China’s Economic Diplomatic Strategy in CEE Countries: Cooperation versus Conflict?

( Shiang-yuan Chu ) 한국EU학회 2023 Asia-Pacific Journal of EU Studies Vol.21 No.1

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, in the international community China’s economic rise has brought about many opportunities for the development of political, economic and strategic cooperation patterns. As a manifestation of strategic thinking underlying economic diplomacy, China put forward the concept of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, and announced the plan in March 2015. In terms of shaping global political and economic strategic patterns, the question of how to maintain and strengthen the strategic economic cooperative framework between China, the EU, and other European countries has always been an important topic of academic concern. As one salient case in point, China and the EU established the 27 + 1 leaders’ forum mechanism. Among the 27 EU member states, 12 are Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). Beginning in 2013, China launched the 16 + 1 Cooperation Initiative with CEECs under the framework of the BRI, with Greece joining in 2019, leading to its rebranding as “17+ 1”. The three Baltic states left the format in 2021 and 2022 due to asymmetric cooperation. Based on the Theory of International Cooperation and the Regime Theory, this article discusses three main issues. First, it outlines economic diplomacy strategy and the process of promoting economic diplomacy in China, second it examines the origins and development of China’s economic diplomacy with the CEECs and third, it undertakes descriptive statistical analysis of China’s economic diplomacy and its implications for EU-China relations. This article argues that the future prospects of the cooperation format might lie in developing an interest structure of cooperation, competition and conflict between the different actors.

Control performance of sloped rolling-type isolators designed with stepwise variable parameters

Shiang-Jung Wang,Yi-Lin Sung 국제구조공학회 2021 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.27 No.6

With the same horizontal acceleration control performance, the horizontal displacement control performances of sloped rolling-type seismic isolators passively provided with stepwise variable parameters, as well as constant ones, are numerically investigated in this study. The first design possesses a smaller sloping angle with larger damping force at smaller horizontal isolation displacement and a larger sloping angle with smaller damping force at larger horizontal isolation displacement. In other words, this design has stepwise increased sloping angles and stepwise decreased damping force with increasing horizontal isolation displacement. The second design has an opposite design philosophy to the first one, i.e., it has stepwise decreased sloping angles and stepwise increased damping force with increasing horizontal isolation displacement. A series of numerical results present that for sloped rolling-type seismic isolators designed with a constant sloping angle and damping force, in general, the larger the damping force (in other words, the smaller the sloping angle), the smaller and the larger the horizontal maximum and residual displacement responses presented, respectively. The first and second designs with stepwise variable parameters each have its advantage for suppressing horizontal isolation displacement under far-field and pulse-like near-fault ground motions because of their larger energy dissipation capabilities designed at different stages. When the horizontal isolation displacement responses at the end of ground motions are still within the first slope rolling range with a larger sloping angle of the second design, as expected, adopting the second design can exhibit a better re-centering performance than adopting the first design. To have acceptable displacement control performances and without scarifying acceleration control performances under diverse seismic demands, compared with adopting the designs with constant parameters and the first design, adopting the second design could be an alternative solution and better choice.

Analgesic and Anti-Inflammatory Activities of Rosa taiwanensis Nakai in Mice

Der-Shiang Tsai,Mei-Hsuen Huang,Jen-Chieh Tsai,Yuan-Shuang Chang,Yung-Jia Chiu,Yen-Chang Lin,Lung-Yuan Wu,Wen-Huang Peng 한국식품영양과학회 2015 Journal of medicinal food Vol.18 No.5

In this study, we evaluated the analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities of a 70% ethanol extract from Rosa taiwanensis Nakai (RTEtOH). The analgesic effect was determined using acetic acid-induced writhing response and formalin test. The anti-inflammatory activity was evaluated by λ-carrageenan-induced paw edema in mice. The anti-inflammatory mechanism of RTEtOH was examined by measuring the levels of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), nitric oxide (NO), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, and malondialdehyde (MDA) in the paw edema tissue and the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), and glutathione reductase (GRd) in the liver tissue. The betulinic acid and oleanolic acid contents of RTEtOH were assayed by HPLC. The results showed that RTEtOH decreased the acetic acid-induced writhing responses (1.0 g/kg) and the late phase of the formalin-induced licking time (0.5 and 1.0 g/kg). In the anti-inflammatory models, RTEtOH (0.5 and 1.0 g/kg) reduced the paw edema at 3, 4, and 5 h after λ-carrageenan administration. Moreover, the anti-inflammatory mechanisms might be due to the decreased levels of COX-2, TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-6, as well as the inhibition of NO and MDA levels through increasing the activities of SOD, GPx, and GRd. The contents of two active compounds, betulinic acid and oleanolic acid, were quantitatively determined. This study demonstrated the analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities of RTEtOH and provided evidence to support its therapeutic use in inflammatory diseases.

A SIMPLE MODEL TO ESTIMATE HOURLY RAINFALL DDF RELATIONSHIPS BY INCORPORATING DALIY RAINFALL

WU SHIANG-JEN,TUNG YEOU-KOUNG,YANG JINN-CHUANG 한국수자원학회 2005 한국수자원학회 학술대회 Vol.2005 No.1

An Image Hiding Scheme by Linking Pixels in the Circular Way

( Chi-shiang Chan ),( Yuan-yu Tsai ),( Chao-liang Liu ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2012 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.6 No.6

The proposed method in this paper is derived from Mielikainen`s hiding method. However, there exist some significant differences between two methods. In Mielikainen`s method, pixels are partitioned into pairs and a LSB matching function is applied to two pixels for hiding. On the contrary, the proposed method partitions pixels into groups with three pixels in each group. The bits of pixels in each group are linked by using an exclusive OR (XOR) operator in a circular way. If the number of different values between the calculated XOR values and the secret bits is smaller than or equal to 2 in a group, the proposed method can guarantee that at most one pixel is needed to be modified by adding/subtracting its value to/from one, and three secret bits can be embedded to three pixels. Through theoretical analysis, the amount of the embedded secret data in the proposed method is larger than those in other methods under the same amount of pixel modifications. Taking real images in our experiments, the quality of stego-images in the proposed method is higher than those in other methods.

Design of Control IC for Multiphase Interleaved Buck Converter with Alternate Phase-Shedding

Ji-Shiang Lee,Chun-Yu Huang,Tsorng-Juu Liang,Kai-Hui Chen 전력전자학회 2015 ICPE(ISPE)논문집 Vol.2015 No.6

In this paper, a controller for a multiphase interleaved buck converter with alternate phase-shedding is realized. With phase-shedding control, the efficiency at low load condition is improved by turning-on appropriate number of phase(s), but the temperature on the active phase(s) is higher than the off phase(s) that cause the temperature unevenly distribution. To solve this problem, the alternate phase-shedding is implemented in the proposed controller. The phases take turns to provide the load current at low load condition to distribute power to each phase and share the same load as well as improve reliability. The proposed controller would implement interleaved control regardless the number of active phases. In addition, taking advantage of the application of high step-down ratio, the proposed control structure that input current is sensed to control each phase is adopted. The number of components and pins of controller can be reduced. This chip is fabricated with TSMC 0.25um CMOS high voltage mixed signal general purpose process and is tested with an input voltage of 12 V, output voltage of 1.2 V, and output power of 72 W three-phase buck converter to verify the feasibility.

Low English Proficiency Teachers’ Challenges in Bilingual Instruction

Sheng-Shiang Tseng,Hsi-Ling Huang,Cheng-I Chen 아시아영어교육학회 2023 The Journal of Asia TEFL Vol.20 No.2

Role-Balance Based Multi-Secret Images Sharing using Boolean Operations

( Chi-shiang Chan ),( Yung-chen Chou ),( Yi-hui Chen ),( Yuan-yu Tsai ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2014 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.8 No.5

In 2011, Chen and Wu proposed their method of sharing n secret images to n+1 shadow images through the concept of a Boolean-based Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) method. However, the shadow images produced by this method are not equally important. If the participant who owns an important shadow image does not want to cooperate with other participants, most secret images can not be reconstructed. In the proposed method, the relationship between the shadows images and secret images are designed in a circular way mostly. Each shadow image only relates to two secret images. This means that if one participant refuses to cooperate with other participants, there are only two secret images which can not be reconstructed. Moreover, our proposed method only needs to produce n shadow images and n secret images can be shared to them.

On H\"{o}lder-McCarthy-type inequalities with powers

Chia-Shiang Lin,조열제 대한수학회 2002 대한수학회지 Vol.39 No.3

We extend the H"{o}lder-McCarthy inequality for a positiveand an arbitrary operator, respectively. The powers of each inequality are givenand the improved Reid's inequality by Halmos is generalized. We also givethe bound of the H"{o}lder-McCarthy inequality by recursion.

A Feature-based Tumor Detection for MRI Breast Imaging

Guo-Shiang Lin,Sin-Kuo Daniel Chai,Wei-Cheng Yeh,Lin-Jie Cheng 대한전자공학회 2008 ITC-CSCC :International Technical Conference on Ci Vol.2008 No.7

In this paper, we propose a feature-based scheme composed of the intra-slice, texture and inter-slice analyses to achieve tumor region identification in MRI breast images. Our intra-slice analysis evaluates the intensity and size information of candidate regions. To find a precise region, a region growing algorithm is proposed based on ellipse fitness. In the texture analysis, some texture features are extracted and combined with a neural network to reduce the false alarms. The inter-slice analysis is based on the continuity characteristic to verify the static behavior of tumor regions. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can correctly identify tumor regions.