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Drawing on conversation analysis, this paper explores how medical encounters are closed in China's mainland. Based on a collection of 75 naturally occurring cases, we observe two dominant conversational practices oriented to closing Chinese medical encounters: a stand-alone 'okay?' as a generic preclosing initiation, and a gratitude-expressing action as the initiation of the closing sequence. Through a further examination of salient closing patterns in our data, we propose that Chinese doctors prefer fishing for patients' initiation of the terminal exchange to closing the medical interaction by themselves. The ways of and reasons for eliciting a patient-initiated closure are also discussed. This study may provide a frame of reference for studying medical closures in other cultures and have implications for cross-cultural comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of China's rapid growth and increasing engagement in the global climate regime, the authoritarian regulatory model has attracted attention from researchers and policymakers alike. This paper examines the question of to what extent and in what way state authoritarianism leads to (un)successful environmental policy implementation in China, with particular attention to energy transformation. This study inter-connects macro and micro inquiries through a case study of nuclear energy policy in China. An examination of the extended policy cycle as a comprehensive process that brings a policy to fruition shows that authoritarian regulatory environmental policy intervenes in each stage, resulting in a particular path of the evolution of environmental policy in nuclearising energy transformation in China. Adding to commonly accepted tenets of authoritarian environmentalism in general, the explanations of Chinese distinctiveness in materialising environmental policy enhances the understanding of the merits and challenges of authoritarian mechanisms of environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entertainment industry is driven to sell certain commodities transnationally, particularly in a world where borders are becoming increasingly diffused through the access afforded by the Internet. Media content is easily consumed, making cultural exporting fast and easy. Similar tropes and plot have been replicated in the East Asian film and TV industry, perhaps in hopes of replicating the success. This paper looks at the manufacture of ideal masculinities within East Asia, particularly China. From ex-members of K-pop group EXO to the successful TV series, cross-influence of East Asian popular culture is prominent. Through this paper, I look at the influence of K-dramas on the Chinese TV industry and particularly the manufacturing of a militarized masculinity on Chinese TV. Far from portraying brute and fearsome soldiers, ideal masculinity on TV is portrayed as "steely exterior but gentle internally" and thus desirable romantic partners to heterosexual women. By exploring the basic conception of Chinese masculinity, I then discuss representations of militarized masculinity on the silver screen (Wolf Warrior II) and C-dramas, with particular focus on the series, You Are My Hero (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational political communication today is being reconfigured by digital technologies and global power transition. Authoritarian state actors such as China are increasingly active on global social media platforms such as Twitter to directly advance their preferred frames with foreign publics in Western democracies, most notably in what could be called Chinese Twiplomacy contesting narrative globally over contentious issues. This paper problematises such Twiplomacy from authoritarians to Western democracies as 'networked transnational frame contestation', arguing that the political and cultural distance between the sending and target countries, the networked affordance of social media, and the national prism of the target countries, all contribute importantly to the complexity of such frame contestation. Through a case study on China's Twiplomacy in contesting coronavirus narrative in the UK, this paper further provides empirical evidence on how 'networked transnational frame contestation' works between politically and culturally distant countries. Using a mixed-method approach combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, this study finds that China's emotion-evoking discursive strategy draws traction but the authoritarian nature of the highly centralised networkedness and that of its discursive strategy, together with the strong cultural discordance with British publics, lead to networked recontextualisation of its intended frames in Britain. British publics, heavily relying on British political elites and press for foreign affairs, invoke shared cultural reference to recontextualise Chinese frames into culturally resonant counterframes. This study proposes a paradigm of 'networkedness within cascades' to understand frame contestation between politically and culturally distant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship has demonstrated that theorising about security is Eurocentric. This leaves us with a partial account of the concept of security, which is presented as universal. This in turn generates explanatory problems because we are only seeing part of the picture. Yet there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine the concept of security 'elsewhere'. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security? In answering this question, the paper makes two contributions. First, it presents new empirical findings, building a conceptual history of security in China. Drawing on 140 key texts dating 1926–2022, the paper traces the emergence of the concept of security in China and its evolution through three explicit security concepts. Drawing on postcolonial insights it demonstrates that these concepts are hybrid, evolving out of multiple domestic and international influences. They have similarities as well as differences with the Eurocentric concept that dominates International Security Studies (ISS) and produce a discrete approach towards security that has been overlooked in a discipline that uses 'Europe to explain Asia'. Second, considering these insights, the paper demonstrates that the universal concept of security that underpins theorising in ISS is partial and misleading. Differences in security concepts matter for theorising security and for understanding security policy. Consequently, I argue that we need to provincialize the concept of security: a truly global security studies is of necessity a provincial one attuned to difference and similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract / The Chinese used paper for two or three centuries before CE 105, when Cai Lun, director of imperial arsenals under Emperor He of the later Han dynasty (25-220), officially reported the 'invention' of paper. The Chinese began the first printed newspaper, Jing Bao (originally Di Bao), in 713 under the Tang dynasty (618-907); and it continued until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. In 868, Wang Jie printed the famous Diamond Sutra (Kumarajiva's Vajracchedika Prajna Paramita), the earliest printed book in existence. Xylography (block printing) was known in China for at least four centuries before 932, when Prime Minister Feng Dao supposedly 'invented' it by directing the printing of the 11 Confucian classics filling 130 volumes - a task that took 20 years. Alchemist Bi Sheng experimented with movable type for eight years from1041, four cen-turies before Gutenberg. In 1313, Wang Zheng traced the development of movable type in his Nong shu, a treatise on agriculture. Chinese also made typography a fine art and produced numerous books. Printing from movable type reached its highest development in Korea from 1403 onwards. If the invention of printing ushered in the second communication revolution, then the celebration of Gutenberg as the inventor of printing represents a distortion of human history by those trying to document a so-called European 'exceptionalism' of the 15th century. The horizontally integra-tive macrohistory approach should set the record straight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will present a personal journey of making sense of the experience of sibling abortion under China's Once-child Policy and transgenerational trauma related to China's Cultural Revolution in a group analysis training group. The first part of this paper will reflect on and analyse how groups helped me to claim the identity as a mourner, allowed both the presence and absence of my unborn brother to become real, and offered me reparative family relationships when I dealt with my grief. Drawing on the concept of large-group identity and transgenerational transmission, the second part of this paper will explore how experiences in groups enabled me to discover and understand the transgenerational transmission of trauma related to the Cultural Revolution in my family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday leisure creates opportunities for migrant–local encounters and these encounters play important roles in urban migrants' lives as they further their integration into the city. However, migrant workers are not homogeneous, with prominent identifiable differences between generations. This current paper analyses migrant workers' leisure patterns and constraints in Guangzhou, China, with a particular focus on generational differences. Based on survey data collected in 2018, we have identified three leisure patterns, namely Transformed (i.e., higher leisure consumption and longer travelled distance for leisure), Prolonged (i.e., longer leisure time) and Traditional (i.e., lower leisure consumption, shorter leisure time and shorter travelled distance). In addition, significant generational differences are observed: first, while the Transformed Pattern is predisposed to be the new generation's choice, almost half of the first generation retains the Traditional pattern; second, the first generation tends to report more substantial leisure constraints subjectively, but their leisure patterns are contrarily more affected by objective constraint indicators, such as gender, working hours, living with family members and residential location. The new generation is more influenced by subjective constraint indicators such as their attitude towards leisure, lack of like-minded companions or mobility choices. This study contributes to the extant literature by offering a typology of leisure patterns considering multiple dimensions of leisure behaviours, and further revealing the diversification of migrant workers' leisure life in the dynamic urban context. Findings suggest that the two generations may value leisure differently, indicating inevitable lifestyle changes of the newcomers in Chinese cities. Our findings may also provide some suggestions for policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how common property is produced and delineated in contractual communities in China. Shanghai, one of the most developed Chinese cities with a burgeoning housing market, is used as a case study. The research analyses the power relations between land, construction and housing departments within Shanghai district governments and with developers, specifically, during the development phases of land leasing, construction permission and ownership registration. Drawing on the theoretical framework of new institutionalism, and its conception of path dependency in urban space, the article sheds light on what has led to the infringement on homeowners' common property by developers. In a weak legal and regulatory system for property development, the departments within district governments shirk responsibility to each other, whereas developers hold considerable power. The article concludes that common property bears the imprint of power dynamics set in motion in the development phase and thus requires greater recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the Internet and social media (i.e. reviews, forum discussions, blogs and social networks) constituted an interesting source to detect user opinion trends. This study examines the global publication output on opinion mining and sentiment analysis from documents published in 2000 to 2020. Bibliometric indicators on the trends, most cited papers, authors, institutions, countries, funding agencies and research subject areas were independently screened and analysed using bibliometrix package in R. A total of 7603 eligible documents were identified from 2000 to 2020. The total number of citations for all publications was 129,251, with an average of 17.0 citations per publication. About 14,629 authors wrote those documents with 1.93 authors per document and a collaboration index of 1.98. The most prolific author was Cambria Erik, with 47 publications and h-index of 42. The leading countries for research were China with n = 824, India with n = 576 and the United States with n = 244 publications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings was the top-ranked venue for publications with n = 434, h-index of 32 and 4598 total citation scores. National Natural Science Foundation of China was the top-ranked funding agency for research, and most of the publications were computer science (n = 6320) documents. The study provides an in-depth assessment of the landmark of the hot research topic and acknowledges the contribution of the most productive and active authors across different countries in the world. In addition, the findings could support the younger scholars in their future research direction and improve the efficiency in potential future research collaborations and projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As primary drivers of global growth, China and India as Asian giants are on the path to reforming their higher education systems to drive innovation. This paper based on both primary and secondary data sources investigates how India's democratic political leadership has facilitated higher education reform for fostering innovation while underlining key differences in the policy approach of the Chinese leadership. Findings identify the areas of reform for India and also reveal that epistemic boundaries between India and China are beginning to blur so far as right-wing ideological regimentation is concerned, with possible implications for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legalization of recreational cannabis consumption in Canada created a cultural conflict for international students from China, where the use of cannabis is heavily criminalized and deemed immoral. This conceptual paper theorizes this cultural conflict experienced by Chinese international students in Canada by applying three theories from macro to micro levels. Neoliberalism is first used to understand how this cultural conflict exposes collisions between the neoliberal West and the rising economic power of China as illustrated through Chinese students studying in Canada. Next, acculturation theory focuses on these students' cultural transition and provides further insight into potential strategies for their handling of specific cultural conflicts such as cannabis use. Lastly, Cloninger's theory of substance use is adopted to explore Chinese international students' individual reasoning about cannabis use, particularly how they make decisions based on evaluations of various conditions. Building upon the above analyses, an integrated conceptual model is further formed to help us understand Chinese students' potential perception of cannabis use in Canada. This conceptual framework provides an important theoretical and conceptual base for future research and practice, from which to further explore cannabis use in the context of cultural transition of different immigrant and migrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of hospitals has significantly changed over the past decades and the 'medical city' has emerged as a new urban phenomenon in China. However, research on the significance of the medical city to China's urbanism is limited. This paper situates China's medical city in the theory of state entrepreneurialism and rethinks consumerism in healthcare. Particularly focussing on the state–market and production–consumption dyads, the paper argues that the state has engineered the institutional and market legitimacy for the rise of consumerism in healthcare and allows the medical city to capitalise on the provision and consumption of high-end healthcare services to advance the healthcare reform and capture economic opportunities. This argument is substantiated by a case study on the Shanghai New Hongqiao International Medical Center, which focusses on the public–private partnerships in the medical city. It is found that while the production of the medical city is based on private sector participation, the state's presence is diffused in the governance of the medical city through public–private partnerships, which reflect the characteristics of state entrepreneurialism. The findings add to the theory of China's urbanism with new sets of materials and render important implications for the urban future in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China's reform era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an investigation of nature-based practices, from the perspectives of 10 academics/educators from six nations. Participants engaged in a focus group exploring the prevalence and inclusion of nature in social work practice and education. While the study focused on individual members' experiences and perspectives, the findings highlight important context-specific factors for including nature within social work to reconnect humans with nature for health, well-being, healing, and justice. An Integrative Environmental Model for social work is proposed to assist future practice and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok continues to be the top downloaded app in many countries around the world as the short video consumption craze continues. But TikTok has also come under harsh scrutiny for its Chinese origins and data security. For TikTok, the journey of globalization has involved a painful contest with governments, geopolitical manoeuvrers, and, ultimately, finding platform regulation loopholes. TikTok's sister app, Douyin, shares identical digital architectures, but follows different trajectories of development in China. Through interviews with Chinese influencers and media practitioners, along with a content analysis of policy documents and industry reports, this paper identifies and analyzes the borderline practices that have occurred on Douyin – including content transfers, and algorithmic platformization – and evaluates the potential for these practices to be replicated on TikTok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In 2009, the Chinese government incorporated severe mental disorders into the central subsidized local health funding project for the effective management, treatment, and reintegration of patients with severe mental disorders from hospitals into the community (Project 686). The conditions that were classified as 'severe' by this project included: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, paranoid disorders, bipolar disorders, mental disorders caused by epilepsy, and mental retardation accompanying mental disorders. Patients in rural communities received better care after project implementation, of which 62.91% were farmers. Objective: This paper attempts to investigate the complex impact of Project 686 on the levels of rehabilitation of patients by their families. Methods: The last follow-up visit of the community psychiatrists in city H in 2020 was used as the time point. Finally, 174 samples were used in the analysis model. The type of kinship between family caregivers and patients with mental disorders was operationalized according to the information provided under the 'primary caregiver' item within the basic information section of the follow-up form. The software Stata15 was used to perform descriptive statistics, baseline regression model analysis, and a robustness test on the types of kinship identified and patients' recovery. Results: The types of kinship, current symptoms, and medication use all affected patients' recovery, were found to have regression coefficients of −0.148, −1.756, and 0.902, respectively. Parents of patients with mental disorders remain in the caregiver category with the largest proportion. Community acceptance of patients is high; current symptoms, medication use, and types of caregiver-patient relationships influence patients' recovery levels. Conclusions and discussion: Project 686 has solved some of the rehabilitation and living difficulties of patients with mental disorders in rural communities. The types of kinship between family caregivers and patients with mental disorders in rural communities affect patients' rehabilitation levels. Patients' current symptoms and medication use can effectively moderate the impact of kinship type on patients' recovery in terms of complete self-knowledge, productive work, and life and good social relationships. It is necessary for mental illness prevention-treatment organizations to establish supplemental, replacement, and substitution mechanisms for the life and rehabilitation of patients with mental disorders in rural communities. Furthermore, the sense of reward and concern for family caregivers should be actively enhanced, and greater scientific use of the rehabilitation function of the 'family care + village doctor management' model should be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world's largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features 'hegemonic precarity' has arisen since capital's move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of 'hoarding of time', Foxconn's management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority's wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of 'gig manufacturing' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the popularly adopted recent land development programme under 'increasing versus decreasing balance' policy in China to boost inclusive development of the urban and rural in the face of rapid urbanisation. We distinguish two types of increasing versus decreasing balance land programmes based on the different ways they manage land development rights and offer qualitative and quantitative evidence of the programme effects on village development and household welfare. We show that both programmes provide rural households with better access to urban-equivalent services and spaces, while different approaches to managing land development rights play different roles in market access and household income. To promote more inclusive urbanisation, governments and rural collectives should balance short-term economic benefits and long-term development potential and adopt proper land management programmes according to their own conditions. Practical policies are suggested for China and other developing regions faced with land use pressures under inevitable urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways new houses in Tibetan villages of Qinghai have become a marker of family status. After the advent of state-led housing subsidy projects in China's Qinghai province in 2009, Tibetan villagers have actively and increasingly engaged in building new houses to maintain their family status and prestige. According to local standards, owning a new, high-quality house is now an important measure of the household's living standard and signals the family's social and economic status. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and engaging with cultural geographies of home and house, this study examines the shifting markers of family status and explores how state-led development projects inscribe social, cultural, and political meanings in housing. In doing so, it argues that Tibetan villagers' desire to construct new housing in Qinghai province is to create markers of family status, not actual shelters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core significance of China's development of "new liberal arts" is to comply with the general trend of new technological revolution and industrial transformation, and focus on the new tasks of innovation transformation and traditional culture transformation. The development of tourism education has entered a new historical construction stage, especially the construction of tourism management talents training system needs to integrate innovative elements. The progress of tourism education should not be complacent, but should actively integrate the development needs of the times. From the current analysis, there are considerable problems in the training objectives, curriculum system, teaching staff construction and practical teaching of tourism major in China. In this paper, the goal of the professional training as a starting point, from the above four levels to solve the problem put forward targeted suggestions, put forward the characteristics of tourism management professional training path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the deepening internationalization of China's economy and society, English has gradually become a common language for Chinese people to connect with the world, and plays an increasingly important role in daily life. At the same time, Chinese people's mastery of English is gradually improving. Grasping the foundation of this period can effectively improve students' English level, and it will play a very important role in further learning English or job hunting in the future. Therefore, how to improve the interest of college school students in English learning and improve their ability and level of English learning is particularly important. Virtual community refers to a group of people who communicate and discuss through the Internet and are willing to share some knowledge and information in the exchange, and gradually develop into a social network aggregation. This paper designs an English learning platform for college school students based on virtual community and image processing technology. The platform is developed with SSM framework. After the development, the platform is tested for college school students in several schools in Xi'an. The experimental results show that the system can effectively stimulate students' interest in learning English, and then improve students' vocabulary and academic performance, which provides an effective reference for the study of students' learning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the practice of developed countries, countries with higher patent applications and PCT patent applications (such as the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, etc.) have relatively higher outward foreign direct investment, and the actual data of provinces in China also show that with the improvement of the patent level in various provinces and cities, the intensity of outward foreign direct investment in each province and city has also increased. At present, there are relatively few research data and the research method is relatively single. Therefore, collecting panel data on China's 31 provinces from 2003 to 2016, this paper conducts an empirical analysis on the influence of patent level on outward foreign direct investment via analytical method of equal part linear regression and Grey Computing. By comparing analysis results with the model and the results with conventional linear regression model, the difference of different regression models is observed. Furthermore, the impact of China's patent level on China's inter-provincial outward foreign direct investment is further analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of the Internet economy, Internet enterprises have attracted tremendous public attention, especially in China. In this paper, data mining through regression analysis, grey relational analysis, decision tree analysis and cluster analysis is implemented to further study the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP) of Internet enterprises in China. This study collects and analyzes data of 20 Internet enterprises in China from the year of 2011 to 2016 and draws the following conclusions: (1) the relationship between CSR and CFP of the Internet enterprises is negative; (2) from the stakeholder perspective, CSR to shareholders, creditors and government is positively related to CFP; CSR to customers, suppliers and employees is not positively related to CFP; (3) through decision tree analysis, it is found that what affects the overall CSR performance of the Internet enterprises the most is CSR to customers and suppliers, while what affects the CFP of the Internet enterprises the most is CSR to creditors; (4) through cluster analysis, 20 enterprises can be divided into three types. This study has theoretical, methodological, practical and educational implications for future related research, business practitioners and educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines onwards migration patterns and the factors that influence them in urban China. In contradiction to Ravenstein's laws of step migration, we argue that movement up the urban hierarchy does not dominate onwards migration in the Chinese context. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we model how past migratory experiences intersect with migrants' demographic and socio-economic characteristics to explain the stay-versus-move decision and who moves up as well as who moves down within China's urban hierarchy. The general pattern of China's domestic migration is a movement up the urban hierarchy in the first migration and a movement down in onwards migration. We identify a transition-levels effect whereby the larger the difference between the hukou -registered place and the first migration city in the urban hierarchy, the greater the probability of onwards migration, with the effect manifesting most strongly for less-educated, mid-age (the 1970s and 1980s birth cohorts) migrants with rural origins. As to onwards migration direction, mixed results were found for migrants' demographic and socio-economic characteristics whereas educational level and the transition-levels effect are both highly predictive of movement up and down the urban hierarchy. Our findings suggest that 'jumping too high' in previous migration(s) predicts a greater likelihood of moving down the urban hierarchy in response to insurmountable obstacles to settling in cities classified as large and above. Our research advances migration scholarship by considering the multipolar nature of onwards migration and offering an integrated approach to analysis that foregrounds the causes and effects of multiple-step migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If gentrification is occurring globally, we must understand the uneven intervention of globalisation in the production of a (global) gentrifier class. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to investigate the 'new middle class' within China's urban context. Through the critical examination of subtle retailing changes, it discusses how recent place-making strategies have fabricated the aura of 'authenticity' built upon the history of traditional residential neighbourhoods, attracting gentrifiers, whose consumption practices have transformed the retail space of a gentrified historic neighbourhood. Using Nanjing as a case study by employing qualitative research methods, this study shows that the Chinese new middle classes have yearned for modern and elitist lifestyles, with a preference for consuming Western-style goods to manifest their distinctive tastes and social status. This paper's research findings propose the concept of Xiaozi consumption, a specific term that challenges Western-developed concepts of 'consuming authenticity' by highlighting the planetary indigeneity of gentrification in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, production in China’s television sector have reshaped media cultures across the country as well as the geocultural region of East Asia. Through analysis of licensed reality television programs such as China’s Got Talent, this paper examines transnational television formats and their circulation and replication in contemporary China, challenging the traditional concept that television format trade falls within a West-Rest narrative. While highlighting the cultural and media phenomena of interactive ‘glocalization’ of cultural products, this paper calls for de-westernization in approaching Chinese and East Asian media studies. It does so by pointing out unique imitating and adaptive practices of Chinese unscripted television programs, which serve as case studies to the existing literature of television business and cultures. The practice of licensing formats provides a unique perspective into analyzing China’s media strategies in a globalized industry and reviewing the current scholarship on media globalization. With a comparative analysis, the paper attempts to reconceptualize the spatiality of East Asian media production and consumption. I also include my observations while working on the production teams for these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power system analysis (PSA) is the first comprehensive curriculum for the major of electrical engineering at the undergraduate stage. It helps students obtain an overview of the power system, and systematically learn about fundamental theories. However, the traditional teaching of PSA course excessively focuses on the class lecture, and is combined with hardware-based experiments that are restricted due to concerns of security and cost. Enhancing the PSA course has been attempted at Shandong University, China, since 2016, which combines class lecture, laboratory exercises, and practical activities into the daily teaching. In laboratory exercises, project-based learning (PBL) is carried out by using the hardware experimental equipment and self-developed teaching software, VTPCE, hence to enhance students' understandings of knowledge, hands-on abilities, and researching skills. Practical activities are organized by visiting the topic-related institutes to establish the relationships between theories and practices. This paper introduces the architecture, the intended learning objects (ILOs), and the detailed arrangement of the reformed PSA course. The assessment procedures for students are also presented, as well as the satisfaction surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant "superstition." As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines depictions of Africans in China during the period when China moved to establish diplomatic relations across the African continent – the foundation of what would become Africa–China relations today. Chinese posters were early forms of mass visual interaction with (the image of) foreign nationals. They reflect how Chinese society viewed itself in relation to others as it developed a global awareness through domestic mobilization. This study investigates how Africa and Africans are depicted in Chinese posters and how they shaped and/or reflected discourses of the period. It also examines motivations behind the inclusion of Africans in Chinese posters, arguing that this largely had a domestic rationale. By historicizing the meaning-making process of the image of Africa in 20th-century Chinese posters, this paper demonstrates that Chinese posters informed public opinion by defining friend and foe, focused more on China and her Cold War entanglements than on Africa, and simultaneously challenged and reinforced some widely held stereotypes about the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a poststructuralist theoretical framework to explore parents' attitudes towards children's right to play in Shanghai, China. It adopted mixed methods of online questionnaires (N = 880) and semi-structured interviews (N = 11). The findings suggest that participants struggle with embracing and practising children's right to play as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), reflecting culturally-sensitive and -contextualised concerns around their children's future success. Those concerns are connected with the hegemony of Confucianism in shaping educational values in Chinese education. In the context of globalisation, this paper points to the empowerment of parents in practising children's rights to play in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China–Africa relationship has received increased interest over the past few decades as scholars critically examine the challenge that China, in its quest for a closer strategic partnership with Africa, poses to the norms governing the neoliberal world order (NLWO). One crucial aspect of this is international aid, and how Chinese aid to Africa differs from Western aid. This paper argues that Chinese aid reduces the power of traditional aid donors to shape the development route of African countries. This new development finance ultimately breaks the monopoly of Western aid to decide how poor countries in the global 'South' develop. In doing so, the Sino–African aid relationship is challenging the current world order as it offers African states the possibility to decouple (or delink) themselves from the global economy. By challenging assumed neoliberal economic development fundamentals, this relationship, if harnessed correctly by African leaders, can pose longer-term ideological questions around the very set of ideas that underpin development itself, while enabling African states the policy space needed to pursue more sustainable development from an Afro-centric perspective. It is this possibility to delink, due to changing ideological fundamentals concerning economic development, that is the challenge China and Africa pose to the NLWO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the utilization of land resources, in recent years, there has been an increase in the design and construction of over-track buildings in metro depots in China. However, there are daily tasks such as testing, parking, and maintenance of metro trains in the depot, vibration induced by trains in those tasks may exert impact upon the residents living in the buildings over the metro depots. In this paper, detailed on-site measurements were carried out to investigate the source and transmission characteristics of train-induced vibrations in the metro depot. The main results indicated that (i) the magnitudes of train-induced vibration on the testing lines and throat areas are greater than other areas, and the issue of environmental vibrations induced by trains in the building near these areas need to be given more attention. (ii) Traininduced vibrations are more attenuated from the ground to the platform and less attenuated from the platform to the building floor, and most vibration acceleration levels below 30 Hz are even amplified during the transmission from the platform to the floors in the building, which could be because of the matching of the frequencies of train-induced vibrations and the natural frequencies of the superstructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how Han buyers' perception of and desire for the qualia—sensuous qualities—of Pu'er tea affects how ethnic minority producers perceive and make the tea. As a defining aspect of the consumers' experiences with ancient Pu'er tea, these qualia were invented and emphasised as part of the elite Chinese tea culture by Han traders and consumers. While the Bulang people's traditional way of making and using Pu'er tea related more to its economic and symbolic values than to its perceived effects on the body, in response to China's rapid marketisation they had to learn to sense the qualia rooted in a Han lexicon and philosophy and then acquire new skills to produce them. The paper argues that sensorial experience as a cultural dimension of tea has created new layers within Bulang people's encounters with the modern market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China's political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party's propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party's propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much work has examined the phenomenon of dispute escalation, whereby the concrete measures state actors take edge them closer to war. Less attention has been devoted to the ways in which state actors' perceptions of what is at stake in a dispute can also change, with important consequences for the likelihood of conflict. This paper examines the phenomenon of dispute inflation – wherein a contest over an object or issue assumes ever greater stakes and significance for its protagonists – and identifies three different mechanisms that can generate increasing non-material stakes. The upshot is that theoretically even a minor dispute can grow into a major conflict due to swelling stakes, especially when dispute inflation spirals. To illustrate these dynamics at work, this paper looks to recent developments in the dispute between the People's Republic of China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence and intensification of transcontinental exchange during both the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age profoundly influenced the social history of Eurasia. While scholars have intensively discussed east-west long-distance communication along the proto-Silk Road, the north-south transport networks that connected China to South and Southeast Asia during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age have attracted much less attention in the scholarly literature based on archeological science data. In this paper, we find new radiocarbon dates from 11 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in northwestern and central Yunnan in Southwest China, a key entrance into South and Southeast Asia from China. Combined with previously published archeological records and radiocarbon dates, we attempt to disentangle and understand the timing and routes of the networks linking China to South and Southeast Asia during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. We propose three north-south land routes that played essential roles in the cultural exchanges in addition to the proto-Silk Road and maritime routes. This includes the trans-Himalayan routes, trans-Hengduan Mountain routes, and the trans-Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau routes. The north-south exchange between China and South and Southeast Asia probably emerged in the fifth millennium BP (before the present) mainly through a low-frequency trans-Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau and trans-Himalayan routes. The exchange frequency significantly increased after the fourth millennium BP, with the synchronous development of the three primary north-south passageways. Trans-Hengduan routes might have been the most crucial artery connecting China and South and Southeast Asia during 3000–2200 BP, but more archeological records are needed to understand the detailed evolution of these transport networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of Web 2.0, social media dialogue has been increasingly important within the world of open access (OA), striving for more user-generated content and ease of use. In this article, we analysed the impact of OA articles published by both Chinese and the American researchers using PLOS ONE. Papers published in the same year, using citation and social media metrics, were all used to analyse the correlation between the level of social media metrics and citation. Overall, the impact of OA articles published within the United States is higher than OA articles published in China. The results showed that citations and number of Mendeley readers have a significant correlation, which reflect the similar impact in evaluation of OA articles. However, most social media metrics did not have an obvious correlation with impact evaluation, which indicates the social media metrics are useful when paired with citations, but not irreplaceable to citations. Social media metrics appear to be a useful alternative metrics to accurately reflecting the impact of OA articles within the scientific community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) was a momentous event. This article explores the social and institutional history of HTS research in China between 1987 and 2008. Desire for a Nobel Prize shaped the Chinese state's initial push to establish the National Superconductivity Research Program. Yet, after the enthusiasm for HTS research cooled, and even after a Nobel Prize for HTS was awarded to non-Chinese scientists, financial and institutional support for the research continued. This process fostered the 'to live' ethos of science, which has replaced the Nobel Prize dream as a central mechanism of interaction between the state and science in China. Indeed, Chinese HTS research not only survived, but also produced an abundance of 'normal science' discoveries. This pattern continued after 2008, when Japanese scientists made the groundbreaking innovation of iron-based superconductivity and Chinese scientists quickly turned their attention to this sub-field. They published many papers pushing the field forward slightly, rather than making the largest scientific advances. The mutual interaction between the state and scientists underpinned this phenomenon: On the one hand, the productivity of normal science has helped to maintain state legitimacy. On the other hand, the evaluation and incentive systems, as well as deep-rooted cultural features such as officialism, utilitarianism, and the foregrounding of politics lead scientists to opportunistically pursue normal science. The state and scientists have co-produced a regime of normal science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reactor is an extreme environment of high temperature, high pressure, and high radiation dose. Damage accumulates in structural materials over service time. It will eventually lead to material failure, such as hardening, embrittlement, and swelling. The radiation damage accumulation is an inherent, complex, and multiscale process, which has been studied extensively with multiscale modeling and simulation methods. The rapid development of high-performance computing makes it possible to accurately operate multiscale simulation for the microstructure evolution of irradiated reactor materials. The European Union, the USA, and China have put great effort into this, and many related works have been carried out. This paper first outlines the basic application of multiscale modeling and simulation technology in understanding the effects of radiation on reactor structural materials. Then, some relevant projects carried out by the USA, the European Union, and China in recent years are summarized. Next, the paper focuses on three widely used simulation techniques at different scales: molecular dynamics, kinetic Monte Carlo, and cluster dynamics. For each method, some key developments in algorithms and computer implementations are reviewed. Finally, the comparison between them is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the rise of China affecting international governance? This paper examines the domain of infrastructure finance by focusing on China's two policy banks, which are the main creditors of China's overseas infrastructure projects. While the incumbent international credit regimes led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) distinguish development-oriented aid from commercially oriented export credits, emerging late-developed economies blur this dichotomy by largely funding development projects with state-backed export credits. The way China alters the OECD's credit governance, this paper argues, demonstrates both the generality of late development and the peculiarity of "Chinese" development. Rather than directly subsidizing firms' international business with the state's fiscal revenue, policy banks financialized host country's state-owned and state-coordinated assets using various market instruments. By doing so, they gave Chinese firms a comparative advantage in the markets of less developed regions, allowing them to undertake projects that firms from advanced industrial countries cannot. This financing mechanism has reshaped the international development regime by transforming the dominant means of credit allocation from state-led aid-giving to market-based exchange, and rewritten the liberal rules of the international export credit regime by financing the developing world in a both statist and liberalist manner. As a result, China has built a paralleled regime in regions insufficiently covered by the existing financial schemes of incumbent credit regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: This paper describes the multilingualism patterns practiced in the Zauzou community, a small ethnic group in Southwestern China. Zauzou is in contact with Lisu, Bai, Lama, and Mandarin Chinese. The present study aims to characterize the relationship between the social/linguistic factors including age, second language (L2), types of code-alternation, and the multilingualism patterns in this community. Design/methodology/approach: Self-reports and participant observation were used to discover any recurrent multilingualism patterns regulated by social/linguistic factors. Data and analysis: Self-reported data on Zauzou speakers' language repertoire and language use were collected by means of demographic survey. Code-alternation between Zauzou and different L2s were collected from systematic linguistic fieldwork. Findings/conclusions: Zauzou is the dominant language in intragroup multilingualism, while intergroup multilingualism is dominated by Zauzou speakers' L2s. Zauzou speakers exhibit a shift from the local multilingualism toward Mandarin-Zauzou bilingualism. The two patterns can be characterized by speakers' age, L2, and the type of code-alternation. Zauzou-Mandarin bilingualism is realized as both code-mixing and code-switching, and is pervasive among the younger generation, while multilingualism is realized as code-switching and is dominant among older speakers. This shift is due to the new market economy and the language policy that promotes Mandarin in the whole area. Originality: This study presents naturalistic data on multilingualism practices in a small minority group in China, which is overlooked by most linguistic descriptions and sociolinguistic studies of lesser-studied languages in China. Significance/implications: This paper discovers three parameters to define two cross-linguistic multilingualism patterns in small indigenous societies: the local multilingualism and the national bilingualism, and the shift toward bilingualism that directly results from language policy and economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural sensitivity is missing in the widely researched construct of resilience. The assumption that resilience takes the same form in all cultures fails to acknowledge that culture shapes the interpretation and instantiation of resilience. Examining how suffering and adversity are perceived and dealt with in Chinese contexts, can identify cultural concepts related to resilience. In this paper, we examine the ways in which Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, the three main belief systems that have influenced Chinese people's perception of the nature of life, can serve as sources of strength to individuals facing adversity. We summarise three culturally inflected elements of dealing with adversities and compare them with existing, widely researched notions of resilience. Taking a socio-ecological perspective to explore resilience, this paper proposes a multidimensional model that can improve understanding of culturally embedded resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has China contributed toward the conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)? The extant literature tends to either undervalue China's role or emphasizes the absence of China's willingness to realize the RCEP. However, it is difficult to form region-wide multilateral preferential trade agreements (PTAs), such as RCEP, without any significant contribution from a regional hegemon, such as China. This paper, thus, argues that China has contributed significantly toward the conclusion of RCEP by engendering incentives for member countries to join through multiple cooperative structures. These cooperative structures involve China-led bilateral PTAs and international development forums, which include the Belt and Road Initiative and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. With the gradual shift from bilateral to multilateral PTAs and forum-linkage strategies, China turned to be more assertive in concluding the RCEP than in the early years of RCEP negotiations, as evidenced by the discourse of political and opinion leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with the point prediction of the wind power, the interval prediction provides more information to assist power dispatching and optimize quotation strategies in power trading. To improve the accuracy of the prediction intervals, this paper proposes a novel model based on the lower upper bound evaluation (LUBE) by the gate recurrent unit (GRU) network. First, the Pearson correlation coefficient is selected to screen out the variables related to wind power, which can simplify the input variables of the prediction model while preserving the feature information as much as possible. Afterwards, with the consideration of the prediction interval relative deviation (PIRD), the improved objective function is introduced. Based on the GRU network, the prediction intervals of the wind power can be obtained to minimize the new objective function. Finally, by choosing several mainstream neural networks, experiments are conducted towards a certain wind farm in China. The results show that the proposed model has a significant improvement in both prediction interval width and PIRD under the given prediction interval coverage probability (PICP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands upon a hitherto underexplored finding by Rich and Banerjee's 2015 model which finds that Taiwan has done comparatively better with non-democracies in Africa. The paper proposes that democratisation makes an African state more responsive to domestic economic imperatives and thus more likely to form relations with the demographically and economically larger People's Republic of China because of the prospective trade, aid and investment gains to be made once such a switch is affected. Seven case studies conducted over the 2001–2018 period yield results which are in line with this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the scaling characteristics in China is critical for perceiving the development process of rapidly urbanising countries. This paper conducts a comprehensive scaling analysis with quantitative assessment of a large number of diverse urban indicators of 275 Chinese cities. Our findings confirm that urban scaling laws can also be applied to rapidly urbanising China but demonstrate some unique features echoing its distinct urbanisation. Chinese urban population agglomeration results in more effective economic production but the economies of scale for infrastructure are less obvious. Some urban indicators associated with infrastructure and living facilities surprisingly scale super-linearly with urban population size, contrary to expected sublinear scaling behaviours. In developing countries, different-sized cities have diverse agglomeration, industrial and resource allocation advantages, which can be reflected by scaling exponents. We characterise these unique features in detail, exploring the spatial disparities and temporal evolution of scaling exponents (β). Strong regional variations and differences are particularly pronounced in Northeast China and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration. Scaling exponent variations over time reflect the temporal evolution of the urban system and measure the coordination and balance of urbanisation. Economic output was most efficient in 2009 and β of GDP was slightly greater than 1.15 in recent years. Urban land expansion has been accelerating since 2000 with β remaining around 0.85–0.90. The study of urban scaling in China is enlightening in elaborating the uniqueness and coordination of urban development in rapidly urbanising countries and provides support in formulating differentiated urban planning for different-sized cities to promote coordinated development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of COVID-19, many schools have to educate their students using online activities. During this time, whether and how parents are involved may be of particular importance for young children—who are less able to learn independently via the Internet due to their developmental immaturity. Therefore, this study examined the cross-sectional association of maternal involvement in child online learning with child adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic and tested maternal mindfulness as a moderator. Data were collected from 236 mothers of kindergarten-aged children (mean age = 55.91 months; 75% of them were girls) during the fourth wave of COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong, China. Using paper-and-pencil questionnaires, mothers rated their involvement and mindfulness and their children's pre-academic ability and internalizing and externalizing behaviors and provide demographic information. Regression models revealed that maternal involvement was associated positively with child pre-academic ability and negatively with child internalizing behaviors, but such associations were only significant for children with more mindful mothers. Maternal mindfulness did not moderate the negative association between maternal involvement and child externalizing behaviors. Findings highlighted the role of maternal mindfulness in child development, suggesting that it may be crucial to promote maternal involvement and mindfulness during the pandemic and perhaps beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, environmental studies in research on prehistoric China have been gaining popularity and importance. For Northwest China in particular, climate change, especially the so-called ~4.2k BP event has been seen as the main reason for an alleged collapse of Late Neolithic societies and a transition to pastoral-heavy economies and mobile lifeways. Yet, these explanatory models tend to rely on limited archaeological and environmental data and non-contemporaneous historical data, resulting in simplistic causal relationships between environmental changes and social response. This paper re-evaluates the Incipient Bronze Age in China's Northwestern region, discussing evidence for climate change and its exact dates, as well as textual and archaeological evidence. We argue that the old narratives perpetuating the image of a dichotomy between Steppe and Sown are inaccurate, while large-scale models of region-wide subsistence change in response to climate cooling tend to disregard local developments and group-specific responses as well as chronological issues. Focusing on the Xindian and Siwa archaeological phenomena, this paper provides a view into sub-regional responses to this climate event, warning against simplistic broad-brush reconstructions and calling for both a return to archaeological fundamentals and large-scale intensive fieldwork and interdisciplinary studies involving archaeologists, paleobotanists, zooarchaeologists, isotope specialists, and climate scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While access to school is one crucial aspect of education equality, there is a lack of research on factors that influence the distance that pupils travel to school. Previous studies have failed to reveal the relationship between pupils' socio-spatial characteristics and travel distance. This paper uncovers the multilevel structure, ignored hitherto, that underpins the determinants of pupils' travel distance. Using detailed travel survey data for Beijing and an appropriate multilevel modelling approach, this research reveals that contextual variation remains, having taken account of compositional (individual-level) variables; and that contextual factors, that is, school density and neighbourhood context, are more influential when compared with individual-level factors except for education stage and housing type. The policy implications include improved planning for schools in comparatively deprived areas, increased provision of affordable housing and enhanced education opportunities for migrant children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]