The Chinese New Middle Class and Green NGOs in South China: Vanguards of Guanxi (Connections)-Seeking, Laggards in Promoting Social Causes?

By examining the emerging Chinese new middle class as well as green non-governmental organisations, this study finds that while the emergence of the Chinese new middle class facilitates the growth of green NGOs, the Chinese new class is not activists or agitators working against the government. Based on in-depth interviews with leaders of green NGOs founded by the Chinese new middle class in Guangdong province, this research examines why green NGOs do not call for or advocate environmental protection It concludes that contrary to conventional wisdom, the Chinese new middle class is a vanguard of guanxi (connections)-seeking, but a laggard in promoting environmental protection and civil-society activism. Green NGOs are principally used as a tool to cultivate social capital in the form of guanxi in order to promote personal material interests

The Sino-US Confrontation in the South China Sea: Insights from International Order Perspective

Conventional accounts of the South China Sea territorial disputes identify China’s assertive behaviour as the primary cause of the rising tension since the early 2010s. This paper goes beyond this traditional view of the disputes by arguing that the territorial disputes are an expression of the broader contestation between two order-building projects by China and the US. China’s assertive behaviour originates in its desire to promote a ‘historical’ and ‘post-colonial’ maritime order that is premised on its Sino-centric historical narrative of the Sea and on its emphasis on the historical legitimacy of the regional order of 1943-1945. The US-led ‘liberal’ maritime order is underpinned by a post-war legal framework built on the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the notion and practice of freedom of navigation. Since October 2015 the US has enhanced its Freedom of Navigation Operations to challenge China’s ‘excessive’ maritime or territorial claims. We conclude that as a result of the uneasy co-existence of these two order-building projects, which fundamentally disagree over the foundations of maritime order in the South China Sea, the disputes have reached an open-ended impasse

The rise of xenophobia and nationalism in China since the COVID pandemic: insights from discourse analysis

Since the successful containment of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late March 2020, China had implemented a nationwide highly stringent and restrictive zero-COVID policy to manage the pandemic until the sudden swift away from it in early December 2022. How did the Chinese Communist Party discursively construct it as a ‘normal’ and legitimate policy? Using interpretivism and poststructuralist political theory, this paper examines how Chinese political elites constructed a discourse of danger for the COVID pandemic, with the dominant discursive narratives full of xenophobic and nationalist languages. The discourse framed ‘foreigners’ as ‘threats’ to Chinese people’s health, advocated that China should rely on home-made vaccines and medicines and, more importantly, argued that the Chinese Communist rule demonstrates ‘institutional superiority’ over Western governance. This xenophobic and nationalist discourse has lingered on after the dismantling of the zero-COVID policy. There are grounds for us to concern whether China is seeking self-reliance rather than integrating itself with the world. A Chinese decoupling from the world—a nationalist self-reliance policy similar with that in the Mao era—is not unthinkable

The true amphipathic nature of graphene flakes: a versatile 2D stabilizer

The fundamental colloidal properties of pristine graphene flakes remain incompletely understood, with conflicting reports about their chemical character, hindering potential applications that could exploit the extraordinary electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties of graphene. Here, the true amphipathic nature of pristine graphene flakes is demonstrated through wet‐chemistry testing, optical microscopy, electron microscopy, and density functional theory, molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo calculations, and it is shown how this fact paves the way for the formation of ultrastable water/oil emulsions. In contrast to commonly used graphene oxide flakes, pristine graphene flakes possess well‐defined hydrophobic and hydrophilic regions: the basal plane and edges, respectively, the interplay of which allows small flakes to be utilized as stabilizers with an amphipathic strength that depends on the edge‐to‐surface ratio. The interactions between flakes can be also controlled by varying the oil‐to‐water ratio. In addition, it is predicted that graphene flakes can be efficiently used as a new‐generation stabilizer that is active under high pressure, high temperature, and in saline solutions, greatly enhancing the efficiency and functionality of applications based on this materia

Hamiltonian Quantization of Effective Lagrangians with Massive Vector Fields

Effective Lagrangians containing arbitrary interactions of massive vector fields are quantized within the Hamiltonian path integral formalism. It is proven that correct Hamiltonian quantization of these models yields the same result as naive Lagrangian quantization (Matthews's theorem). This theorem holds for models without gauge freedom as well as for (linearly or nonlinearly realized) spontaneously broken gauge theories. The Stueckelberg formalism, a procedure to rewrite effective Lagrangians in a gauge invariant way, is reformulated within the Hamiltonian formalism as a transition from a second class constrained theory to an equivalent first class constrained theory. The relations between linearly and nonlinearly realized spontaneously broken gauge theories are discussed. The quartically divergent Higgs self interaction is derived from the Hamiltonian path integral.Comment: 16 pages LaTeX, BI-TP 93/1

NNLO phase space master integrals for two-to-one inclusive cross sections in dimensional regularization

We evaluate all phase space master integrals which are required for the total cross section of generic 2 -> 1 processes at NNLO as a series expansion in the dimensional regulator epsilon. Away from the limit of threshold production, our expansion includes one order higher than what has been available in the literature. At threshold, we provide expressions which are valid to all orders in terms of Gamma functions and hypergeometric functions. These results are a necessary ingredient for the renormalization and mass factorization of singularities in 2 -> 1 inclusive cross sections at NNNLO in QCD.Comment: 37 pages, plus 3 ancillary files containing analytic expressions in Maple forma

Wnt activation downregulates olfactomedin-1 in Fallopian tubal epithelial cells:a microenvironment predisposed to tubal ectopic pregnancy

Ectopic pregnancy (EP) occurs when the embryo fails to transit to the uterus and attach to the luminal epithelium of the Fallopian tube (FT). Tubal EP is a common gynecological emergency and more than 95% of EP occurs in the ampullary region of the FT. In humans, Wnt activation and downregulation of olfactomedin-1 (Olfm-1) occur in the receptive endometrium and coincided with embryo implantation in vivo. Whether similar molecular changes happen in the FT leading to EP remains unclear. We hypothesized that activation of Wnt signaling downregulates Olfm-1 expression predisposes to EP. We investigated the spatiotemporal expression of Olfm-1 in FT from non-pregnant women and women with EP, and used a novel trophoblastic spheroid (embryo surrogate)-FT epithelial cell co-culture model (JAr and OE-E6/E7 cells) to study the role of Olfm-1 on spheroid attachment. Olfm-1 mRNA expression in the ampullary region of non-pregnant FT was higher (P0.05) in the follicular phase than in the luteal phase. Ampullary tubal Olfm-1 expression was lower in FT from women with EP compared to normal controls at the luteal phase (histological scoring (H-SCORE)1.30.2 vs 2.40.5; P0.05). Treatment of OE-E6/E7 with recombinant Olfm-1 (0.2-5 g/ml) suppressed spheroid attachment to OE-E6/E7 cells, while activation of Wnt-signaling pathway by Wnt3a or LiCl reduced endogenous Olfm-1 expression and increased spheroid attachment. Conversely, suppression of Olfm-1 expression by RNAi increased spheroid attachment to OE-E6/E7 cells. Taken together, Wnt activation suppresses Olfm-1 expression, and this may predispose a favorable microenvironment of the retained embryo in the FT, leading to EP in humans. © 2012 USCAP, Inc All rights reserved.link_to_OA_fulltex

Spectral functions of CVD grown MoS2_2 monolayers after chemical transfer onto Au surface

The recent rise of van der Waals (vdW) crystals has opened new prospects for studying versatile and exotic fundamental physics with future device applications such as twistronics. Even though the recent development on Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) with Nano-focusing optics, making clean surfaces and interfaces of chemically transferred crystals have been challenging to obtain high-resolution ARPES spectra. Here, we show that by employing nano-ARPES with submicron sized beam and polystyrene-assisted transfer followed by annealing process in ultra-high vacuum environment, remarkably clear ARPES spectral features such as spin-orbit splitting and band renormalization of CVD-grown, monolayered MoS2 can be measured. Our finding paves a way to exploit chemically transferred crystals for measuring high-resolution ARPES spectra to observe exotic quasi-particles in vdW heterostructures

A central resource for accurate allele frequency estimation from pooled DNA genotyped on DNA microarrays

Analysing pooled DNA on microarrays is an efficient way to genotype hundreds of individuals for thousands of markers for genome-wide association. Although direct comparison of case and control fluorescence scores is possible, correction for differential hybridization of alleles is important, particularly for rare single nucleotide polymorphisms. Such correction relies on heterozygous fluorescence scores and requires the genotyping of hundreds of individuals to obtain sufficient estimates of the correction factor, completely negating any benefit gained by pooling samples. We explore the effect of differential hybridization on test statistics and provide a solution to this problem in the form of a central resource for the accumulation of heterozygous fluorescence scores, allowing accurate allele frequency estimation at no extra cost

Low CO Luminosities in Dwarf Galaxies

[Abridged] We present maps of CO 2-1 emission covering the entire star-forming disks of 16 nearby dwarf galaxies observed by the IRAM HERACLES survey. The data have 13 arcsec angular resolution, ~250 pc at our average distance of 4 Mpc, and sample the galaxies by 10-1000 resolution elements. We apply stacking techniques to perform the first sensitive search for CO emission in dwarfs outside the Local Group ranging from single lines-of-sight, stacked over IR-bright regions of embedded star formation, and stacked over the entire galaxy. We detect 5 dwarfs in CO with total luminosities of L_CO = 3-28 1e6 Kkmspc2. The other 11 dwarfs remain undetected in CO even in the stacked data and have L_CO < 0.4-8 1e6 Kkmspc2. We combine our sample of dwarfs with a large literature sample of spirals to study scaling relations of L_CO with M_B and metallicity. We find that dwarfs with metallicities of Z ~ 1/2-1/10 Z_sun have L_CO about 1e2-1e4x smaller than spirals and that their L_CO per unit L_B is 10-100x smaller. A comparison with tracers of star formation (FUV and 24 micron) shows that L_CO per unit SFR is 10-100x smaller in dwarfs. One possible interpretation is that dwarfs form stars much more efficiently, however we argue that the low L_CO/SFR ratio is due to significant changes of the CO-to-H2 conversion factor, alpha_CO, in low metallicity environments. Assuming a constant H2 depletion time of 1.8 Gyr (as found for nearby spirals) implies alpha_CO values for dwarfs with Z ~ 1/2-1/10 Z_sun that are more than 10x higher than those found in solar metallicity spirals. This significant increase of alpha_CO at low metallicity is consistent with previous studies, in particular those which model dust emission to constrain H2 masses. Even though it is difficult to parameterize the metallicity dependence of alpha_CO, our results suggest that CO is increasingly difficult to detect at lower metallicities.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, 19 pages, 7 figure