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Pension inequality resulting from fragmented arrangements among different population groups – such as public sector employees, enterprise workers, rural residents, and urban informal workers – has become an essential obstacle to China's socioeconomic development. This commentary analyzes the impacts of the 2015 pension reform on the inequality within China's pension system. We claim that the unification of pension rules should be considered the greatest achievement in mitigating pension inequality. However, the integrated pension rules do not necessarily reduce gaps in pension opportunity and benefits among groups because of differentiation in their labor incomes as well as pension attributes. In addition, although the pension structures were flattened at the basic level, structural disparities exist at the supplementary level, strengthening unequal pension benefit outcomes. We argue that the 2015 pension reform enables public sector employees' privileged status to continue while enterprise employees and rural residents and urban informal workers remain at the pension system's margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Drawing upon the New Industrial City (NIC) projects by China Fortune Land Development (CFLD), a Shanghai stock-listed top 10 real estate enterprise, this article accounts for the emergence of business-promoted city-regionalism as a novel mechanism for industrial zone development in small cities near large metropolises. Lacking sufficient capital and professional personnel, local governments of these small cities made long-term contracts with CFLD, a private company, to build and develop industrial zones under the brand CFLD NIC. This novel phenomenon demonstrates the state orchestration of business-promoted city-regionalism, namely, a variegated form of state entrepreneurialism prevalent in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental sustainability constitutes an important part of the political and educational context in China as it strives to move toward an ecological civilization. However, there is limited literature documenting the ways in which sustainability is embedded in higher education (HE) teaching. This qualitative research involves interviews and focus groups with 30 faculty in Business and Economics disciplines at three high-ranked Chinese Universities and offers an original exploration of how they include environmental sustainability in their teaching, and the opportunities and challenges they encounter. The findings are significant in suggesting that a broad range of sustainability concepts and aligned pedagogies are incorporated but that political and institutional culture, limitations on obtaining research data, constraints on curriculum design, and individual beliefs are significant barriers to implementation. Strategies employed by faculty to embed sustainability are investigated and reviewed in the context of the 'theory of the second best', previously used in UK research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]