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Acidified/calcined red mud (ACRM), a novel catalyst used in Fenton-like process, was prepared by acidification and calcination of red mud (RM). Catalyst characterization showed that iron phase of ACRM was mainly α-Fe2O3 and ACRM was a porous material with rough surface and loose structure. Degradation of butyl xanthate in Fenton-like process catalyzed by ACRM was investigated. Butyl xanthate was effectively degraded, and the degradation of butyl xanthate was well fitted by second order kinetic model. ACRM had an excellent long-term stability in a Fenton-like process. The possible mechanisms of hydroxyl radical production and butyl xanthate degradation in a Fenton-like process catalyzed by ACRM were presented.

In the construction industry, the operator's mental fatigue is one of the most important causes of construction equipment-related accidents. Mental fatigue can easily lead to poor performance of construction equipment operations and accidents in the worst case scenario. Hence, it is necessary to propose an objective method that can accurately detect multiple levels of mental fatigue of construction equipment operators. To address such issue, this paper develops a novel method to identify and classify operator's multi-level mental fatigue using wearable eye-tracking technology. For the purpose, six participants were recruited to perform a simulated excavator operation experiment to obtain relevant data. First, a Toeplitz Inverse Covariance-Based Clustering (TICC) method was used to determine the number of levels of mental fatigue using relevant subjective and objective data collected during the experiments. The results revealed the number of mental fatigue levels to be 3 using TICC-based method. Second, four eye movement feature-sets suitable for different construction scenarios were extracted and supervised learning algorithms were used to classify multi-level mental fatigue of the operator. The classification performance analysis of the supervised learning algorithms showed Support Vector Machine (SVM) was the most suitable algorithm to classify mental fatigue in the face of various construction scenarios and subject bias (accuracy between 79.5% and 85.0%). Overall, this study demonstrates the feasibility of applying wearable eye-tracking technology to identify and classify the mental fatigue of construction equipment operators.

This is a poor village located in mountainous area. The village population is less than 900 and its average annual income per capita is less than 900 yuan. However, even the 900 yuan statistical figure by the government has not been agreed upon by the villagers. Some villagers said in front of the village cadres: “How could it be 900? In my view, it’s even less than 600 yuan!” In fact, even villagers themselves cannot find out the exact figure, but poverty is definitely out there. In the eyes of officials, poverty is demonstrated by figures on forms, whereas in villagers’ eyes, poverty is a real way of life, and even a big embarrassment that is unable to be cast off.

If rural issues have become the hot issues in contemporary Chinese society, the reform of township governments naturally draws the most attention among all these issues.

My friends often ask me why I study peasant issues. I usually answer that this is the responsibility of an academic researcher.

Nowadays, “rural governance” has entered the government official discourse system and has become a policy term. In my opinion, talking about rural governance, we should not merely consider how to “govern” the countryside but first of all think about how to “govern” the government. Good governance of the government is the precondition of good rural governance.

This writing is inspired by a party of more than 70 headmasters of schools for rural migrant workers. When they first invited me to the party, I declined because I was away on a business trip. They postponed that party for me and waited until I returned to Beijing. The party, simple and warm, was hosted in a spacious classroom of Minzu University of China. Old friends were cordial and new acquaintances hit it off. In the mid and late 1990s, I hosted parties for these persons several times and invited professors from normal universities to lecture on school administration.

Editor’s Note of Phoenix Weekly: Recently, the chief editor of Phoenix Weekly interviewed Zhao Shukai and had a discussion on present and future social stability issue.

In the early autumn in 2000, the Harvard campus was bustling more than usual as it was the time for students to return after the summer vacation. There was a Vietnamese restaurant near the campus and many of the Harvard staff went there to have lunch.

According to the rules of democracy, the basic logic of grassroots democracy should be letting people solve their own problems and resolve their own contradictions at the grassroots level. Allowing and encouraging local explorations and breakthroughs should become the basic strategies for developing grassroots democracy in China.

There are so many friends coming to my speech on rural democracy in such a cold day, which shows your enthusiasm of this issue. Why I am going to talk about this topic? It is because this is a highlighted issue in both rural study and political research. Of course, present study of rural democracy study is no longer as hot as before. Especially since the beginning of the 21st century, academic and social attention to this issue has sharply declined. Against this background, I think it is necessary for us to discuss the following questions: What is the status of rural democracy? What will be its prospect? What will be the direction of its development?

Reviewing the targets and objective process of the reform at the county and township levels in the past two decades, we find that the actual evolution has often gone astray from the good intentions of the policy design and run into a new predicament. In a certain sense, this predicament can be summarized as a simple system of circulation characterized with “decentralization leads to disorder, disorder then follows centralization, and centralization causes stagnation,” but the problem per se is much more complex and profound than such an understanding. When the target design clashes with the actual process, such divergence and embarrassment force us to reflect on whether the target design or the operation in the reform process is problematic. The further question is whether we should adhere to the established targets. If we shouldn’t, what then should be the new target? If we should, how do we push the reform forward?

Like many peasants in China, I have tried to imagine the life of peasants in the United States. During my investigations in the countryside, when I struck up a conversation with peasants, they often asked about “peasants in America.”

Why should we develop grassroots democracy? There are many reasons and plenty of theoretical resources for it. However, if we carefully observe the transformation of China’s grassroots society, especially the new structure emerging in the grassroots organizational system, we can find that grassroots democracy actually is the realistic requirement of such a profound organizational transformation.

The process of reform requires institutional rearrangements. As far as rural reform is concerned, the first challenge in the methodological principles is deciding what the basis for the institutional arrangements should be. Of course, a new system is usually conceptualized or textualized by officials and scholars. However, the essence of the new system should come from and be selected and created by peasants. The historical process of reform has manifested that any institutional arrangements contrary to the wishes and action logic of peasants are doomed to failure.

Subaltern studies are gaining the attention of Chinese researchers, especially those in the fields of social science and political science. In recent years, the academic activities of Western scholars in China such as Professor Elizabeth Perry in the Department of Government at Harvard University and Professor James C. Scott in the Department of Political Science at Yale University have been promoting the research of Chinese scholars in this area. I have also become familiar with subaltern studies through communications and discussions with the two professors. Considering the reality of China’s rural research, I think that subaltern studies should be greatly advocated in China.

The new countryside construction has been carried out vigorously. The development of rural China is entering an exciting golden era. With the policy orientation of “promoting agriculture by industry and driving the development of countryside through cities” and the advantageous environment of a huge increase of government investment, what are the key issues of rural development? There may be different answers if we observe rural society taking different perspectives.

The more relevant that affairs are to people’s interests, the more enthusiastically they will participate. International experiences have demonstrated that if the participation channels are not open and economic demands cannot be expressed effectively, these demands may easily be turned to political ones.

During almost the entire decade of the 1980s, the No. 9 Courtyard was a hub of Chinese rural policy research. The first wave of the five “No. 1 Documents of the CPC Central Committee” originated there. Located west of the ancient Beijing imperial city wall, this courtyard, full of historical sense and mystery, once gathered quite a few high-level political figures.

The reform in township governments has not yet reached satisfactory results for many reasons, the most basic being the lack of a driving force. In many cases, it is the demand of the superior government and the wish of people to undertake reforms. However, the grassroots government itself lacks the desire to change. Looking back to the 1980s, township reforms went through a history of “hard work” and “bad harvest,” and the key point was that many of the reforms were not initiated from intrinsic motivation, but compelled by the situation in order to cope with the higher-ups. Thus, the “reform” process was just showy, and it was difficult to achieve effective results. In my opinion, if the peasants’ participation can be stimulated, the reform in township governments will gain a strong driving force.

A reform era is a glamorous stage of history, on which performances have created different historical figures, most notably reformers. They not only come from the higher levels, but also from the grassroots. In a sense, it is the latter that have brought up the former because it is grassroots reformers’ exploration and innovation that provide the chances for high-level political leaders to make the right choices.

First of all, I’d like to say thanks to www.zhongdaonet.com and the Son of Peasant Group of Beijing Normal University for organizing this reading party around the author’s new books. And it is a great inspiration for me to see so many young students concerned with the research of peasant issues.

The three decades of rural reform coincide with the three decades of peasant migration. To observe the three decades, we can take two different perspectives: one from peasant performance and the other from government performance.

Various new social problems and demands have been emerging in the process of social transformation. It is far from enough simply to rely on the government capacity to solve the problems and meet the demands and therefore an organized social force is in need. Both the government and social groups need civil organizations from the bottom up to exert a positive effect. Civil organizations are a crucial condition for the advancement of democratic politics; on the other hand, they are also a consequence of the development of democratic politics. Currently, in China’s development of grassroots democracy, civil organizations have received increasing attention.

Globalization is not just economic globalization but also contains plenty of political content. As far as Chinese grassroots democracy is concerned, globalization has brought about complicated impacts. The so-called “Third Wave” has wide influences toward political reform, social development, and promotion of grassroots democracy in China. Such influences have taken place and continue to exist. In a sense, the development of China’s democratic politics has actually become a component of the international wave of democratization.

For me, Mr. Lu Zixiu is both an elder and my “colleague.” In terms of seniority, I am surely a junior because he is in his eighties and I am just over fifty; in terms of career, both of us served as Mr. Wang Yuzhao’s secretaries, i.e., subordinates of the same leader in different years. What is more important is that both of us are engaged in rural research and know each other well.

Generally speaking, China is undergoing economic transition and social transformation, but the truth is that not only economy and society but also politics and government are changing or need to be changed. Moreover, there are inner connections between social and economic transition and government transition, neither can be neglected or carried out alone. From the survey of grassroots government, involution, institutional alienation, and reform path lock are the key issues to be addressed for government transition which needs to break ground in three dimensions: grassroots democracy, grassroots self-governance, and government under law.

Observing the developing process of China’s grassroots democracy since the reform, we come up with two findings: the social foundation bolstering democratic development in China is growing vigorously and various emerging forces are a huge impetus for democratization that will not be affected by the developing pace of corresponding institutional arrangements; on the other hand, democratic development itself is in urgent need of accelerating the pace of legal system construction. In the situation where the rule of law remains insufficient, the growth of democratic power will lead to disorder in political life or even chaos in social life, which has been demonstrated by many conflicts emerging in practice.

Democracy is not just an ideal social state or a kind of political value. Equally important, democracy is also the basic guarantee of social harmony.

Contracting land to individual households and turning collective management to family management was a simple issue for peasants as the process was not complicated and the methods were easy. However, to the government, it was not an easy thing but a so-called “big issue.” Thirty years ago, from local villages to the center and from common people to high-level officials, heated debates, even struggles, happened around the issue of collective farming or individual farming. “Socialism,” “capitalism,” “Marx–Leninism,” “revisionism,” and so on, from grassroots to the high level, from scholars to officials, there were both opposite ideologies and power conflicts. What is the reason for it? I believe it was due to “politics.”

A few days ago, I passed by the main gate of No. 9 Courtyard by chance. I could not help stopping and looking at it: the thick and dignified gate with the marble doorplate reading “Mansion of Prince Li of the Qing Dynasty” is just as before. Beside the gate, soldiers stood on guard with guns. Nobody knows exactly how many recruit–veteran successions occurred at the posts, but it still seemed to be familiar to me. More than 20 years have passed, but the appearance here, compared to the first time I entered the gate, has been exactly the same. However, I know that the deep and mysterious courtyard has totally changed as far as the persons working inside are concerned. In those years, this place had been a “meeting place of wind and clouts” for Chinese rural reforms. Every move within the courtyard had been closely associated with Chinese rural reforms, but now it has disappeared from the sight of rural researchers.

The driving force of the development of grassroots democracy in China can be summarized from two angles. The first is socioeconomic development. Economic and social changes have provided demands and motivation for people’s democratic participation, and they have also provided people abilities and space for their participation. The second is the government’s leadership and direct promotion.

This village has been notorious for its “chaos” in recent years. It is a big village with a large population of around 3000, hence its falling into chaos also led to a significant impact.

In my rural surveys, I often heard some grassroots officials questioned the villagers’ self-governance and thought it was unrealistic to grant autonomy to peasants because they hold that the present quality of Chinese peasants is too low to exercise democracy. But when the topic turned to a specific job, they often complained, “Peasants know too much now and it is more and more difficult to deal with them. The peasants are so hard to be managed”. At this time I often asked, “Does it mean that their quality is improving?”

In 1982, I began my first job to deal with people’s letters and visits for petition. By this year (2007), it has been exactly a quarter century. If dated back to the beginning of the reform in 1978, the history of the system of letters and visits has lasted 30 years. During this period, peasants’ petition (appealing to the higher authorities for help), as a remarkable social phenomenon, has experienced a dramatic development, and such a phenomenon really provokes our thoughts.

Five compounds, terephthalic acid mono-[2-(4-carboxy-phenoxycarbonyl)-vinyl] ester (1), (E)-3-(5′-hydroperoxy-2,2′-dihydroxy[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-yl)-2-propenoic acid (2), 3,4,5-trihydroxybenzoic acid (3), succinic acid (or butanedioic acid) (4), and 2,3,4,5,6-pentahydroxybenzoic acid (5), were isolated from Phyllanthus urinaria. The structures of these compounds were elucidated by means of spectral techniques including IR, MS, and 1D/2D NMR. 1 and 2 are new compounds.