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Abstract: Since the open door policy in 1978 China has undergone enormous economic and social changes making China to be one of the largest economies and consumers of resources in the world. The pronounced differences in income and lifestyles especially between urban and rural China were also part of China''s economic rebirth. This paper explores current trajectories and scenarios for urbanization and lifestyle changes and other important socio-economic trends in China. The implications of these changes are analysed for Beijing in particular and then compared to China for the year 2020. These changes by 2020 are modelled using input–output analysis in combination with the Ecological Footprint and Water Footprint. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

ABSTRACTInstitutional and learners' discourses about English and the implications for ?China English?. China's politics and international relations with Western powers have historically determined the role and status of the English language in China (Adamson, 2004). Following the country's Open Door Policy in the 1970s, the entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Beijing Olympics, English, once considered a barbaric language, has been enjoying unprecedented popularity. The seven years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics saw a series of foreign language campaigns in different sectors of Chinese society. The Beijing Olympics provided China with an opportunity to improve its world position and to ?reclaim? ? and show the world ? its glorious past. Since 2001, when China won the bid to host the Olympics in 2008, English learning campaigns have promoted both so-called ?standard? and ?authentic? English. The purpose of these campaigns was not only to ensure a successful Olympics, but also to equip the people with a tool essential for modernising and integrating China into the global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special rights and responsibilities of the great powers have traditionally been treated as a key component – even a primary institution – of international society in the English School literature. Recent interpretivist work has focused on the meanings of special responsibilities in contemporary international society with far less scholarly attention being given to the corollary of this – special rights. This article uses an interpretivist approach to attempt to uncover what recent debates over China's right or otherwise to a sphere of influence in East Asia tells us about understandings of great power rights in contemporary international society. The argument advanced is that if Beijing's right to a sphere of influence is successfully rejected by the rest of international society without repudiating its status as a great power more broadly, China will indeed be a great power without historical precedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rise has been accompanied by a rise in nationalism. But what are the characteristics of this nationalism now being witnessed? Does it support China's constructive engagement with the international order, or does it seek to assert China's supremacy? These questions lie at the hub of a rapidly expanding secondary literature on the emergence of nationalism in China and its impact on China's foreign relations. What is, however, absent from the academic discourse is the voice of the Chinese people themselves. What are their perceptions of the nation-state, and how do these beliefs shape their views of China's relationship with East Asia? To address this gap, we conducted a series of large-scale surveys in Beijing between 2011 and 2013 on the twinned topics of domestic nationalism and international relations. Our findings, as reported below, represent an initial attempt to answer this final and, arguably, most critical set of questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the spectacle of Beijing 2008, China's domestic prestige has been both enhanced and rigorously called into question. Its international position has likewise been both self-evidently improved and critically (some would say 'aggressively') examined. Any amount of critical distance in assessment forces us to recognize the real improvements China has made that have been illuminated via the Games, right alongside the serious challenges the country faces -- both those arising as a result of its Olympic efforts, and those that have been there all along. 'Ordeals' to come have conventionally been categorized in terms of 'internal' domestic issues vs. 'external' international issues, despite the obvious dependence of the latter on the former. Along with the obvious 'realist' international political paradigm of state interaction, the ebb and flow of Chinese suzerainty throughout history casts today's Chinese polity in a familiar game of position, the politics of which are as cosmological as not. Viewed in anthropological terms, the Beijing Games was a meaningful event in an ongoing process where the Olympics as political ritual energizes a certain pregnant geopolitics, the participating audience of which includes all other polities -- and especially those in the Pacific Rim region. This analysis argues that the ritual process of the 2008 Games indexes a logic that renders recent resource diplomacy and global position building productively understandable; a process comparable in its ritual structure to the contemporary seeding of Confucian Centres across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]