Chow's Work Research Articles

Identity-based encryption with security against the KGC: A formal model and its instantiations

The key escrow problem is one of the main barriers to the widespread real-world use of identity-based encryption (IBE). Specifically, a key generation center (KGC), which generates secret keys for a given identity, has the power to decrypt all ciphertexts. At PKC 2009, Chow defined a notion of security against the KGC, that relies on assuming that it cannot discover the underlying identities behind ciphertexts. However, this is not a realistic assumption since, in practice, the KGC manages an identity list, and hence it can easily guess the identities corresponding to given ciphertexts. Chow later amended this issue by introducing a new entity called an identity-certifying authority (ICA) and proposed an anonymous key-issuing protocol. Essentially, this allows the users, KGC, and ICA to interactively generate secret keys without users ever having to reveal their identities to the KGC. Unfortunately, since Chow separately defined the security of IBE and that of the anonymous key-issuing protocol, his IBE definition did not provide any formal treatment when the ICA is used to authenticate the users. Effectively, all of the subsequent works following Chow lack the formal proofs needed to determine whether or not it delivers a secure solution to the key escrow problem.In this paper, based on Chow's work, we formally define an IBE scheme that resolves the key escrow problem and provide formal definitions of security against corrupted users, KGC, and ICA. Along the way, we observe that if we are allowed to assume a fully trusted ICA, as in Chow's work, then we can construct a trivial (and meaningless) IBE scheme that is secure against the KGC. Finally, we present two instantiations in our new security model: a lattice-based construction based on the Gentry–Peikert–Vaikuntanathan IBE scheme (STOC 2008) and Rückert's lattice-based blind signature scheme (ASIACRYPT 2010), and a pairing-based construction based on the Boneh–Franklin IBE scheme (CRYPTO 2001) and Boldyreva's blind signature scheme (PKC 2003).

TESTING THE PREDICTABILITY OF CONSUMPTION GROWTH: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. INTRODUCTIONIn his early study, Chow (1985) reported strong evidence in favor of the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) using annual observations in China from 1953 to 1982. Later, Chow (2010) re-evaluated his model for the post-economic reform regime, 1978 to 2006, then provided the same conclusion.1 Using further updated data, Chow (2011) reported weaker but similar supporting evidence for the PIH in China.We believe these findings are not convincing both theoretically and empirically. Under the PIH, optimizing consumers choose a stable path of consumption over their lifetime.2 This implies that those consumers must borrow whenever their realized current income falls below their permanent income. However, in the absence of perfect capital markets, poor consumers may not be able to access to credit markets (Shoji, Aoyagi, Kasahara, Sawada, and Ueyama, 2012), which implies that liquidity constrained consumers may fail to obey the PIH.One may claim that these consumers may still resort to informal credit markets as Guirkinger (2008) points out. We view these possibilities highly improbable in the case of China. For instance, using rural household data, Yuan and Xu (2015) show that the poor in China are severely excluded from not only formal but also informal credit markets. Therefore, it seems difficult to reconcile Chow's proposed indirect evidence of the PIH with such institutional facts about accessibility to credit markets in China.From an empirical point of view, we note that his empirical analysis focuses on the coefficient of the lagged consumption in an autoregressive (AR) model for consumption. Finding that the confidence band of that coefficient includes 1, he suggested that the PIH is consistent with Chinese annual data. However, his statistical inference may not be valid when consumption obeys an integrated process, because the conventional t-test he uses is invalid when consumption obeys an I(1) process.3 Further, his work does not implement any direct statistical tests for the predictability of consumption growth in China.This paper fills this gap by directly investigating the in-sample and the out-of-sample predictability of consumption changes in China as well as the postwar US data for comparison. Our findings suggest that consumption changes are highly predictable, which provides a clear contrast with findings shown in Chow (1985, 2010, 2011).The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a data description and preliminary test results. In Section 3, we provide our major findings. Section 4 concludes.2 DATA AND PRELIMINARY ANALYSISWe obtained per capita disposable income ( ) and consumption expenditure ( ) data in China from China Statistical Yearbook (2012) following Chow (1985, 2010, 2011). Observations are annual and span from 1978 to 2012. It should be noted that observations prior to 1978 are excluded, because China began their major economic reforms since 1978, and the pre-economic reform regime data are often unreliable. We deflated all observations using the GDP deflator, obtained from the same source. All data are log transformed.The log real per capita disposable income and the log real consumption expenditures of nondurable goods and services in the US are obtained from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Observations are quarterly and cover the period from 1952:Q1 to 2011:Q4.We first implement the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test for these variables. Results are reported in Table 1. The ADF test rejects the null of nonstationarity only for differenced series with an exception of y t in China when time trend is present. Overall, our test results imply that consumption and income are integrated series, which is also consistent with Chow's work.3. EMPIRICAL FINDINGS3.1. In-Sample AnalysisCampbell and Mankiw (1990) test the validity of the PIH in the US by empirically evaluating Hall's (1978) famous claim: Consumption follows a random walk process under the PIH. …

The labor of mimesis

This article is a preliminary examination of the conception of mimesis as it unfolds in Rey Chow's work. Focusing on Chow's work on film, the article shows how Chow rejects a certain iconophobic imperative with which anti-orientalist critiques come laden, with all of the assumptions about surface/depth, misrepresentation/truth, and myth/reality that attend such iconophobia. Since there is no Archimedean point outside of the “fabulation” of the world, the labor of critique must work at two simultaneous levels that are not related to each other as surface and depth, but rather as an extension of the surface of critique itself: analyze the cultural work done by the image itself; and, by means of this analysis, gain insight into the “condition of possibility for what becomes visible”. The notion of mimesis that one gleans from Chow's work is informed by a Heideggerian ontology, but modulated by a Benjaminian materialism. In this light, both the objects of Chow's study and her own reading practices form a continuous circuit within the labor of mimesis.

Rey Chow and the hauntological spectres of poststructuralism

One of the most persistent themes in Rey Chow's work is the concept of the ethnic and the ways in which it has been redefined in a poststructuralist context. This essay examines Chow's critique of poststructuralist theory, particularly as it pertains to the concepts of nationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the predominant definitions of nationalism and ethnicity, Chow's work challenges the largely unquestioned tendency in contemporary theory both to be humanistic, or cosmopolitan, and to deconstruct any ‘fixed’ meaning. Chow's theoretical position underlines the fact that such theoretical de-constructions, first and foremost, ignore the social and political problems that are irrevocably linked to the question of ethnicity. It also exposes the ways in which poststructuralist theory's critique of ethnicity inadvertently serves the Western logocentrism that it originally set out to deconstruct. Finally, this article focuses on the relevance of Chow's critique to the status of national departments in the University setting and the definition of Comparative Literature as a field.

Reading Rey Chow

This article examines some key concerns and problematics that are regularly engaged in the work of Rey Chow, and relates them to the theoretical and political problematics of cultural studies as an ethico-political project. It associates Chow's work with strong impulses and many of the abiding concerns that define the projects of such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, whilst also connecting her interventions to other key problematics in the fields of cultural studies, poststructuralist cultural theory and postcolonial studies. It shows that Chow's work tests and explores political, theoretical and philosophical interpretive machines and positions by way of very close and yet wide-ranging readings of all manner of ‘objects’, unconstrained by contingent disciplinary demarcations (such as those between literature, media, popular culture, film, identity, and so on), in a way that reveals the complex discursive relations, reticulations, implicit and explicit interconnections between as well as gaps, hiatuses, aporias and barriers across putatively separate ‘realms’.

Theory, thresholds and beyond

This essay seeks to open up the question of the location of a critical disposition, the worldly conditions of analysis, and the vulnerability of languages, exposed to unacknowledged geographies, voices and places. The principal line of argument is that the accumulative force of Rey Chow's work forces us to consider how the rest of the world becomes a target for Euro-American theory. This propels us into the heart of darkness of a political, cultural and intellectual formation specific to the West. Focuses of analysis—whether literary, cinematic or social—turn out to present us with slippery and excessive definitions regarding their disciplinary location: they become the unsuspected sites of unauthorized and often unwelcomed questions. For Rey Chow's ‘style’ of intellectual work reveals a positionality that persistently stymies the universal and ‘neutral’ pretensions of the abstract knowledge proposed by the humanities. It is this gap, between pretence and positionality, that Chow consistently explores. Our attention is drawn through the details of analysis towards a further, unsuspected and unfamiliar shore from where the finitude of thought, its limits, blindness and epistemological conceits, can be traced. Pushed to confront its location in Occidental privilege, the largely silenced world that the Western academy nominates here returns bearing uncomfortable, perhaps even unanswerable, questions. It is this profound and unacknowledged provincialism that constitutes what Chow calls a ‘persistent epistemic scandal’.

Hybrid disciplinarity: Rey Chow and comparative studies

The question of comparison has been central to all of Rey Chow's work. She understands it not as an exercise performed upon a common ground, but as the drawing together of incommensurable places and objects of knowledge; its point is not to gain prestige within a dominant cultural field and not simply to reverse the hierarchy obtaining between centre and margin, but to generalize the condition of otherness. The analogy she posits between the stakes of aesthetic reflection and the politics of cultural difference in a field without a stable hierarchy or a normative centre has pay-offs both for the methodology of literary studies and for reflection on cultural politics, and it restores the link between them. This article looks at the grounding of her practice of comparison in the Kantian concept of an ungrounded reflective judgement and in a notion of the heterogeneous ‘field’ which is its condition of possibility.

Kung Fu Hustle: a note on the local

The success of Kung Fu Hustle within and beyond Hong Kong provides a convenient starting point for a discussion of actor‐director Stephen Chow's films and the manner in which they present themselves as belonging to a particular ‘local’ context. The production of the local is a critical issue in south Indian cinemas, where the local has been named as the linguistic‐cultural identity and became available for political mobilization. Chow's work has significant implications for the study of south Indian cinemas because the dissimilarities between the two facilitate the identification of similar cinematic techniques used by both.

Null-hypothesis tests are not completely stupid, but Bayesian statistics are better

Unfortunately, reading Chow's work is likely to leave the reader more confused than enlightened. My preferred solutions to the “controversy” about null- hypothesis testing are: (1) recognize that we really want to test the hypothesis that an effect is “small,” not null, and (2) use Bayesian methods, which are much more in keeping with the way humans naturally think than are classical statistical methods.

Ten Years of Storm

In our third issue, Lord Lindsay of Birker reviewedFeng Pao Shih Nien, an account of the Communist Chinese régime given by a leader of the China Democratic League who had co-operated with it until 1956 when he fled to Hong Kong. Since then, the book has appeared, reduced in size, in an English translation entitledTen Years Of Storm. In his review, Lord Lindsay indicated the main points of interest in Mr. Chow's work. Here we print, with the kind permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, two eyewitness accounts from the book. The first describes an episode during the 1951 campaign against counter-revolutionaries; the second is even more personal, telling as it does of the attacks made on Mr. Chow himself during the “Three-Anti Movement” against waste, corruption and bureaucracy in 1952.