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Xinjiang is located on the northwest border of China, which is an important agricultural production and export base. In order to establish integrated management of agricultural products and service information system, China put forward the ″Golden Agriculture Project″ program in 1994, whose construction development is still insufficient because of the backward informatization level in Xinjiang. This article uses the management theory to analyze the shortcomings of the current three information platforms for agricultural products, based on the current situation of the Xinjiang΄s informationization and the different demand for information of each node on the supply chain of agricultural products. Proposing an interactive platform for integrated information of agricultural products which combines farm production, supply and marketing of Xinjiang agricultural products. This will help the information platform to play the role of information collection and distribution, and to improve the efficiency of the circulation of Xinjiang agricultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter studies the formation of the new national and provincial elites during the era of Jiang Zemin. The focus is on two trends that have been unfolding in parallel, but in tension with each other. The first trend is growing political localism; the second is the strengthening of institutional control in an attempt to limit the abuses of power based on local interests and personal political networks. Political localism is stronger and more legitimate today than ever before in the history of the People's Republic of China. Indeed, more generally, through the reform era – but especially since about 1997 – conflicts of interest between regions, factions, and social groups have come more out in the open than ever before. At the same time, new institutional mechanisms have been put in place to limit favoritism and abuse of power by particularistic (including localistic) interest groups. The central government has made continual efforts to coordinate the multifaceted political demands raised by various regions and by new socioeconomic forces in this fast-changing country. China's political and economic life during the Jiang era is filled with several seemingly contradictory trends. This is particularly evident in the recruitment of political leaders. On one hand, informal networks are ubiquitous in the formation of the new leadership. These networks includ regionally based groups (tongxiang, or fellow provincials), particularly the notorious Shanghai Gang, and those based on kinship with top leaders in Beijing (taizi, or princelings). Such favoritism and nepotism, however, have also caused a growing public demand, especially from backward inland regions, for a more representative leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The balance shifted in 2001 to greater globalization, interpreted as priority for security and insistence on active U.S. leadership. The change began when the Bush administration took office and accelerated after the September 11 attack on the United States. This shift altered the environment for regionalism, which was squeezed between new U.S. assertiveness and resurgent nuclear blackmail by North Korea. By 2003 Japan's growing military activism and South Korea's reinforced soft posture toward the North aroused doubts that could have complicated the search for regionalism. If it seemed that divisive forces would overwhelm integrative ones, we can also find reminders that the main actors continued to pursue regionalism and now had additional reasons to work together. Looking ahead to the year 2002, boosters of regionalism in early 2001 had seen the possibility of a breakthrough. Japan and South Korea would jointly hold the World Cup, drawing close together in this shared experience. Power in China would pass to a younger generation of better-educated leaders at the 16th Party Congress just as China would be implementing its WTO commitment to openness. Moving pragmatically closer to the West, Vladimir Putin would become a more reliable partner in Asia too as well as an energy supplier with a need for Asian markets. A new style of leadership in Japan by Koizumi Junichiro, who took office in April, would at last accelerate economic reforms and raise that country's leadership profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the euphoria after the end of the cold war little thought was given to great-power rivalries and balance-of-power politics. Only in 1996 did great-power relations rise to the surface again. The Taiwan missile crisis called attention to Sino-U.S. differences that could result in armed combat. Suddenly, the United States had a potential rival, whose power was growing along with determination to alter the status quo. In April Sino-Russian relations were upgraded to a strategic partnership amidst talk of how these two powers could shape a multipolar world. Now the image grew of powers cooperating to balance U.S. hegemony. The Japanese-U.S. security alliance was also strengthened with warnings that security threats loomed. This indicated that the United States was responding in NEA to build a coalition of powers. Before long Sino-U.S. negotiations accelerated with China treating them as a means to forge new strategic triangles and quadrangles. Tokyo, in turn, readied an initiative toward Moscow, suggesting that the two great powers had geopolitical as well as territorial and economic reasons to talk. A high tide of geostrategic scrambling ensued, overshadowing other aspects of regionalism. There was no imminent threat that eliminated the search for regionalism or undercut growing economic ties, but cooperation was perceived as requiring an underpinning of great-power agreement and balance. Northeast Asia lacked a security forum, although some discussions piggybacked on the new annual ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in SEA. For the most part, the jockeying for great-power advantage occurred in summits between two leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THUS far, my analysis has focused on the origins and development of localprotectionism. Based on this discussion, it would appear that by 1989–90 little progress had been made toward transforming China's internal economy from one characterized by the coexistence of markets and the plan. Resource wars had undermined the old system of commodity monopsonies left in place after reforms in the early 1980s. But movement toward effective marketization appeared stalled by the adoption of the new unified purchase system and the reduction in interregional economic conflict brought about by centrally brokered cease-fires. If anything, the new system appeared to represent retrogression because it was a system of fragmented local monopsonies rather than a centrally controlled and regulated monopsony. Illegal import barriers blocked the flow of consumer goods. Predatory taxation threatened to stifle whatever trade managed to continue in the face of export and import protectionism. Monetary embargoes and the subversion of local courts exacerbated the situation by undermining property rights and prompting the explosive growth of interregional debt chains. Despite this upsurge in local protectionism, China did not split into warring economic fiefdoms. Instead, China's internal trade system weathered the crisis of 1989–90, emerged from that crisis, and began to move in the direction of reduced local protectionism. Specifically, after the central government initiated a major antiprotectionism campaign in November 1990, provincial, prefectural, and county governments embarked on a sustained campaign to lower internal trade barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOCAL protectionism first became a highlyvisible issue during the later 1980s when a series of what the Chinese referred to as “resource wars” erupted. During the early 1980s, as predicted in Chapter 3, local governments, particularly those in less developed areas, expanded local industry. To support local infant industries, local preference policies were embraced by a number of provincial governments. Yunnan's 1981 economic plan, for example, stated “purchasers should not look to producers outside the province to purchase products” and in 1982 the provincial governor said that local cash crops should be fed into local industries rather than exported to other provinces. That same year, the governor of Gansu remarked: “As a matter of principle we do not want to buy things from other provinces.” The chairman of the Ningxia-Hui Autonomous Region, on the other hand, stated that: It is not right to passively protect … enterprises by means of administrative measures because … economic blockades between one area and another have been lifted. We must [however] give aid to up-to-standard products. … If our products are up to the required quality, and up to state standards, and if the prices are reasonable, then the commercial and materials departments, as well as industrial enterprises, must give priority to [local] products. … We should not seek far and wide for what lies close at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EXPORT protectionism and interregional resource wars characterized the initial stages of local protectionism. Born out of rents created by the underpricing of raw materials and persistent shortages created by the same underpricing, export protectionism arose shortly after the adoption of commercial reforms in 1984. Import protectionism took longer to reach critical levels because investment priorities before 1978–9 limited productive capacity in many rent-producing sectors and created persistent shortages, forcing the state to ration many overvalued goods. Economic reforms adopted in 1984 afforded local governments new opportunities to invest in sectors characterized by rents. Investment in consumer durables, such as televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines, began to increase during the early 1980s. Combined urban collective and rural TVE investment in fixed industrial assets increased from ￥722 million in 1978 to ￥48.38 billion in 1988, a thirty-five fold increase (adjusted for inflation) in just ten years, with the bulk of this investment going to light industrial production. State investments in light industry, meanwhile, grew from ￥2.93 billion in 1978 to ￥12.33 billion in 1988, thus pushing total investment from ￥3.45 billion at the start of the reform period to ￥60.71 billion ten years later. Despite the rapid expansion of light industrial production during the early and mid-1980s, shortages persisted until 1987–8, when supply began to catch up to demand. So long as supply lagged behind demand, both infant and mature industries were able to expand without necessarily infringing on each other's markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last half-millennium before the Christian era, zones of intercommunication like the Hellenistic world began to develop elsewhere in the Afro-Eurasian landmass. On the Indian subcontinent, a new cultural synthesis had been in the making for centuries, built on elements of the older civilization of the Indus valley, local traditions elsewhere in India, and the cultural contributions of the Aryan-speaking invaders who came across the northwestern frontier during several centuries centered on 1500 B.C. or thereabouts. Buddhism, a new religion drawing on older Brahman religious traditions, was one of the main articulating elements in this new synthesis. It began spreading through the subcontinent from the time of the Buddha himself in the fifth century B.C. The Maurya Empire, reaching its apogee in the reign of Ashoka in the third century B.C., unified most of the South Asian world and guaranteed a broad, if temporary, victory for Buddhism as a religion. More important still, it helped to create a political framework for a common culture that began to be recognizably Indian in spite of great regional variation. Still farther east, Confucius's teachings of the fifth century B.C. had their first political expression in the Han dynasty of China (ca. 206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which united China for the first time and helped to integrate various local cultures in much the same way the Maurya and Hellenistic syntheses had done farther west. Up to about the second century B.C., these centers had been separated by mountains, steppe, desert, and deep forests with very sparse populations. Overland contact was possible, but occurred only occasionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]