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Front and back cover caption, volume 40 issue 4 VIETNAMESE UNDERGROUND LOTTERY The front cover image captures the essence of Vietnam's underground lottery game, đề. Central to the scene are runners and bookies, the critical intermediaries in this illegal yet persistent practice. In a bustling urban setting, people gather to watch lottery draws, discuss numbers and place bets. Numbers dominate the visual landscape, appearing on scraps of paper, digital displays and floating ethereally in the background. These are not mere figures, but powerful symbols carrying deep personal and cultural meanings. A player might be seen contemplating everyday objects or recalling a dream, illustrating how đề participants creatively derive their bets from daily life and nocturnal visions. The image reflects Le Hoang Anh Thu's research on how đề permeates players' routines in Ho Chi Minh City. It depicts the intersection of tradition and modernity, with the game thriving amidst a rapidly changing urban environment. The dreamlike quality of floating numbers and faint lottery ticket patterns echoes the players' belief in supernatural messages. This visual narrative encapsulates how đề transcends gambling to become a way for players to interpret their world. It invites readers to consider the broader anthropological significance of numerical symbolism across cultures, highlighting how numbers shape life narratives and cultural performances. The cover image thus offers a glimpse into a practice that connects everyday Vietnamese experiences with deeper cultural meanings, illustrating the universal yet culturally specific ways numerical reasoning permeates human life. MACROBIOTICS IN VIETNAM This image captures the essence of Le Hoang Ngoc Yen's study on macrobiotics in Vietnam, showing the striking differences between city life and traditional macrobiotic practices. The left side depicts a bustling cityscape, symbolizing the challenges of contemporary living. High‐rise buildings, heavy traffic and visible pollution represent the environmental degradation that accompanies rapid industrialization and urbanization. This side embodies the health hazards of modern life, including exposure to pollutants and processed foods, which many Vietnamese associate with the rise in chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular ailments. In contrast, the right side portrays a serene rural setting that embodies macrobiotic principles. Lush greenery, simple homes and clear water symbolize harmony with nature. Community members engage in health‐promoting activities such as gardening and cooking with fresh, organic ingredients. This side represents the perceived benefits of returning to natural, unprocessed foods and a lifestyle aligned with ancestral wisdom and environmental sustainability. Yen's research, based on extensive interviews and field visits, reveals growing concern among Vietnamese about the impact of modernization on health and the environment. Many attribute the increase in chronic diseases to chemical‐laden, processed foods and polluted environments. The macrobiotic diet, known in Vietnamese as gạo lứt muối mè ('brown rice and sesame salt'), emphasizes organic whole grains, vegetables and minimally processed foods. Followers view it as more than just a diet – it represents a return to a simpler, more natural way of life in harmony with nature. This perspective illuminates how traditional knowledge addresses modern challenges. The macrobiotic movement offers anthropologists insights into cultural constructions of health, resistance to globalized food systems, and identity negotiation in changing societies. It contributes to debates on tradition and modernity shaping health paradigms and environmental relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a panel dataset on China's state‐owned construction land supply at the prefecture level, this paper adopts the spatial panel data model to investigate the existence of spatial dependence in the mechanisms behind China's urban land expansion from 2004 to 2014. The empirical results show that China's urban land expansion has been mainly influenced by a quadruple process of urbanization, industrialization, globalization and decentralization. The strong existence of spatial dependence in China's urban land expansion can be reflected by the significant coefficient estimates of the spatial lags of both the dependent variable and independent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political‐administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty‐eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north‐eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make‐up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state‐incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state‐propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state‐sponsored mega‐shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications. This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in ten of its cities. The paper also identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electricity demand in South Africa has experienced vast changes both from a policy point of view and due to the country's great industrialisation and urbanisation. The literature dealing with the South African electricity case, to date, has not taken into account these changes and their effect to the symmetric behaviour of the residential and industrial electricity consumers. Hence, this paper aims at examining the asymmetric behaviour of the annual South African electricity demand (total, residential and non-residential) for the period 1960-2012. To do so, three different tests were used: the entropy test proposed by Racine and Maasoumi (2007. Journal of Econometrics 138, 2, 547; 2008. Econometric Reviews 28, 246), the conditional symmetry test proposed by Bai and Ng (2001. Journal of Econometrics 103, 225) and the Triples test proposed by Randles et al. (1980. Journal of the American Statistical Association 75, 168). The findings showed that there is weak evidence of asymmetry, given that the null hypothesis of symmetry can only be rejected at 10 per cent level of significance. Hence, econometric models examining the South African electricity demand during the same period are credible in their assumption of a linear data generating process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, rural development and politics in China has entered a new phase that revolves around what the central government calls 'agricultural modernization'. Transforming the once-dominant smallholding, family-based agriculture has become a focal point of the government's programme of rural rejuvenation, where a range of economic changes unleashed by urbanization and industrialization also converge. We argue that in this new context, agrarian change has become the key vantage point from which to study rural China. We review key contributions of the papers in this special issue and highlight their insights on rural differentiation, land politics and rural livelihoods. We discuss how studying the ' Chinese path' of agrarian transition can contribute to ongoing debates on key themes in agrarian studies, including both the agrarian questions of capital and of labour, and how agrarian political economy offers unique perspectives on the overall processes of capitalist development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]