Exploring digital discourse with Chinese characteristics: contradictions and tensions

Capitalism in China is under transformations. This research aims to register and interpret China’s discourse on network technologies, reveal the underlying ideologies, and tie this discourse to the transformation of China’s capitalism of which it is a part. Digital discourse, as this thesis defines it, is about the contemporary discourse on network technology under Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. China’s state-led capitalism has gone through all aspects of changes that are enabled by network technologies, ranging from production, consumption and the market, to the relations between international capital, the State, domestic capital, and individuals are experiencing changes. Along with the economic, political and technological changes are ideological transformations. Digital discourse is part of the social process that is related to other social changes. This thesis will focus on the particular forms of digital discourse as a channel to investigate both social and ideological transformations in China’s digital capitalism. In particular, this thesis looks at the digital discourse from three social and political actors. It analyses discourse from the current central government’s information society policies and President Xi Jinping’s speeches, from CEOs of the dominant Internet companies in China, and from young workers in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Shenzhen. Through the lens of ideology, this thesis provides a critique of how digital discourse from different actors legitimate social relations in the current capitalism in China. In particular, at the international level, the government and BAT have appropriated a nationalist discourse to legitimate the global expansion of China’s capital and enterprises. At the domestic level, these actors have produced different types of discourse to legitimate the concentration of the market and the commercialisation of Internet platforms. At the individual level, there is a tendency among all actors to construct a consumer identity to replace a more politically active citizen identity. Through analysing digital discourse from these three actors, this thesis also identifies several features of ideology and the mechanisms of how ideologies work in contemporary capitalism. While the study illustrates the discrepancy of ideological discourse between by the dominant groups and subaltern groups, it also identifies one crucial ideology that legitimates, internalises and naturalises the dominant socio-political arrangements surrounding the commercialised Internet – This is no alternative. This finding suggests a double-layer and multi-dimensional understandings of the ideologies about China’s digital capitalism

Chromosome mapping of dragline silk genes in the genomes of widow spiders (araneae, theridiidae)

With its incredible strength and toughness, spider dragline silk is widely lauded for its impressive material properties. Dragline silk is composed of two structural proteins, MaSp1 and MaSp2, which are encoded by members of the spidroin gene family. While previous studies have characterized the genes that encode the constituent proteins of spider silks, nothing is known about the physical location of these genes. We determined karyotypes and sex chromosome organization for the widow spiders, Latrodectus hesperus and L. geometricus (Araneae, Theridiidae). We then used fluorescence in situ hybridization to map the genomic locations of the genes for the silk proteins that compose the remarkable spider dragline. These genes included three loci for the MaSp1 protein and the single locus for the MaSp2 protein. In addition, we mapped a MaSp1 pseudogene. All the MaSp1 gene copies and pseudogene localized to a single chromosomal region while MaSp2 was located on a different chromosome of L. hesperus. Using probes derived from L. hesperus, we comparatively mapped all three MaSp1 loci to a single region of a L. geometricus chromosome. As with L. hesperus, MaSp2 was found on a separate L. geometricus chromosome, thus again unlinked to the MaSp1 loci. These results indicate orthology of the corresponding chromosomal regions in the two widow genomes. Moreover, the occurrence of multiple MaSp1 loci in a conserved gene cluster across species suggests that MaSp1 proliferated by tandem duplication in a common ancestor of L. geometricus and L. hesperus. Unequal crossover events during recombination could have given rise to the gene copies and could also maintain sequence similarity among gene copies over time. Further comparative mapping with taxa of increasing divergence from Latrodectus will pinpoint when the MaSp1 duplication events occurred and the phylogenetic distribution of silk gene linkage patterns. © 2010 Zhao et al

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

Generalized Second-Order Thomas-Fermi Method for Superfluid Fermi Systems

Using the $\hbar$-expansion of the Green's function of the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equation, we extend the second-order Thomas-Fermi approximation to generalized superfluid Fermi systems by including the density-dependent effective mass and the spin-orbit potential. We first implement and examine the full correction terms over different energy intervals of the quasiparticle spectra in calculations of finite nuclei. Final applications of this generalized Thomas-Fermi method are intended for various inhomogeneous superfluid Fermi systems.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, PR

Diagnosing numerical Cherenkov instabilities in relativistic plasma simulations based on general meshes

Numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) or instability is a detrimental effect frequently found in electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) simulations involving relativistic plasma beams. NCR is caused by spurious coupling between electromagnetic-field modes and multiple beam resonances. This coupling may result from the slow down of poorly-resolved waves due to numerical (grid) dispersion and from aliasing mechanisms. NCR has been studied in the past for finite-difference-based EM-PIC algorithms on regular (structured) meshes with rectangular elements. In this work, we extend the analysis of NCR to finite-element-based EM-PIC algorithms implemented on unstructured meshes. The influence of different mesh element shapes and mesh layouts on NCR is studied. Analytic predictions are compared against results from finite-element-based EM-PIC simulations of relativistic plasma beams on various mesh types.Comment: 31 pages, 20 figure