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Under China's “Western Development” plan, inland China has witnessed massive urban expansion and land development, but little is known about the consequent stratification among relocated communities. This study examines the urbanization process on the outskirts of the Municipality of Yinchuan in northwestern China. Previous studies have focused on how urbanization impoverished or enriched rural communities, while this study examines how relocated communities (or teams) were differentiated in their compensation and relocation outcomes, as a combined outcome of policies and resource structures. Quantitative evidence suggests that urbanization has led to both between-team and within-team variations, and qualitative analyses illustrate why even the “lucky” teams always had “unlucky” villagers in compensation outcomes. Between-team variations were often used to mobilize collective resistance to strive for better compensation, but the rise of within-team variations has undermined the grassroots alliance against “unfair” policies. Villagers were more obsessed with individual competition of property investment based on their wealth and self-financing capabilities, but they also complained about “unjust” competition, such as the appropriation of resources based on cadres' privileges and connections. Although individual competition was celebrated under the official neoliberal market-oriented narratives, the decline of collective patronage and the resentment toward cadres' rent-seeking behaviors have added to tensions within relocated communities and contributed to their fragmentation.

BackgroundDue to its low incidence and diverse manifestations, paradoxical embolism (PDE) is still under-reported and is not routinely considered in differential diagnoses. Concomitant acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and acute pulmonary embolism (PE) caused by PDE has rarely been reported.Case presentationA 45-year-old woman presented with acute chest pain and difficulty with breathing. Multiple imaging modules including ECG, echocardiography, emergency cardioangiogram (CAG), and CT angiography of the pulmonary arteries showed acute occlusion of the posterolateral artery and acute PE. After coronary aspiration, no residual stenosis was observed. One month later, a bubble study showed inter-atrial communication via a patent foramen ovale (PFO). The AMI in this patient was finally attributed to PDE via the PFO. PFO closure was performed, and long-term anticoagulation was prescribed to prevent recurrent thromboembolic events.ConclusionsPDE via PFO is a rare etiology of AMI, especially in patients with concomitant AMI and PE. Clinicians should be vigilant of this possibility and close the inter-atrial channel for secondary prevention.

In urban China, residential mobility behaviors have changed fundamentally in recent decades. While research has been undertaken on the trends and causes of residential relocation for different population groups, less attention has been paid to micro-level processes of residential change, yet the latter underscore urban dynamics. This study addresses this through a survey conducted in Guangzhou in late 2012, which analyzes the spatial flows of residential shifts within and between three distance zones?inner core, inner suburbs and outer suburbs?to reveal complex mobility trends. In particular, hukou or household registration status, socio-economic status, the nature and rank of employment, and tenure were found to have varied effects on the probability of inward and outward shifts. More specifically, while outward shifts in recent years mainly involved local hukou holders, families with higher education levels, a higher socio-economic status or those working for government departments and public institutions were found to be more likely to settle in high-rise commodity housing in the inner core. The majority of non-hukou migrants, by contrast, moved within the same street or between adjacent streets within the same suburban area, while age, socio-economic status and homeownership were found to increase an individual's chance of an inward shift.

The concept of accessibility has been widely employed to understand the jobs-housing relationship in US cities. However, relevant studies in Chinese cities are rare. Little attention has been paid to accessibility modelling, variations among population groups, and the influence of land use arrangement and transport infrastructure in Chinese cities. To address this deficiency, the present paper provides measures on the job accessibility of workers with different hukou status in Guangzhou. The study yields the following findings: 1) inner-city districts have better job accessibility compared to suburban areas; 2) local hukou workers have significantly higher job accessibility than non-local hukou workers; 3) job suburbanization seems not to be effective in improving job accessibility or narrowing the gap between local and non-local hukou workers; and 4) investment in public transport would significantly improve the mobility and job accessibility of non-local hukou workers and help to alleviate accessibility inequality.

Jobs-housing relations and commuting have been a concern of academics and policy makers alike. Various hypotheses from the West have been tested in leading Chinese metropolises, but so far no attention has been paid to the role of hukou, a rather unique Chinese institution causing the emergence of invisible walls within cities. To address this deficiency, the present paper places hukou at the forefront in its analysis of commuting in Guangzhou and reveals that in comparison with hukou holders, non-hukou residents tend to have more balanced jobs-housing relationship, rely less on motorized transport, and spend less time on commuting than hukou holders. Furthermore, some variables have influence on commuting time for one hukou type but not the other; some other variables that have influence on both groups differ systematically in their effects.

Background: Proliferation of neural stem cells (NSCs) is crucial for recovery from spinal cord injury (SCI). The effect of PPAR-γ agonist on SCI recovery and the way it regulating NSCs proliferation are both unknown. Methods: The effects of PPAR-γ agonist (rosiglitazone) treatment on recovery from SCI and proliferation of NSCs were confirmed. The roles of mitophagy and PTEN induced putative kinase 1 (PINK1) in rosiglitazoneinduced proliferation of NSCs were explored. Details mechanisms on the transcription regulation of PINK1 by rosiglitazone were addressed. Findings: Rosiglitazone independently increased the proportion of Nestin /Brdu cells in the spinal cord and motor function of SCI rats. It reduced mitophagy and expression of PTEN induced putative kinase 1 (PINK1) in NSCs. The forkhead box protein O1 (FOXO1) was identified as the transcription factor mostly altered by rosiglitazone. Restoration of FOXO1 expression antagonized the effects of rosiglitazone on mitophagy and PINK1 expression. The FOXO1 consensus sequence (FCS) was not identified upstream of the PINK1 transcription start site, but three FCSs were found in the first intron of the PINK1 gene. All of the FCSs participated in the regulation of PINK1 transcription upon treatment with rosiglitazone and expression of FOXO1 but the proximal FCS (chr 5: 156680169-156680185, 3022 bp counting from the translation start site) exerted greater influence. Conclusions: PPAR-γ agonist could be a promising therapeutic strategy for spinal cord injury. Funding Statement:This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81870334, 81301038, 81300071, 81300279 and 81741067); the Science and Technology Program of Guangdong (Grant No. 2015A020212029); and the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou City (Grant No. 201510010048, 201607010009, 201607010010 and 201804010050). Declaration of Interests: All authors declare no potential conflict of interest. Ethics Approval Statement: All of the animal experiments complied with the ARRIVE guidelines, and they were carried out in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (NIH Publication No. 8023, revised 1978)

Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21), a recently discovered regulatory factor, plays an important role in glucose and lipid metabolism. In this study, we firstly found the FGF21 expression in white blood cells (WBCs). Then, we enrolled 51 women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and 50 pregnant women with normal blood glucose levels to determine the FGF21 levels in the WBCs and the sera at the 28th week of pregnancy, and tracked the dynamic changes of FGF21 in these women until the 7th day postpartum. Repeated Measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that there was a significant interaction effect between group and time on FGF21 levels (P

For the degree of thermal deformation nonlinear is high and difficult to predict, fuzzy neural network modeling (FNN) based on Takagi-Sugeno model was applied to the NC machine tool thermal error modeling thus the complete thermal error fuzzy neural network mathematical model on NC machine tool was established and network parameters initialization and learning method were discussed. Thermal error experiment was conducted on large NC gantry rail grinder spindle box system and two independent groups of spindle thermal error data were collected, one was used to establish thermal error fuzzy neural network prediction model and another one was used to verify the prediction accuracy of this model. The test results show that fuzzy neural network model has high prediction accuracy.

This study investigates the interaction between the homeowners of commodity housing and the Internet in transitional urban China. It examines how the homeowners make use the Internet and weave it into their everyday life in the commodity housing estates to improve their positions in both home purchase and neighborhood management. The study analyzes the emergence and use of online neighborhood forums with a special reference to Guangzhou. It argues that the neighborhood forums provide a platform within which information exchange, organization of collective actions, social interactions, and community building take place simultaneously. In the course of both online and offline interactions, users have adopted four kinds of strategies of mobilizing and organizing: common grievances, common threats, common amenities, and common attributes.

The transition from a socialist centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy, together with a land tenure system reflecting an institutionalized urban-rural divide, has produced neighborhood and housing types characterized by distinct built-environment features and socio-occupational mixes. Using data from a household survey conducted in Guangzhou, this study analyzes the interrelationship between neighborly relations and community attachment on one hand, and neighborhood satisfaction on the other, and also examines how such relationships are conditioned by the built residential environment. The results show that local networks are generally weaker in commodity-housing enclaves. However, commodity-housing estates exhibit higher community attachment and neighborhood satisfaction, even though gating appears to have minimal effects on community attachment.

This paper examines home financing in China, using data from household surveys conducted in Guangzhou and Shanghai. The nationwide Housing Provident Fund is still of minor importance. The majority of homebuyers continue to rely heavily on personal savings and parental contributions to finance home purchase. Mortgages are gaining importance, with slightly less than one-third of the purchases employing this means. Demographic attributes have relatively minor effects on mortgage loan utilisation. Socio-economic status is of somewhat greater significance; however, it exhibits contrasting effects in Guangzhou and Shanghai, which may be attributed to the difference in local housing market conditions. Migrants are discriminated by their hukou status. The findings show hukou status affects access to mortgage primarily through its impacts on the job market.

This paper uses the concept of citizenship in the social sense of membership and the right to an allocation of resources to examine the urban citizenship of migrants in Chinese metropolises with special reference to Shanghai. Citizenship in the Chinese context is interlocked with the household registration (hukou) system instituted more than 50 years ago. The paper tracks the changes in both the defacto and the hukou population in selected Chinese cities in the past 30 years to analyze how large the gate of the hukou system has been opened and under what circumstances urban hukou is conferred on migrants. Facing a flood of migration, the Shanghai Municipal Government has introduced a residence card system without challenging the existing hukou system. Blended new wine in an old bottle, a hierarchical structure of population registration and management has been set up leading to a system of citizenship stratification, which allows the municipal government to trade the differential citizenship for talents, capital, and super-low-cost labor and to avoid the social obligations to the non-constituents.

Chinese cities are undergoing massive transformation. One after another, inner-city neighbourhoods of pre-1949 origin and work-unit compounds built in the socialist period are being torn apart, giving way to glossy office towers and luxurious condominiums. Millions of people have been uprooted and forced to be relocated. Mass media and research based on case studies generally convey a message of widespread grievance among the displaced residents. Based on a survey of 1200 households conducted in Shanghai in 2006, the present study provides a systematic account of the profiles of the displaced residents, juxtaposed against other resident groups of the city. The major conclusion is that, irrespective of all the criticisms concerning unregulated demolitions and forced evictions, the housing conditions of displaced residents are somewhat better than those of other Shanghai residents, both objectively and in terms of subjective evaluations.

This paper examines the role of personal housing loans in advancing homeownership in urban China. The focus is on the Housing Provident Fund (HPF) and commercial bank mortgage loans. National data show that the use of HPF loans and bank loans has only become more common since 1998, but their share of the total expenditure on home purchase remains relatively small. Data derived from household surveys conducted in Guangzhou in 2001 and 2005 show that personal savings and parental contributions are the most important sources of home finance. The affordability of housing is closely tied to personal savings. To date, access to mortgage finance has played a relatively minor role in China's drive towards homeownership.

The gradualist housing reform over the past quarter century has produced a highly complex mix of housing tenure forms and consumption patterns in urban China. Using a sample of sixteen hundred residential histories derived from a survey conducted in 2001, this article traces how individuals and households in Beijing responded to the different phases of the urban housing reform and gradually moved from renting work unit housing to owner occupation over the period 1980 to 2001. The proportional hazards model is used to analyze the factors that affected the tenure change at different points in time. The findings show that despite gradual introduction of market mechanisms, established rules that favored seniority in the workplace and people holding redistributive powers continued to be practiced in reform China. Cadres in Party and government organizations and state-owned enterprises and people with many years in the work unit were those who were most likely to experience the ownership switch.

Beijing's residents, government officers and academics alike are very much concerned about the high price of commercial housing in the city, which is considered beyond the reach of the average citizen. The paper analyses to what extent the high housing price has led to low levels of housing affordability in the period 1992–2002. The price-to-income ratio is used to measure housing affordability. The reasons for the high housing price in Beijing are also examined.

For a prolonged period of time, the Chinese state had monopolised housing provision. Chinese people had virtually no choice of housing. Much has changed with the deepening of the market-oriented reform launched since 1979. A housing market, though not yet a full-fledged one, has been established. People now have greater freedom to choose their homes. More and more people buy houses from the market. There is, therefore, an urgent need for an inquiry into how housing decisions in China are made, what people's preferences for housing are, and what factors influence their housing choices. To this end, the authors study the joint choice of dwelling and neighbourhood by potential homebuyers in Beijing. Because the housing market in China is still in an embryonic state and highly regulated by the government, one may not be able to get information on actual housing choices to reveal housing preferences. This study thus adopts the stated preference modelling approach. Data were collected in 2001 in Beijing, capital of China. The study shows that, in general, neighbourhood variables are more important than dwelling variables in the choice of housing in Beijing. Associated with this is the importance attached to districts with a good reputation and the concern for dwelling and neighbourhood security.

Twenty-plus years of reform have brought about a highly complex system of housing tenure in urban China. Although the traditional work unit housing under rental occupancy remains the dominating tenure mode, an increasing number of urban households have become owners under various forms of subsidized homeownership. The author analyzes data derived from a survey conducted in 1996 of movers to newly completed “commodity housing” in Beijing and Guangzhou. Findings show that despite the many attempts at privatization and commodification, private housing in Beijing has become almost nonexistent. In Guangzhou, the open-market sector is better developed, and a sizable number of households have opted to move from subsidized to nonsubsidized housing. The findings also reveal that although the direction of movement is significantly related to the current tenure, it is unrelated to whether the move involves a change in tenure status.

Residential mobility can be conceptualized as an outcome of a choice process exercised under complex institutional and personal constraints. China's rather unique pattern of housing market segmentation under market transition impinges directly on residential location and relocation. Drawing upon data from a sample survey, this paper analyzes the pattern of residential moves resulting from commodity housing construction in a major Chinese city, Guangzhou. Most moves are of short distance, although the general direction is towards the urban periphery. Danweis and the municipal housing bureau, rather than the market per se, are the primary driving forces behind suburbanization in China today.

Based on a survey of households conducted in 1996, this study analyses the pattern of residential moves resulting from commodity housing development in Beijing. While short-distance moves were important, a large proportion of the moves recorded were of longer distance. A clear suburbanisation trend is discerned. The work units and the housing bureaux to a significant extent still controlled residential location and relocation in the city, even though housing in the primary market had become a commodity. A logistic regression analysis of the data shows that people who relied on the work units for housing were more inclined to end up in the outer city districts, whereas people who depended on the housing bureaux for welfare housing were more likely to be provided with inner city residences. The results also indicate the continued importance of membership of the Chinese Communist Party and its powerful influence on residential location.

The Chinese government has made repeated attempts to end the so-called welfare provision of housing so as to reduce the burden on the state and the individual work units. Development companies have been set up to undertake housing construction and the housing units sold as commodities; these are referred to as ‘commodity housing’. The author conducts a comparative study of housing consumption in Beijing and Guangzhou, drawing upon two surveys of newly completed commodity housing conducted in 1996. In Beijing, which is dominated by the traditional socialist system of economic and social organisation, only a tiny portion of such housing is traded on the open market. In Guangzhou, where many of the market-oriented reform measures were first experimented with, the open market already accounts for a substantial proportion of the newly constructed stock. In both Beijing and Guangzhou, however, the work unit still constitutes the single most important buyer and distributor of commodity housing. Further, if the analysis is restricted to the subsidised sectors, which also include housing managed by the municipal housing bureau and resettlement housing, a comparison of the two samples reveals quite similar differential factors underlying housing consumption in the two cities, despite their difference in social and economic structure. The traditional redistributive system still exerts tremendous influence on housing consumption, even in cities renowned for their openness and market orientation. Certain differences in the results between the two cities are also revealed. For example, seniority is important only in Beijing, whereas professional and technical workers assume a special position only in Guangzhou. These differences point towards the importance of contextual considerations in the study of housing consumption in China.

The housing reform in China aims at commodification and privatization of urban housing. Using data from a household survey conducted in Guangzhou, the present paper examines the relationship between a household's socio-economic characteristics and the source of housing provision, and the factors governing the tenure form. The results show that households with different sets of characteristics are associated with particular housing types, defined with reference to the source of provision, and that owners and renters differ systematically in socio-economic characteristics. Open market housing residents earn the highest income, work mainly as managers in enterprises of various ownership types or as proprietors of petty trades, and are the youngest among residents of all types of housing. Those in work unit housing are the best educated, and work mainly as managers in state-owned enterprises. Those in housing bureau housing and resettlement housing are relatively old, less well educated, earn lower i...

The use of differential pricing as a means of traffic management has been advocated by specialists in the field of transport for quite some time. Because of technical and political reasons, a full-scale pricing scheme for the use of road space has yet to be introduced. Applying the principle to a highly automatic rail system, however, is technologically much more feasible. The Mass Transit Railway Corporation of Hong Kong has implemented a so-called “revenue neutral peal pricing policy” after the completion of a second cross-harbour route- the East Harbour Crossing — in May, 1990. Passengers travelling from Kowloon to the central business district (including Jordon and Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon side and stations from Sheung Wan to Causeway Bay on the Island side) during the morning peak hour are confronted with the following choice: either (i) make use of the Nathan Road Corridor and pay 80 cents on top of normal face; or (ii) take the less congested but in general longer route via the East Harbour Crossing and get a 80 cents discount. The present paper attempts to analyse the effectiveness of this differential pricing policy in diverting passengers from the overcrowded section to the less heavily utilized route. A personal interview survey comprising a total of 1094 successful cases was conducted for this purpose. The logit regression model was employed to analyse the route choice. It is found that income, habit and journey time are the most important variables determining the route choice. The effect of cost or fare difference, although large in terms of magnitude, is only marginally significant in the statistical sense. It is suggested that efforts to change the passengers' habit and measures to shorten the train transfer time at the Quarry Bay Station for the East harbour Crossing users would be more effective in achieving this end. This is especially the case given the current political development in Hong King which renders further enlargement of the price difference a highly difficult proposition.

In September, 1984, Britain and China concluded the Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong. The Joint Declaration guarantees the continual practice of capitalism and a high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong for a period of 50 years after 1997. It helped to rebuild confidence and caused property prices to rise. However, Annex HI of the Joint Declaration places severe restraints on the present government, limiting its ability to respond to market trends and generate funds from land sales. This paper seeks to look at some of these effects. It is argued that there is very little room for the present government to maneouvre and that even now the constraints imposed by the Joint Declaration are affecting the land market in Hong Kong. Higher land prices, a slower rate of horizontal expansion of the city and a greater intensity of land use are likely consequences of the newly imposed contraints. The recent emphasis on inner city development and redevelopment vis-a-vis a new town development strategy is in part attributable to the Joint Declaration.

Public housing is an important source of accommodation in Hong Kong. Subsidies to public housing are tied to the consumption of housing services. Consumer's consumption pattern will therefore be distorted, and a welfare loss incurred as compared to an equivalent cash transfer. This paper seeks to measure the extent to which tenants' benefit from public housing subsidies. A measure of net tenant benefit is used, which is based upon the Marshallian consumer surplus concept. The results indicate that Hong Kong's public housing programme has had a significant impact upon households' consumption patterns, and that the welfare loss is relatively low.