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Harbin, located in Northeast China, is the provincial capital of Heilongjiang province, the People’s Republic of China. The city was one of the most crucial junction cities on the Chinese Eastern Railway built in the early 1900s, which connected Russia and China. Russian migrants had a significant impact on the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of Harbin and Russian features can be identified from Harbin’s urban planning, which is unique to other major Chinese cities. However, there is limited research on Russian influence on Harbin’s urban development during the Russian colonial period from 1898 to 1931, which is the focus of this paper. Field observation, map analysis, and desktop research were conducted to collect qualitative data. This study addresses the importance of Russian colonial impact on Harbin’s urban planning and the heritage conservation of the city’s historical urban fabric. Findings of this research can help researchers and local authorities understand the uniqueness and value of Russian inspired city planning. It will also be beneficial to the development of appropriate conservation guidelines which are applicable to Harbin and to other Chinese cities previously under colonial influence.

PurposeSpatial arrangement of hospital environments has been proven to have impacts on hospital users such as wayfinding, privacy and operational efficiency. Many studies examined the spatial quality of hospitals, but there is a lack of comparative research between Chinese and Australian hospitals. Hospitals in both countries have salient features that are worth to learn and can inform hospital stakeholders internationally on design decisions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare the spatial quality of hospitals from both countries using space syntax approach and field observation.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses space syntax analysis and observation to provide qualitative and quantitative data. Illustrative case studies from both countries are selected for comparison. The main benchmarks involved in measuring the spatial qualities, such as step depth and visual connectivity, are analysed using Depthmap X before comparing with the results from observation.FindingsFor Chinese hospitals to be more human-centred, public space design and facility management need additional attention. Australian hospitals could learn from Hospital D on how to design highly centralised nursing stations that cope with a high patient flow. Global policy and decision-makers should consider the potential inconsistency between initial design intention and practical use.Originality/valuePractical implications were made based on the results for bettering hospital environments. It is hoped that the methodology presented in this research is of significance to the enhancement of global healthcare environment research.

PurposeEconomic theories on structural change focus on factors such as fluctuations in relative prices and income growth. In addition, China’s reform and opening up has also been accompanied by increasing openness, significant fluctuations in investment rates, and frictions in the labor market. Existing literature lacks a unified theoretical framework to assess the relative importance of all these determinants. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachTo incorporate all of the potential determinants of China’s structural change, the authors build a two-country four-sector neoclassical growth model that embeds the multi-sector Eaton and Kortum (2002) model of international trade, complete input-output structure, non-homothetic preference and labor market frictions. The authors decompose the sectoral employment shares into six effects: the Baumol, Engel, investment, international trade, factor intensity and labor market friction effects. Using the data of Chinese economy from 1978 to 2011, the authors perform a quantitative investigation of the six determinants’ effects through the decomposition approach and counterfactual exercises.FindingsLow-income elasticity of demand, high labor intensity, and the existence of the switching costs are the reasons for the high employment share in the agricultural sector. Technological progress, investment and international trade have comparatively less influence on the proportion difference of employment in the three sectors.Originality/valueTherefore, to examine the impact on China’s structural change, in addition to Baumol effect and the Engel effect, it is also necessary to consider the impact of three more factors: international trade, investment and switching costs. Therefore, the authors decompose the factors that may influence China’s structural change into the Baumol, Engel, investment, international trade, factor intensity effect and switching cost effects. The authors evaluate these six effects using the decomposition approach and counterfactual exercises.

There is currently an urban housing crisis affecting low-income people across China. Due to the need for high-density public housing, it is becoming increasingly common to demolish urban villages in order to build denser and higher social housing towers for low-income people. However, in addressing the need for new housing for low-income people, the social and cultural aspects of urban villages should be duly considered.This paper aims to identify and elucidate the salient features of urban villages based on case studies in Guangzhou and then use these to formulate sustainable strategies for new housing typologies in contrast with the conventional development approach of having residential towers. Indeed, dense mid-rise dwellings that retain the mixed functions of communal, social and commercial gathering spaces as found in the urban villages would foster the formation of communal living environments among residents. After identifying the salient features of urban villages, this paper proposes a new social housing typology that is visualised through computer 3D modelling and rendering.This research acknowledges the pressing housing needs in China and explore an alternative housing approach that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable, which addresses housing needs with due consideration of the social and cultural site contexts.

How did eighteenth-century China manage to provide public goods nationwide despite its low tax rate? We construct a prefecture-level panel dataset from 1738 to 1820 and examine the effectiveness of the provision of public goods by the state granary system and local elites in mitigating price volatility. The results show that government intervention effectively smoothed grain price fluctuations in regions with greater military threats, implying that national defense concerns drove the distribution of state resources. We also find that local elites provided this service in other regions, suggesting that the state and local elites were substitutional in the provision of public goods.

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions. Our inferred measures are small in value, favorably match measured costs of the silver trade derived from contemporary accounts, and fare well in the comparison to estimates of trans-Atlantic gold points. This leads to the conclusion that the degree of Chinese financial market integration was substantial. However, during and immediately after World War I, our estimates of the silver points increased appreciably, foreshadowing the collapse of China's linkages to world financial markets beginning in the 1930s.

Combining datasets on the 1920 Protestant diffusion in China and the financial reports of about 125,000 Chinese industrial firms from 1999 to 2007, we find significant effects of historical Protestant activities on current corporate tax avoidance. We then use disaster frequency as the instrumental variable to establish causality. Analysis of the survey-based CFPS data and a peer-to-peer lending dataset with more than one million borrowers shows that people from cities with more historical Protestant activities tend to trust others more and have better credit records. By illustrating the role of Protestantism in fostering social capital, our analysis suggests persistent effects of religion on individual and corporate behaviors.

We examine the different functions of the government and of local elites in eighteenth-century China by considering their responses to grain price fluctuations, which were the largest shocks to traditional agrarian society. Descriptive evidence has indicated that both the government and the local elites provided public goods that mitigated high grain prices and maintained social stability. However, few studies to date have quantitatively compared the importance of these two types of service. We construct a prefecture-level set of panel data from 1742 to 1795 to compare the effects of government-managed granary with the effects of community services provided by local elites, and we show how these effects varied by region. The results show that although higher grain prices commonly led to increased conflict across China, this pattern did not apply in the most prosperous regions, namely the North and the Lower Yangzi. This set of findings suggests the existence of effective interventions to deal with food-supply crises. Further investigations show that although the government played a dominant role in the North, the local elites were more effective for reducing price fluctuations in the Lower Yangzi. We also provide several explanations for the different patterns of crisis relief found in the two examined regions.

Structural transformation is a key feature of economic development. Traditional literature attributes it to changes in the sectoral composition of consumption. Different from it, we argue that the "servici fication" of investment goods, which is induced by investment-specific technological change, becomes an increasingly important reason for structural transformation, particularly for the rise of the services economy. Our study of the input output tables finds that the share of service inputs in investment goods have grown significantly in many countries since the 1980s, especially for investment-intensive economies such as China. To assess if the investment channel is quantitatively significant, we build a standard model with three broad sectors, but instead add an investment production function employing factors from all three sectors. Moreover, we incorporate investment-specific technological change by allowing the productivities of the three sectoral inputs to evolve over time. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy from 1981-2014 and perform counter-factual experiments accordingly. We find that the technological change in the investment sector accounts for 33.1 percent decline in employment share of agriculture, 36.0 percent increase in employment share of manufacturing and 31.5 percent increase in employment share of services over the period. The magnitude of this effect on the share of services keeps growing, particularly after 2000. Our findings are not unique for China, but also apply to other economies experiencing "servici fication" of investment sector.