglobin level group (aHR 17.74, 95% CI: 1.74, 180.80; p = 0.015). The patients in the low haemoglobin level group were also associated with a higher risk of bleeding events compared to the normal haemoglobin level group (aHR 7.18, 95% CI: 1.13, 45.40; p = 0.036). CONCLUSION: In our Asian cohort, patients with anaemia undergoing PCI were associated with a higher comorbid burden. Despite adjustments for comorbidities, these patients had higher mortality and worse cardiovascular outcomes following contemporary PCI

The impact of chronic kidney disease on long-term outcomes following semi-urgent and elective percutaneous coronary intervention

10.1097/MCA.0000000000000980Scientific Sessions of the American-Heart-Association326517-52