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Over the last decades, China has rapidly increased its influence throughout the South Asian region, using both its hard and soft power tactics. China has succeeded in eclipsing India's influence and emerged as an important player in the region. China is making inroads in South Asia by making huge investments and constructing roads, highways, railways, sea ports, bridges, power grids, dams, and public buildings. China is pursuing a foreign policy that aims to advance its strategic and economic interests while trying to imbalance India's predominant position and contain India within the boundaries of South Asia. This is to prevent the rise of a peer competitor that can challenge or hinder the rise of China as a sole Asian power. This paper argues that the geostrategic situation of South Asian countries is such that they pose threats to India's security by aligning with the extra-regional powers. Hence, China's expanding strategic and security ties with South Asian countries have wider implications for India's security due to the complex and sensitive nature of its relationship with China. The theoretical approach of Power Transition Theory has been utilized to analyze the Sino-India power rivalry and China's growing threat to India's security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy consumption monitoring technology plays a very important role in the realization of intelligent building energy saving, but it is not accepted widely in China. The main reasons for this are the low public energy-saving awareness and incomplete informational policy instruments; thus, studying how informational policy instruments affect the adoption of energy consumption monitoring technology and the impact of energy-saving awareness is of great significance to the widespread acceptance of energy consumption monitoring technology and its role in the realization of intelligent building energy saving. This paper introduces informational policy instruments and energy-saving awareness into technology acceptance model and builds an extended technology acceptance model. A questionnaire survey of 298 respondents who related to the operation and management of public buildings was used to explore the effect mechanism of informational policy instruments on adopting energy consumption monitoring technology. The results show that (1) informational policy instruments have no direct impact on the acceptance of energy consumption monitoring technology (2) and energy-saving awareness, attitudes, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use can mediate the relationship between informational policy instruments and behavioral intention of adopting energy consumption monitoring technology, namely, informational policy instruments can affect behavioral intention through six paths which are informational policy instruments ➔ energy-saving awareness ➔ behavioral intention, informational policy instruments ➔ energy-saving awareness ➔ attitudes ➔ behavioral intention, informational policy instruments ➔ attitudes ➔ behavioral intention, informational policy instruments ➔ perceived ease of use ➔ behavioral intention, informational policy instruments ➔ perceived ease of use ➔ perceived usefulness ➔ behavioral intention, informational policy instruments ➔ perceived usefulness ➔ behavioral intention. Finally, relevant policies and suggestions are put forward based on the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Energy-efficient university campuses will play a vital role in the development of future sustainable cities, and will be important for achieving the Chinese carbon-neutrality goals. It is, therefore, necessary to develop new decision-making tools for evaluating the sustainability of campus buildings. Since university campuses typically comprise a broad variety of building types, standardized evaluation methods and tools, such as Green BIM, are needed. Green BIM (Building Information Modeling) emphasizes the importance and role of BIM technology in the design and construction of green buildings, providing a standardized framework for the decision-making process, and methods for improving the green performance of buildings. Methods: This study develops a method based on the Green BIM framework, using BIM architecture to analyse building performance, and the Assessment Standard for Green Building (GB/T 50378-2019) standard to establish benchmark values for evaluation, and project objectives. The method is evaluated on three examples of the most representative university buildings in northern China. The goal is to understand common denominators and differences between different types of campus buildings, in terms of green building indicators, that are important to consider in the early design stages of campus building complexes. Results: In this study, a library is used as a case study to demonstrate the tools for evaluating green performance. The study optimizes green performance from five aspects: surrounding environment, function layout, envelope performance and system transformation, and management measures improvement. The results show that this optimization scheme can achieve reductions of the annual loads of about 47.4%, in line with the national energy efficiency standards for public buildings. In particular, the heating load was reduced by 59.1%, and the cooling load reduced by 21.5%. Conclusion: A comprehensive approach, combining the aspects of planning, building design, system design, energy management, and energy conservation planning, is required to improve the green performance of university buildings to meet the goals. In the future, it will be further necessary to perform data mining of energy consumption patterns, and continue energy retrofitting of existing buildings and energy systems, to achieve the goal of green and low-carbon campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Productive building energy efficiency work is a non-ignored booster to achieve the sustainable development in China, and evaluating the driving forces of carbon emissions in Chinese public buildings (CECPB) plays a crucial role in China building energy efficiency work. Nevertheless, China building energy efficiency work is currently challenged by the lack of effective approaches to evaluating the driving forces affecting CECPB at a quantitative level. To improve the carbon emission control strategy of Chinese public buildings, this study utilized the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) model and ridge regression analysis to evaluate the driving forces affecting CECPB from 2000 to 2015. This study has three main results: (1) All of the five driving forces (i.e., population, urbanization level, floor area per capita of existing Chinese public buildings, GDP index in the Chinese tertiary industry sector, and carbon emission intensity in Chinese public buildings) have positive contributions to CECPB during the period of 2000-2015. (2) The different contributions of the aforementioned driving forces can be expressed by their different β values in decreasing order, as follows: floor area per capita of existing Chinese public buildings (21.12%), population (20.98%), urbanization level (20.81%), carbon emission intensity in Chinese public buildings (20.20%), and GDP index in the Chinese tertiary industry sector (19.44%). (3) The goodness of fit for the final ridge regression analysis proves that the proposed evaluation method is also applicable for evaluating these driving forces at a subitem level. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the feasibility of evaluating the driving forces affecting CECPB using the STIRPAT model and ridge regression analysis and fills the research gap. The discoveries of this study can impel the development of the carbon emission control strategy of Chinese public buildings for the upcoming phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]