Hong Kong

This course introduces the basic properties of complex functions and analytic functions and illustrates the important use of these theories to other branches of mathematics and sciences. Topics include: complex numbers; limits, continuity and derivatives, Cauchy-Riemann equations, analytic functions; elementary functions; mapping by elementary functions; Contours integrals, Cauchy-Goursat theorem, Cauchy integral formula, Morera's theorem, maximum moduli of functions, the fundamental theorem of algebra; Taylor series and Laurent's series; residues and poles, evaluation of infinite real integrals.

This course examines the technical, economic, political, and social environments of Asian countries, including the cultural and historical factors leading to these conditions as well as their government-business tie-up and management systems. Specific topics include Asia's rise in the world economy, challenges and opportunities of doing business in Asia, China's Silicon Valley, dynamism and innovation in Japan's business sector, Asian entrepreneurism and social enterprise, managing risk in Asia, and doing business in a cross cultural environment. Assessment: term paper (30%), class participation (20%), group presentation (30%), quiz (20%).

This course is a survey of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, with a focus on political transformations in the region since the Cold War. The course provides a historically grounded approach to understand the formation of Southeast Asian states as well as the contemporary dynamics of political changes in the region. It starts by reviewing the impact of colonialism and historical trajectories in the region. It then delves deep into specific Southeast Asian countries, overviewing key political events and important leaders, tracing logics of political contestation, and providing a foundation to understand the structures of governments. After the specific country studies, focus is on a few specific issues and challenges pertaining to the region, such as economic development, political regimes and governance, and regionalization and ASEAN.

This course explores various aspects of popular culture in Hong Kong from a cultural studies perspective. The course develops critical ways of reading popular texts in the context of Hong Kong's social, cultural, and historical background. The course begins with a critique of how ideological forces of domination and common sense are at work in the consumption space of everyday life. Examples are drawn from popular texts such as the fiction of Amy Cheung and the films of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai. The course looks at how culture can be considered an active and living process. Topics include the interfusion of the hegemonic and the oppositional; the ways popular texts are incorporated into the state propaganda machinery; the politics of identity and the question of high and low culture; and genre films as an indication of social and cultural changes. The course addresses issues of production, circulation, and reception in order to understand the complex and contradictory nature of Hong Kong popular culture.

This course introduces the essential techniques and offers a hands-on experience in basic instrumentation of experimental physics, and a proper perspective on how to plan a physics experiment. A mixture of lectures, laboratory sessions and one project cover topics and skills ranging from machine programming, computer interface, hardware instrumentation, data acquisition, error analysis, and report writing.

Pharmacognosy is the science of bioactive nature-derived compounds with pharmaceutical or nutraceutical applications. Traditional Chinese medicine and alternative medicine use many crude herbs or extracts. Understanding the origin, identification, development, production, control and usage of traditional Chinese medicine and other natural products is important for drug development, phytotherapy, and nutraceuticals. This introductory course first covers the fundamentals of modern pharmacy and medicine, and the basic concepts of traditional Chinese medicine. Next, it explores the extraction of various chemical constituents, authentication analysis and quality control of plant derived extracts, and the regulatory measures of traditional Chinese medicine. The course concludes with discussion of more advanced topics including application of pharmaceutically active compounds in common diseases; good agricultural, cultivation, manufacturing practices of traditional Chinese medicine; and, herbal-drug interactions.

This course covers simple electronic circuits as functional building blocks and tools. Topics: fundamental electronic concepts for DC and AC circuits, KVL and KCL, Thevenin's and Norton's Theorems, linearity and superposition, nodal and mesh analyses, sinusoidal steady state and phasor, transient analysis, transfer functions and Bode plots, op-amp, diodes, MOS transistors and related circuits.

"This course provides an in-depth understanding of the social, economic and cultural dynamics of the tea industry in China. The course examines the tea industry through a creative industry approach, that is, as a cultural product embodying the symbolic and economic dimensions. The course covers the development of the Chinese tea culture, the emergence of the tea industry and the recent rebranding of the tea industry as a form of cultural industry in China. The course investigates the business model and organizational dynamics of the tea industry in China and illustrates how the notion of aesthetics has informed and is in turn being shaped by the economic process. The course encourages the critical analysis of the interaction between culture and business through discussing controversial issues such as tea tourism, commercialization of tradition and fairness in trade.

"While warfare between states has become quite infrequent, conflicts between governments and terrorist groups have increasingly developed into one of the predominant forms of political violence. Indeed, long before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, domestic (or transnational) terrorist groups have terrorized tens of millions of civilians and scores of countries around the world. Since the turn of the century, terrorist attacks have also become increasingly lethal and destructive in various ways. This course takes an actor-centered approach to the study of terrorism and political violence. It addresses, among other things, the goals and origins of terrorist groups, the strategies that these non-state actors and governments use to combat each other, the effects that such groups can have upon the unfortunate countries in which they operate (as well as on other countries unfortunate enough to suffer from any ‘spillovers') and the various ways that these conflicts eventually end. From HKU's Politics and Public Administration course description