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High-quality carbon information disclosure is required with the development of China's national carbon emission trading market. It is still controversial what factors influence carbon information disclosure quality in China's power industry. This paper involved four factors: government regulation, media reports, enterprise size, and directors' professional backgrounds based on strategic change theory. The carbon information disclosure quality was measured using the analytic hierarchy process (APH) and entropy weight method (EWM). Then, panel data regression was used to analyze the relationship between the factors and carbon information disclosure quality. The results showed that (1) the quantity of media reports has no significant correlation with carbon information disclosure quality. (2) The proportion of directors with legal backgrounds to all directors is significantly and negatively correlated with carbon information disclosure quality. (3) Government regulation, the media value orientation, enterprise size, and the proportion of directors with accounting backgrounds to all directors are significantly and positively related to the carbon information disclosure quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Up until the end of Cold War mainstream theories in the disciplines of International Relations and Peace Studies have overlooked the transformation in relations between actors but instead concentrated on either the constant state of conflict between units or radical changes from war to peace. Acknowledging major changes in their subject matters due to the changing conditions with the end of Cold War, both disciplines had to rethink their theoretical assumptions and renew their toolboxes. Accordingly, the constructivist turn in International Relations and the introduction of Transformational Approach to conflict in Peace Studies have brought the two disciplines closer. Similar to the Constructivist theory of International Relations that emphasizes changes rather than law-like regularities in international politics, the Conflict Transformation Approach in Peace Studies focuses on perennial transformation processes in conflicts. This paper through bringing together insights from the disciplines of International Relations and Peace Studies, analyses the cross-strait conflict between the People's Republic of China and Republic of China (Taiwan) within a constructivist framework, and from a transformational perspective by applying Hugh Miall's five-point model of conflict transformation (context transformation, structural transformation, actor transformation, issue transformation, and personal/elite transformation). Miall's five-point model is utilized in this paper to show that, despite serious crisis occurred in more than 70 years history of People's Republic of China-Republic of China conflict, the relationship of the parties has undergone a set of transformations on the way to reconciliation. Although the conflict, with serious disagreements on crucial issues, is far from being settled, the ongoing transformation creates room for negotiations and further reconciliation on issues that were previously regarded as non-negotiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since China is facing a complicated international situation and sustainable development requirement at the same time, this paper examines the effects of external uncertainty, international sanctions, on green innovations by adopting the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation for 30 provinces (autonomous region and municipalities) from 1997 to 2019. We employ green inventions as the dependent variable and 5 indicators of sanctions (including unilateral, plurilateral, multilateral, economic, and intensity) as the main explanatory variables alternately. For further robustness tests, we use substitution variable green utility models, adopt sub-samples in different regions, change the empirical methodology, and add omitted variables. We also examine the mechanism effects of three possible channels. The conclusion is that plurilateral and economic sanctions both present significant negative impacts on green innovations, whereas China was not affected by unilateral or multilateral sanctions during the sample period. GDP, interpersonal globalization, and environment are proved to be the possible channels through which sanctions affect green innovations. Our research findings should assist Chinese-listed companies suffering from sanctions to make better responses on their way to green innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative cross-nation study of the transition to more sustainable stormwater management (SSWM) in the United States and China. Multi-level perspective and multiphase models are used to examine the transition dynamics and reflect on how transition theory explains the change within federal and socialist context. Instead of simply differentiating the two countries' transition patterns by using terms such as bottom-up or top-down, we consider the importance of changes at all three levels of the system. The main difference between the transition process in the United States and China is the extent to which niche level innovations are developed, especially in the type of actors and activities investigated. The analysis suggests that the Chinese transition is less radical, while the U.S. pathway exhibits signs of reconfiguration, dealignment and realignment. Developing learning networks across sectors and actors to spread knowledge and experience appears to be the next major challenge for the Chinese Sponge City initiative. Despite the feasibility of transition theory for transition comparison, the author suggests its usage with caution and critical reflection to avoid the risk of embedding the mindset of 'catch-up' and convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how the scarcity of different types of workers in a region shapes firm innovation across industries, using the unbalanced regional sex ratios in China as a source of identification strategy. The empirical results show that the shortage of female workers has spurred firms in female‐intensive industries to innovate more, particularly in industries with low substitution between female and male workers, consistent with the price effect of the directed technical change theory. In male‐intensive industries with high elasticity of substitution and regions with more skewed local sex ratios, firms are more innovative, demonstrating that the market size effect of the directed technical change theory is also at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decomposition analysis has been employed to discover the driving factors of carbon emission intensity, but the current studies assume that production functions are under the condition of the neutral technical change. Grounded on biased technical change production theory, this paper proposes a novel multidimensional decomposition approach which combines production-theory decomposition analysis (PDA) and index decomposition analysis (IDA). This novel approach can illustrate how energy structure effect, element substitution effect, efficiency change effect, input biased technical change, output biased technical change and magnitude of technical change affect carbon emission intensity of China's 30 provinces. The results indicate that during the 11th FYP and 13th FYP, output biased technical change and the magnitude of technical change are the critical factors in China's carbon emission intensity, while other four drivers increase carbon emissions. But, during the 12th FYP, the role of six drivers has been reversed contrasting 11th FYP and 13th FYP. In addition, we also explore the impact of each driver from the perspective of regional heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the 'age of conspiracism', the harmfulness of conspiratorial narratives and mindsets on individuals' mentalities, on social relations, and on democracy, has been widely researched by political scientists and psychologists. One known negative effect of conspiracy theories is the escalation toward political radicalism. This study goes beyond the exploration of mechanisms underpinning the relationship between conspiracy theory and radicalization to focus on possible approaches to mitigating them. This study sheds light on the role of counter-conspiracy approaches in the process of deradicalization, adopting the case study of anti-China sentiment and racial prejudice amid the Covid-19 pandemic, through conducting an experiment (N = 300). The results suggest that, during critical events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, exposure to countermeasures to conspiracist information can reduce individual acceptance of radicalism. We investigated two methods of countering conspiracy theory, and found that: (1) a content-targeted 'inoculation' approach to countering conspiracy theory can prevent the intensification of radicalization, but does not produce a significant deradicalization effect; and (2) an audience-focused 'disenchantment' method can enable cognitive deradicalization, effectively reducing the perception of competitive victimhood, and of real and symbolic threats. This study is one of the first attempts to address causality between deradicalization and countermeasures to conspiracy theories in the US-China relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]