Digital Commons Network^™

Oral History Interview With Tsui Kai Chong: Conceptualising Smu, Kai Chong Tsui

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with SMU, roles and responsibilities, overseas visits, information technology, dean of School of Business, planning, undergraduate programme, Wharton curriculum, first admissions exercise, opening day, teaching pedagogy, students, case competition, postgraduate programmes, Masters of Applied Finance, achievements.

Biography:

Founding Dean, School of Business, SMU, 1999–2003

Member of SMU start-up team

Professor Tsui Kai Chong was an SMU ‘pioneer’, a member of the start-up team for Singapore’s third university, and he oversaw planning for communications and information technology. He was appointed as the first dean of the School of Business in 1999, became vice provost of undergraduate …

Narrative Of A Journey From Heraut To Khiva, Moscow, And St. Petersburgh, During The Late Russian Invasion Of Khiva, With Some Account Of The Court Of Khiva And The Kingdom Of Khaurism. V.1 (1884), James Abbott Sir

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

19th century Afghanistan's description and travel

Oral History Interview With Hwang Soo Chiat: Conceptualising Smu, Soo Chiat Hwang

Oral History Collection

The interview with Hwang Soo Chiat covered:first involvement with SMU, roles and responsibilities, first classes, teaching pedagogy, pioneer students, student interaction, student recruitment, parent interaction, commencement, milestones.

Biography:

Associate Professor of Accounting, SMU, 2000–present

Member of SMU start-up team

Professor Hwang Soo Chiat is one of the SMU ‘pioneers’, a member of the start-up team for Singapore’s third university. Today he is an associate professor of accounting at SMU. In December 2005, he was named Outstanding Teacher in the School of Accountancy. His research interests are in the use of accounting ratios for prediction of bankruptcy of companies, corporate governance, …

An Account Of The Kingdom Of Caubul, And Its Dependencies, In Persia, Tartary, And India (1842), Mountstuart Elphinstone

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

v.1. Geographical description of Afghaunistaun. Situation and boundaries of Afghaunistaun -- Mountains of Afghaunistaun -- Rivers of Afghaunistaun -- Natural and political divisions of Afghaunistaun -- Of the climate of Afghaunistaun--rain -- Animals, vegetables, minerals of Afghaunistaun -- General account of the inhabitants of Afghaunistaun. Introduction, origin, and early history of the Afghauns -- Divisions and government of the Afghaun nation -- Marriages, condition of women, funerals, etc. -- Education, language, and literature of the Afghauns -- Religion, sects, moollahs, superstitions, etc. -- Hospitality, predatory habits, etc. -- Manners, customs, and character of the Afghauns -- Of the inhabitants of …

Making A Cantonese-Christian Family: Quotidian Habits Of Language And Background In A Transnational Hongkonger Church, Justin K. H. Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Studies of the Hong Kong‐Vancouver transnational migration network seldom pay close attention to religion in the everyday lives of Hongkonger migrants. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork at St. Matthew's Church, a Hong Kong church in Metro Vancouver, this paper examines the tacit assumptions and taken‐for‐granted quotidian practices through which a Hongkonger church is made. I argue that St. Matthew's Church has been constructed as a Hong Kong Cantonese‐Christian family space through the everyday use of language and invocations of a common educational background. This argument extends the literature on Hongkonger migration to Metro Vancouver by grounding it in …

Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2010: Q3 Results, Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2010: Full Year Overview

Research Collection Institute of Service Excellence

Following the release of CSISG results for the Retail, InfoCommunications, Transportation & Logistics, and Education sectors in the first two quarters of 2010, the current third quarter release of results are of the Food & Beverage (F&B) and Tourism, Hotels & Accommodation Services (THAS) sectors. CSISG results of the final two economic sectors for 2010, the Finance and Healthcare sectors, is scheduled to be released in January 2011, together with the 2010 national score. CSISG company scores are based on face-to-face interviews with end users of companies’ products and services. Sub-sector scores are derived as a weighted average of company …

Sun Yat Sen, A S’Pore Icon? Hardly, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Assistant Professor of Law Eugene Tan discusses if we are unwittingly overemphasising the role of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore's path to nationhood.

Iftikhar Chaudhry’S Options: Can The Courts Remake Pakistani Democracy?, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Fiats: Presidential Legislation In India's Parliamentary Democracy, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The article presents information on the presidential legislation of the parliamentary democracies, India and Pakistan. It discusses the role of the President acting as the Council of Ministers for the enactment of legislations as ordinances without the consent of the Parliament. Information on the legal interpretation of the ordinances and its interaction with the principles of the parliamentary system of the government is also presented.

Traditional Plant Use Of The Raglay In Cãu Gãy Village, Núi Chúa National Park, Alex Greene

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Members of the Raglay community of Cãu Gãy Village were interviewed to determine the extent and nature of their traditional reliance on plants. This community, located in the buffer zone of Núi Chúa National Park, was found to utilize 64 plant species for a wide variety of uses. Botanical specimens and photographs were used to identify 42 plants to species level, 13 to genus level, and 6 to family level, while 3 remained unidentified. For each plant, the Raglay name, local Vietnamese name, use, specific application, and preparation were documented, as well as any details of ritual or commercial significance. …

Affirming Difference, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Elite Christian schools in Indonesia can become places where religious, ethnic and class identities are heightened, particularly in relation to the nation’s ethnic Chinese. Exceptional academic performance, faith education, strict discipline and a safe environment are some of the factors that attract ethnic Chinese to enrol their children into elite Christian schools in Indonesia. In fact, these schools have become a thriving business across major cities, generating handsome profits from the provision of high quality education. They are generally attended by Chinese Indonesian students from a middle and upper class background. The schools are equipped with much better facilities than …

Learning To Belong, Lyn Parker, Raihani Raihani, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Educational efforts are being made around the country to enable minorities to feel they belong and to teach majorities that they should value the diversity of Indonesia. The cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of Indonesia is famed around the world and accepted within Indonesia. The national motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ places diversity at the centre of the nation-state. But despite significant progress in democratisation, decentralisation and regional autonomy in post-Suharto Indonesia, old fears of federalism, separatism and disunity remain. Multiculturalism and pluralism are still often viewed with suspicion and paranoia is spread by extremists for their own ends.

Stories For Today: A Contemporary Artist Brings New Life To A Moribund Indonesian Theatre Genre, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Dani Iswardana is single-minded about his mission to inject new life into wayang beber, perhaps the oldest form of Indonesian narrative theatre, but now described as a dying art. The intensity of his purpose buoys Dani through long stretches of painting when food is forgotten and his work, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, is all that he cares for. However Dani has gone for years without producing anything, because he will work only when the creative spirit possesses him. Painting for money means nothing to him, and the everyday demands of making a living have no place in his creative …

The Division Of Matrimonial Assets: A Mathematical Methodology As A "Check"? Ajr V. Ajs, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a recent High Court decision concerning the division of matrimonial assets, the Judge developed an extensive (and somewhat mathematical) methodology “as a rough check” to his discretionary powers in determining a “just and equitable” division of the matrimonial assets. This introduced a new perspective to an exercise long considered to be impossible to be mathematically precise. This piece considers the extent of the utility of the new methodology.

Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been infleected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the field, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture …

China And Geography In The 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is …

Discharge Of A Contract Where Both Parties Are In Breach: Alliance Concrete Singapore Pte Ltd V Comfort Resources Pte Ltd, Chee Ho Tham

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This case note examines the most recent attempt by the Court of Appeal to provide further guidance on: (a) how the doctrine of discharge of contract by breach operates when both parties are in breach of their contract obligations; and (b) when a promisee is entitled to rely on an alternate basis to justify its election to discharge a contract for the promisor’s breach when the basis originally relied upon and communicated to the promisor is ultimately found to be legally insufficient.

Labor Supply Responses To The 1990s Japanese Tax Reforms, Ken Yamada

Research Collection School Of Economics

The consumption-leisure choice model implies that an exogenous change in tax rates will induce a change in labor supply. This implication is expected to be important to labor supplied by secondary earners under a progressive tax system when spousal income alters effective marginal tax rates. This paper examines labor supply responses to the income tax changes associated with Japanese tax reforms during the 1990s. The results indicate that the hours-of-work elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax rate is 0.8 for married women.

Silence Is Still Golden: Women And The Metropolis In Early Chinese Cinema, Yap Soo Ei, Ji Xing, Nicolai Volland, Yang Lijun, Paul Pickowicz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock is making headlines these days, setting new records at the box office in China. We cannot say yet if the excitement is justified—Aftershock has only just hit the theaters here in Singapore. It is clear, however, that the current cinema craze in China is not at all a new phenomenon. In fact, new releases on the silver screen created similar sensations in Shanghai as early as eighty years ago. And many of these old films continue even today to fascinate. Films by pioneering Chinese directors of the 1920s and 1930s still dazzle, with their opulent sets, …

An Interview With Deanna Fei, Author Of A Thread Of Sky

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Deanna Fei is author of A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), a novel about three generations of women in a Chinese American family. Here, she talks with recent UC Irvine graduate Mengfei Chen.

Mengfei Chen: What were some of your inspirations in writing the book? How did it begin? What experiences informed your writing?

Deanna Fei: A Thread of Sky is the story of a family of Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. It was inspired by a trip through China’s “must-sees” that I embarked on ten years ago with my mother, my …

“We Are Not Machines:” Teen Spirit On China’S Shopfloor, Mary E. Gallagher

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This spring, a series of well-coordinated and successful strikes in foreign-invested enterprises in China made headlines all around the world. Young migrant workers openly and forcefully articulated demands for higher wages, better representation, and more consideration of their “spiritual” and mental well-being. These demands have led to increased speculation that China’s current economic boom is winding down, as its growth strategy founded in part on cheap migrant labor from rural areas faces domestic and international difficulties.

This is not the first time that Chinese workers have openly protested for higher wages, better treatment, and more job security. What makes this …

Reading Round-Up: China Now The World’S Second-Largest Economy

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This week came the not-unexpected news that China has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Here, we’ve rounded up reactions to and analyses of the story:

• At his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos asks “Why the Long Face?”, explaining that “While the story has rated front-page treatment in the U.S., it has sent China into a frenzy of self-flagellation, in the hope of reminding people that it is still home to a lot of very poor people.”

• Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is taking the news of its third-place status with …

An Image

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There were 12 minutes and 28 seconds remaining.

I had never bid on eBay. It takes too much energy, too much attention to follow the vagaries of an online auction. And there never seems to be anything I want that badly. But I wanted that propaganda poster—a reproduction of an oil painting, mid-1970s—depicting, with the imagination and rhetorical power possible only in socialist realism, the May Fourth movement of 1919.

In the painting, the sky is clearing and clouds are dissipating behind the imposing presence of Tiananmen, which dominates the scene. The students, young men and women, are marching at …

Panic Room

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On my (continuing) walk across China, I have occasionally come across the kind of construction featured in the attached image — a farmhouse with a door half way up the wall, no stairs attached. I have previously assumed the house was still under construction, or perhaps they ran out of money before doing the stairs. But as I passed his one, in Guang’an county in the middle of Sichuan, last Saturday, it struck me that this is in fact a “panic room”, a way to seal off and protect the family and its assets in the top room, safe from …

Frivolous Friday: The Red Army Learns To “Just Beat It”

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” were performed by a Cultural Revolution-era musical troupe? Perhaps not. But thanks to this video on Tudou, the question you never thought to ask has been answered.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter this week (follow us at@chinabeat!); thanks to Kaiser Kuo for bringing it to our attention.

Sodden Anniversary, Paul Katz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

August 8, 2010 marked the first anniversary of the Siaolin Village 小林村 tragedy, when torrential rains caused by Typhoon Morakot triggered a massive mudslide that swept this idyllic community off the face of the earth, taking 474 lives. Conditions one year later were eerily similar, with rain drenching the disaster site and another threat (Tropical Storm Dianmu 電母) lurking off the east coast (happily it did not make landfall). Southern Taiwan has suffered heavy rains during the past month, but there has been little destruction and loss of life (so far), unlike the terrible flooding that has ravaged so much …

Hong Kong’S Glass Ceiling, Reenita Malhotra

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Hong Kong’s women have the power of their purses, are freer and more educated, and enjoy more legal protection than they did 20 years ago. And since 1996, when Hong Kong signed CEDAW, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—which calls for 50 percent representation of women in government leadership, political parties, trade unions, professional and other representative groups—women’s participation in managerial positions has risen from 22 percent in 1998 to 29 percent in 2008. In the civil service, women held 31 percent of directorate officer positions in 2008, compared to 21 percent in …

An Interview With Chinese Underground Rock Musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Tim Hathaway

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A quick listen to Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s (左小祖咒）music would not be enough to explain his fame. His trademark is singing off key.

In spite of the odd sounding vocals or perhaps because of its contrast to the saccharine sweet sounds of Chinese pop and rock, Zuoxiao has become one of China’s most successful rock musicians.

He started his career in 1993 and has since produced ten albums. He has also published a best selling novel and created sculptures and artistic photography. He was a founding member of the avant garde artists residence called Beijing’s “East Village” in the early 1990s where …

The Afghan Question: Speech Of The Earl Of Northbrook, In The Guildhall, Winchester, On The 11th Of November 1878 (1878?), Thomas George Baring Northbrook

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

Speech of the Earl of Northbrook, in the Guildhall, Winchester, on the 11th of November 1878 pertaining to the Afghanistan.

British Agents In Afghanistan (1879), Owen Tudor Burne Sir

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

19th century history of Afghanistan and its relationship with Great Britain.