Taiwan's film importation from China: a political economy analysis of changes and implications
For 40 years, Taiwan observed a strict `closed door' policy with China, concerning not only political and economic relations but also cultural relations. This study examines the changes in Taiwan's importation of China's media and cultural products from 1987, when the two societies resumed contact, to 1997, when both governments announced the most significant policy change. This article reviews the evolution of changes in Taiwan's policies on film importation from China, discusses the motivations for the policy changes and analyzes the implications of these changes. The purpose of this study is to explore relationships between the two Chinese societies' cultural relations and political and socioeconomic relations.
Mediating national identity: Television, politics and audience in Taiwan.
This thesis is concerned with the relationship between the mass media and national identity. It uses methodological triangulation involving multiple methods and multiple sets of data to investigate the ways in which the mass media and television in particular have contributed to the formation of national identity in Taiwan. The Taiwanese case markedly points to the inadequacy of a widely held assumption bout the influence of the media on the formation of national identity: that national media foster national identity and global media weaken national identity. The thesis argues against this simplistic assumption, which reflects two dominant perspectives in the study of nationalism and communication the diffusionist view of national identity-formation, and the transmission view of communication. Both perspectives underestimate the complexity of the media-identity relationship and cannot adequately accommodate the Taiwanese case. This thesis provides an alternative perspective that stresses national identity-formation as a conjunctural mediation process between media representation and audience reception, whereby the powerful media and the active audience co-exist. As a constitutive part of the national discursive space that contains both text and reader, television has helped to create among the Taiwanese audience an imaginable community of solidarity, constituting both the symbolic textures of national identity and the contexts in which that identity is experienced. Through the conjunctural mediations between media representation and audience reception, the respondent families in the present study have subscribed to a national identity that necessarily assumes a hybrid form. Yet despite (or indeed because of) Taiwan's ambiguous statehood, the respondents' hybrid identifications with the 'nation' can best be summed up in the term 'Taiwan-centred identity'. The findings of this thesis extend beyond the Taiwanese case to the broader theorisation of the role of the media, especially television, in the formation of national identity in an age of globalisation.
Comparison of different antenna configurations for probing of layered media
The paper presents the results of a comparative analysis of the different configurations of antenna systems (bistatic, monostatic, differential) in terms of the simplicity and accuracy of determining the thickness of the subsurface layers of stratified environment. To this end, corresponding diffraction problems are solved by the finite-difference time-domain forward solver for each measurement setup. The analysis has shown the advantages and prospects of using differential system with vertically spaced antennas in solving of practical problems of the layered medium GPR probing.