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In the built heritage studies, the intricate web of social and selective processes that define heritage is evident. These processes are, in many cases, intertwined with the notion of scale, examplified through the production of heritage sites at the local, national, and transnational scales. While heritage and geography scholars have articulated the role played by scale in heritage-making and argue against a rigid, fixed, and hierarchical understanding of scale, they highlight the constant reproduction of scale. There is, so far, limited explanation of how the perception of scale gets reproduced and how crucial actors manipulate scalar power and resources for heritage making and the reproduction of scale. To fill this gap, this paper delves into mainland China's heritage-making, using the southern Anhui historical villages as an example. Based on intensive 5-month field research, this paper has three findings: 1) The nomination process for a World Heritage Site is notably influenced by politics and selectivity; 2) Diverse stakeholders are pivotal in shaping heritage narratives; 3) Individual contributions to heritage creation directly interact with, and subsequently reshape, 'scale', an entity that is simultaneously discursive and tangible. By integrating the notion of 'scale' into heritage discussions, we illuminate two concurrent processes: creating hierarchies through rule assimilation by interpreting the UNESCO standard internally and evolving socio-spatial dynamics via the manifestation of individual agency with resource manipulation, scale jumping, and reproduction of scale. This approach aligns with the material orientation in human geography and repositions 'scale'. Here, it's not just an epistemological framework but also a tangible force that steers individual perceptions and actions and yields measurable material impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing people's subjective well-being (SWB) remains a critical challenge for all countries. However, few studies have been dedicated to examining the influence of environmental governance programs on SWB, especially in developing and non-democratic societies. This paper aims to fill this void by taking the Rural Living Environment Improvement (RLEI) program in China—the largest rural living environment governance program in history, as an example to understand the role of environmental governance programs in SWB in the world's biggest developing and non-democratic country. Based on 3747 individual samples from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey database, we found that RLEI can significantly improve rural residents' SWB. This effect remains significant after using the propensity score matching method and the instrumental variable approach to address potential selection bias and endogenous problems. The indirect analysis shows that RLEI can increase rural residents' SWB mainly through improving their income, consumption expenditure, and health. Compared with rural sewage and livestock manure RLEI programs, rural waste RLEI program has a greater enhanced impact on rural residents' SWB. The monetary value of RLEI based on the life satisfaction approach shows that the resulting improvement in rural residents' SWB created by RLEI is almost equivalent to the effect of household income. While the monetary value of rural sewage, livestock manure, and rural waste RLEI program is equivalent to 1.2, 3.67, and 1.1 times the effect of household income. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that RLEI has a greater positive impact on SWB for junior and old-aged, low-educated, Midwestern and Northeastern, and working rural residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the causal effect of retirement on the labor supply. We used male workers in China as an example and selected work hours as a measure of labor supply. The study employed two methods, namely fuzzy regression discontinuity and two-stage least squares, to analyze the impact of retirement on the work hours of the older adults based on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2015. Results show that retirement did not significantly reduce the labor supply. However, its impact on the supply of different types of labor was inconsistent. We also found that retired old adults tended to allocate more work hours to self-employment. Policy implications are as following. There's room for increasing retirement age, but it may not be as effective as expected in increasing the level of labor supply. If a delay retirement policy is to be implemented, we should pay attention to the side effects on the normal replacement of labor in the job market and maintaining a reasonable turnover rate by implementing a flexible retirement system. Moreover, establishing a good job market environment for older adults as well as a mechanism and system for retired older adults with high human capital accumulation to return to the labor market are also recommended to increase the productivity level of the labor force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some researches have shown the associations between air pollution and hospital-based emergency department visits, while the evidence about the acute effects of air pollution on emergency ambulance dispatches for the whole population is rarely available, especially on an hourly time scale. This paper aimed to investigate the effects of hourly concentrations of ambient air pollution on hourly number of ambulance emergency call-outs (AECOs) in Shenzhen, China. AECO data were collected from Shenzhen Emergency Center from January 2013 to December 2016. A time-stratified case-crossover design with conditional Poisson regression was performed to fit the relationship between hourly air pollution and AECOs. The distributed lag model was applied to determine lag structure of the effects of air pollutants. There were a total of 502,862 AECOs during the study period. The significant detrimental effects of SO2, PM2.5, and PM10 appeared immediately with a following harvesting effect after 5 h and the effects lasted for about 96 h. The cumulative effect estimates of four pollutants over 0–96 h were 13.99% (95% CI 7.52–20.85%), 2.07% (95% CI 0.72–3.43%), 1.20% (95% CI 0.54–1.87%), and 2.46% (95% CI 1.63–3.29%), respectively. We did not observe significant effects of O3. This population-based study quantifies the adverse effects of air pollution on ambulance dispatches and provides evidence of the lag structure of the effects on an hourly time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With enhanced economic development and population growth in recent years, total water consumption has increased significantly around the world. As the most populated and most rapidly developing country in the world, one of the major challenges for the Chinese government is to guarantee a continuous water supply to improve the livelihood of the growing population and maintain the fast development of the economy. An ever-increasing trend of water consumption has led to the construction of hydraulic structures and degradation of the ecosystem in China. Through the analysis of water consumption and water-use efficiency around the world, this study concluded that water demand management is the only option to assure a continuous supply of water to a growing population and developing economy. In this paper, water supply and demand of China over the time period 1980-2009 are analyzed to formulate water demand management strategies for a sustainable water supply. The study proposes that a water demand management strategy, based on demand control and quota management, could be a better option for sustainable water management in China. An example of the Haihe River Basin is provided to show the success of water demand management using total demand control and quota management. It can be expected that through the encouragement of a water conserving society, by water demand management, it is possible to harmonize the relationship among water, the environment, ecosystems, and human beings in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]