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Embedded librarianship is an inevitable outcome of the information era. Since the concept of embedded librarianship emerged in 2004, a flurry of papers have been published. In China, many related research papers have also been published, but few of them focus on the practice of embedded librarianship in libraries of Chinese universities. This article investigates the current progress and practice of embedded librarianship in China. A total of 84 Chinese university libraries were surveyed. This article demonstrates that a few university libraries have achieved promising embedded practices, but most remain in the initial stages. Most librarians do not clearly understand the concept of embedded librarianship. To date, the embedded model is still in the transforming stage, and incentive mechanisms and evaluation systems have not been perfected. Based on these results, some suggestions are proposed to accelerate the development of embedded librarianship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining the origins of agriculture is a topic of ongoing debate in anthropology. Traditional explanations have often been categorized as either push or pull models. The former considers the transition as an adaptive response to environmental change, and the latter views farming as a result of cultural innovations. The theoretical debates reflect the traditional dichotomy between materialism and idealism in archaeological research. Yet underlying both approaches is an anthropocentric ontology that privileges humans over nonhumans as the principal agents of historical change. This paper seeks to transcend the limitation through a close examination of the role of nonhumans in the origins of rice agriculture in southern China. Challenging traditional approaches that attribute the rise of agriculture to human interventions on the environment, this paper explores how the active agencies exercised by nonhumans, such as plants and material tools, entrapped humans into a long-term dependence and later into a sedentary lifestyle, eventually leading up to fully agricultural societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trump's earlier statements about China and the US losing out on trade primed his supporters for the "China virus" narratives that epitomized Trump's references to the COVID-19 pandemic. Keywords: Trump; China; victimhood; nationalism EN Trump China victimhood nationalism 882 889 8 10/04/22 20221001 NES 221001 This paper analyses the deployment of victimhood nationalism towards China by Donald Trump during his two presidential campaigns and presidency. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing on interviews with Chinese judges, this paper reveals the major effects of judicial reforms during the past half decade. It focuses on the ramifications of a new quota and responsibility system for judges and on the strengthening of central-government controls over the judiciary. The paper differentiates between what the Party considers to be legitimate and illegitimate influences on judges, which sheds light on recent legal developments and the role of the judiciary in Chinese governance. The article finds that illegitimate influences on courts have declined palpably, but what the Party perceives to be legitimate influences have persisted and even been reinforced. More direct, comprehensive control over judges has replaced previously fragmented, multilayered mechanisms. Despite important changes, the reforms did not lead to institutional independence of Chinese judges, nor has the stature of the courts in China's political landscape changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines child-rearing strategies among Sino-African couples living in China. It explores how and why parents make decisions about their children's citizenship, education, and future country of residence. We argue that there is no universal pattern of child-rearing among Sino-African couples, and that parents are influenced by myriad factors, including their socioeconomic status, community and familial support systems, cultural and religious backgrounds, and value systems. Child-rearing practices are further shaped by wider social systems, such as the structural constraints of China's hukou (residential registration) system, rigid immigration control, and even unstable systems of international trade. Among the various influences, we identify future settlement plans, socioeconomic status, and religious/cultural views as the most significant in shaping approaches to child-rearing. These and other forces often intersect in ways that create an environment of economic, legal, and cultural uncertainty, heightening the challenges that Sino-African parents must navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I trace the emergence of a more-than-human antitoxic politics where microbes are cultivated agents of environmental remediation. Following a successful anti-incinerator protest, a group of urban waste activists in China turned to the brewing of eco-enzymes, a fermented solution made from organic waste, as a means of fortifying the health of bodies, homes, and their local environment. I illustrate how the material effects of microbes catalyze a grassroots response of experimental speculation among middle-class waste activists in response to China's polluted environment. Following feminist science and technology studies scholars and the work of Roberto Esposito, I argue that eco-enzyme brewers engage in a microbiopolitics of immunity and collaboration to reconstitute human and nonhuman collectives in acts of cooperation and care for the environment. Eco-enzymes brewing illustrates how the uncertain effects of microbial transformation can sustain an experimental inquiry into the modes of ecological action that are possible under China's authoritarian politics and polluted landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of economic development and food safety concerns, an increasing number of middle-class consumers in China are demanding higher-quality food and more environmentally friendly food production methods. In this paper, we design a choice experiment to assess Chinese consumers' preference for high-quality imported salmon through their willingness to pay (WTP) for various product attributes, especially the production environment attribute. We included a policy consequentiality script at the beginning of the survey and a consequentiality perception check at the end to test the effect of the device on Chinese consumers' survey responses. The results show that Chinese consumers value the safety certification label of salmon with the highest premium, followed by chilled, wild-caught, and dark red color attributes of salmon. The WTP premiums from the consumers who were provided with the consequentiality script are significantly lower than those from consumers not provided with such a script, and the consequentiality perceptions are also enhanced by the script treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an accompanying paper (Journal of Anthropological Research 73(2):149-80, 2017), the authors assess current archaeological and paleobiological evidence for the early Neolithic of China. Emerging trends in archaeological data indicate that early agriculture developed variably: hunting remained important on the Loess Plateau, and aquatic-based foraging and protodomestication augmented cereal agriculture in South China. In North China and the Yangtze Basin, semisedentism and seasonal foraging persisted alongside early Neolithic culture traits such as organized villages, large storage structures, ceramic vessels, and polished stone tool assemblages. In this paper, we seek to explain incipient agriculture as a predictable, system-level cultural response of prehistoric foragers through an evolutionary assessment of archaeological evidence for the preceding Paleolithic to Neolithic transition (PNT). We synthesize a broad range of diagnostic artifacts, settlement, site structure, and biological remains to develop a working hypothesis that agriculture was differentially developed or adopted according to "initial conditions" of habitat, resource structure, and cultural organization. The PNT of China is characterized by multiple, divergent evolutionary pathways: between the eastern and western parts of North China, and between and the Yangtze Valley and the Lingnan region farther south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth and significance of scientific research into the origins of agriculture in China calls for fresh examination at scales large enough to facilitate explanation of cultural evolutionary processes. The Paleolithic to Neolithic transition (PNT) is not yet well-understood because most archaeological research on early agriculture cites data from the more conspicuous and common early Neolithic sites. In this, the first of two papers, we synthesize a broad range of early Neolithic archaeological data, including diagnostic artifacts, settlement patterns, site structure, and biological remains, to consider agriculture as a system-level adaptive phenomenon. Although farming by this period was already well-established in much of North China and the middle Yangtze River basin, echoes of the foraging past can be found in the persistence of hunting-related artifacts in North China's Loess Plateau and aquatic-based intensification and vegeculture in South China. Our analysis of the growing body of Chinese data and projections using Binford's hunting and gathering database indicate that agriculture was differentially developed, adopted, or resisted by foragers according to measurable, predictable initial conditions of habitat that influenced diet breadth. In a subsequent paper (Journal of Anthropological Research 73(3), 2017, doi:10.1086/692660), we will use these findings as a platform for a deeper consideration of the emerging archaeological record of the PNT, and to develop hypotheses for the last foraging and first farming adaptations in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent fossil and genetic data poses new questions about the degree of variability of the Late Pleistocene fossils from China and the possible interaction of modern humans with other archaic hominins. This paper presents a general overview of the variability of the dental fossil record from some key Late Pleistocene localities in China. Our study reveals that despite having similar chronologies, not all the samples present the same suite of derived traits. This finding may reflect complex demographic dynamics with several migrations and dispersals and/or a degree of population substructure similar to that described for the African continent. Simple and linear models to explain the origin and dispersals of Homo sapiens seem to be progressively outdated by the new fossil, demographic and genetic evidence. In addition, we warn about genetic admixture as a possible source of morphological variability and we hypothesize that some skeletal features of Homo floresiensis and Denisovans could be related to their hybridization with other hominin groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many archaeological and paleoanthropological discoveries have been made in China over the last 2 decades. Among these findings, I particularly note the recently excavated Late Pleistocene sites in the loess plateau in northern China and others found in a number of river basins in southern China. They all provide significant new information concerning Late Pleistocene human migrations across this vast region. A result of these excavations is the confirmation that flake- and pebble-tool industries dominated the region before the late marine isotope stage (MIS) 3. Small-flake-tool assemblages emerged suddenly during the late MIS 3 in South China. Blade industry first arrived in northwest China at the end of MIS 3, and microblade assemblages appeared in the loess plateau and the surrounding areas at a later stage. In this paper I briefly introduce the progress in Chinese Paleolithic archaeology and discusses Late Pleistocene human migrations and related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine, on the one hand, an urban rumor about the city of Shenzhen, China, circulated within Hong Kong and American public and popular media, and, on the other, rumors within European and American scientific communities about scientific authorship at the world's largest genomics sequencing firm, which also happens to be located in that same city. I describe two sets of rumors connected to each other by themes of surveillance, science, technology, bodily leisure, and intellectual labor and simply locate them at the site that is their subject. In so doing, I aim not only to falsify cultural imaginaries about this Chinese city and its dystopian reputation as the "city of fakes" in global public culture but also to examine how and why this site so productively spawns gradations of the truthvalue and illicitness, attending to the particular configurations of "fact" and human capital that this city, as a site of technologized bioproduction, inaugurates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main challenges faced by anthropologists and practitioners who work in international development is the identification of locally appropriate objectives and outcomes for development projects. In recent years, improving the quality of life of target populations has emerged as a key objective of many development agencies, but there is little consensus about how best to define and operationalize this concept. This paper applies anthropological research methods to understand a local population's definitions of quality of life in one rapidly developing township in rural Sichuan, China. The paper also examines the patterning of attitudes about quality of life across occupational groups in the study community. Data are drawn from ethnographic interviews and quantitative surveys. Findings suggest that villagers' definitions of quality of life consist of a range of themes related to both material living standards and subjective measures. Occupational groups differ markedly in their quality-of-life ratings, a pattern that is in line with the widening economic disparities in rural communities throughout China as the nation's economy undergoes liberal economic reforms. Implications for anthropological theory and practice, and for the practice of participatory development, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been much experimental work on floral traits that are under selection from mutualists and antagonists, selection by abiotic environmental factors on flowers has been largely ignored. Here we test whether pollen susceptibility to rain damage could have played a role in the evolution of the reproductive architecture of Davidia involucrata, an endemic in the mountains of western China. Flowers in this tree species lack a perianth and are arranged in capitula surrounded by large (up to 10 cm) bracts that at anthesis turn from green to white, losing their photosynthetic capability. Flowers are nectarless, and pollen grains are presented on the recurved anther walls for 5-7 days. Flower visitors, and likely pollinators, were mainly pollen-collecting bees from the genera Apis, Xylocopa, Halictus, and Lasioglossum. Capitula with natural or white paper bracts attracted significantly more bees per hour than capitula that had their bracts removed or replaced by green paper. Experimental immersion of pollen grains in water resulted in rapid loss of viability, and capitula with bracts lost less pollen to rain than did capitula that had their bracts removed, suggesting that the bracts protect the pollen from rain damage as well as attracting pollinators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies teacher job satisfaction in impoverished rural areas in northwest China. In China, teacher retention is a growing concern. From a long-term perspective, market transition and the opening up of labor markets has created alternate career paths for current and potential teachers. The decentralization of school finance in China has disequalized the economic resources available to schools in different locales. This article, examines the factors leading to satisfaction among teachers serving poor rural communities. A survey of rural primary school teachers, principals, and village leaders conducted in the year 2000 in Gansu, a northwestern province that is one of China’s poorest was analyzed. This paper also test hypotheses about three kinds of factors associated with teacher satisfaction.

Household refuse is ideally suited for the comparative study of social and economic inequality. Compositional variation revealed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling of artifact assemblage data from multiple households is readily interpreted as evidence for qualitative differences in social prestige, wealth, and productive activities. Different configurations of these variables reflect differences in social structure and the underlying bases of inequality between communities. Comparing the average of the Euclidean distances from which each scaling was produced provides a direct and quantitative means of assessing differences in the magnitude of assemblage differences interpreted as social inequality between cases. Gini indices calculated from the same household artifact assemblage data provide a similarly direct and quantitative means of measuring differences in wealth inequality between communities. In this paper, household artifact assemblage data from three Neolithic settlements in three different areas of northern China are analyzed. Our analysis reveals differences between some of China's earliest complex societies in terms of the kinds and degrees of inequality represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to a cast iron industry was essential to the development of ancient China. Previous studies, however, did not address precisely how this process occurred and how the preexisting bronze industry could have served as the foundation for the transition. This paper develops a framework focusing on three parameters—techniques, assemblages of final products, and production organization—to investigate the mechanism of the transition to cast iron. Results of two case studies indicate that the three parameters do not demonstrate dramatic changes between the two industries. Also, cast iron and bronze foundry workers were not segregated; they often worked side by side at the same foundry. Very likely, the cast iron foundry workers adopted and adjusted the original bronze production techniques and, consequently, maintained the preexisting organization. This study illustrates how cast iron manufacturing developed based on the indigenous bronze production in the Central Plains of China, and aims more broadly to contribute to the discussion of technological transitions in archaeological contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discussing the main forces shaping rapid fertility decline, current studies take the Yicheng two-child program as an example showing that the role of the birth-control policy in China's fall in fertility is not as strong as commonly thought. Based on a close examination of documentary evidence, this paper demonstrates that the Yicheng program is not vastly different from the national population-control effort with regard to the timing of marriage, the number of children and the childbearing interval. We argue that in Yicheng the two-child policy has done more to effect a demographic transition to low fertility than has socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic and the global diffusion of modern human populations remain hotly debated topics. The timing and pace of the transition in China are especially uncertain. This paper examines spatial and temporal variation among Paleolithic assemblages in North China dated to Marine Isotope Stage 3. There are two main systems of blank production in evidence: one is Levallois-like whereas the other involves simple unprepared flake cores. The Levallois-like assemblages are limited to northwest China: further dispersal of the technology was probably hindered by the presence of established populations in the eastern part of North China using long-established flake core technology. Consequently we should view North China as consisting of two geographic entities with respect to research on the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. Changes within flake assemblages represent an independent pattern of cultural evolution, and it will be important to clarify when and how other aspects of Upper Paleolithic behavior were expressed there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the Chinese Paleolithic industries between 300 ka and 40 ka, a time span now termed the "later Early Paleolithic" (LEP) in the Chinese chronological scheme. It describes the unique features of LEP remains in China compared with contemporaneous materials in Africa and western Eurasia as well as the internal diversity and complexity of these Chinese Paleolithic assemblages. Basic features of LEP remains in China include the persistent and conservative pebble-tool and simple flake-tool traditions, the use of poor-quality local raw materials, tool fabrication on pebbles and direct use of unretouched flakes, opportunistic flaking, simple and casual modification, and the lack of obvious temporal trends. The diversity and complexity of Chinese Paleolithic cultures as they are expressed in terms of the major difference between southern China's pebble-tool tradition and northern China's simple flake-tool tradition are also assessed. Based on such generalizations and analyses, a comprehensive behavioral model is proposed to explain the unique features of LEP cultures in China and the alternative pathway of human evolution and adaptation in China during that period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research on prenatal health care in China from 2005 to 2007, in this paper I show how ideas about potentiality have a tendency to increase anxieties about anomalous births that many believe can and should be prevented. Focusing on maternal serum screening (MSS), I examine how through local agencies and with the help of the market the state has developed a "quality-assurance regime" that recruits expectant mothers to take active measures of self-assurance. Under such circumstances, MSS is promoted as the safest and most economical and efficient method to predict the potential of the only child. In practice, however, as a screening test, the results of MSS only offer a probability, either "high risk" or "low risk." Facing such uncertainty, pregnant women question the doctors who conduct the tests and deliver the results that offer only vague information. At this point, the quality-assurance regime fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Deng Xiaoping actively participated in, effectively implemented and strictly supervised Mao's notorious utopian project, the Great Leap Forward, which claimed the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people. The paper will also consider the negative influences of Deng on the political processes of the Chinese Communist Party during the devastating campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 9000 cal BP, the first sedentary villages, marking the Early Neolithic, are present in Northeast China, North China, and the Middle and Lower Yangtze regions, but plant and animal domesticates do not make a substantial contribution to subsistence until after several more millennia, when domesticated millet or rice agricultural production is finally in place. While archaeobotanical approaches have been the primary focus of recent studies, this paper looks specifically at the cultural developments in these four regions leading up to the emergence of agriculture in each. It is hypothesized that agriculture does not emerge independently in each of these regions but rather in interrelated steps through variable forms of interaction and information and social exchange within and between these regions. Interaction is currently evidenced through shared forms of material culture and by parallel and contemporaneous cultural developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a Levantine model for the origins of cultivation of various wild plants as motivated by the vagaries of the climatic fluctuation of the Younger Dryas within the context of the mosaic ecology of the region that affected communities that were already sedentary or semisedentary. In addition to holding to their territories, these communities found ways to intensify their food procurement strategy by adopting intentional growth of previously known annuals, such as a variety of cereals. The Levantine sequence, where Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene Neolithic archaeology is well known, is employed as a model for speculating on the origins of millet cultivation in northern China, where both the archaeological data and the dates are yet insufficient to document the evolution of socioeconomic changes that resulted in the establishment of an agricultural system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 10 years, flotation techniques have been introduced and implemented in Chinese archaeology. As a result, a tremendous quantity of plant remains have been recovered from archaeological sites located all over China. These plant remains include crops that might have been domesticated in China—such as rice, foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and soybean—as well as crops that were introduced into China from other parts of world—such as wheat and barley. The new archaeobotanic data provide direct archaeological evidence for the study of the origins and development of agriculture in China. This paper attempts a synthesis of these new archaeobotanic data while presenting some new ideas about the origins and development of ancient agriculture in China, including the rice agriculture tradition that originated around the middle and lower Yangtze River areas; the dry-land agriculture tradition, with millets as major crops, centered in North China; and the ancient tropical agriculture tradition located in the tropical parts of China, where the major crops seem to be roots and tubers, such as taro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for shark fins is arguably the most important determinant of the fate of shark populations around the world. This paper examines the role that social and economic factors in China play in driving the trade both historically and under current trends of economic growth. The use of shark fin as a traditional and socially important luxury food item, along with rapidly expanding consumer purchasing power is expected to place increasing pressure on available resources. At the same time, the migration of the trade from its former center in Hong Kong to Mainland China has resulted in a severe curtailment of the ability to monitor and assess impacts on shark populations. Although recent international policy responses to this issue have resulted in the implementation of shark finning bans in some areas, these measures are likely to encourage full use of dead sharks; i.e. discourage carcass discards, as called for under the FAO International Plan of Action-Sharks, but not reduce shark mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the problem of non-cooperative fishing between Mainland China (MC) and Taiwan (TW) as well as the effects of rising sea surface temperature (SST) on the grey mullet fishery. The results show that Taiwan can expand its fleets to a greater extent when facing an imperfectly elastic demand for fish than when facing a perfectly elastic demand. In addition, when consumer welfare is included in the determination of the size of fleets, fleet size can expand more than when profit is considered alone. It is also shown that the expansion of the fleets in MC and the rising SST cause the rent obtained from the TW fishery to decline, and that Taiwan may partially offset such an adverse effect by adjusting the fleet size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to evaluate the current literature on descent and lineage organization in China and its significance for anthropological discussions of kinship theory. Despite increasing anthropological skepticism over the applicability of lineage theory and the corresponding decline of interest in unilineal descent, the existence of lineage organization has been an unchallenged fact for anthropologists and historians of China, in turn offering explicit support for lineage theory. Recent historical research has shed light on the diversity of Chinese kin organization over time and space for the most part without questioning the model itself. While I do not contest the existence of lineages in China, I argue that the historical conditions of their evolution squarely contradict the theoretical principles upon which lineage theory has been constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the ways in which Chinese translators of Western science books introduce new bibliography features into their works in order to make these books compatible with traditional Chinese reading practices. The author explains that such features are necessary to help transfer scientific knowledge from a Western to an Eastern context. Such bibliographic features discussed include glossaries, indices, and text layout.

Presents an abstract of a paper discussed during the 1993 Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting. Bronze Age burials in western Sichuan aand northwestern Yunnan as tombs constructed with natural stone slabs.