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Xu Lanjun's book, "Ertong yu zhanzheng: Guozu, Jiaoyu ji dazhong wenhua" (Chinese Children and War: Nation, Education and Mass Culture), explores the reinvention of childhood in modern Chinese literature and culture during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The book examines how war propaganda and political ideologies shaped the conceptualization of childhood and the integration of children into the war experience. Xu analyzes various child-oriented literature and media, highlighting the blurred boundaries between children and adults and the role of children in nation-building. The book also discusses the connection between Chinese children's culture and war discourses during the Cold War and in Sinophone society. While the book could benefit from further exploration of age awareness, it offers valuable insights into the cultural construction of childhood in wartime China. [Extracted from the article]

Blind-box consumption, a phenomenon sweeping through the retail market in China, is the process of buying an unlabelled box containing assorted and random novelty gifts from different retailers. Despite the intensity of its emergence, the extent of research on the phenomenon from a marketing perspective has been scarce. This paper identifies factors likely influencing Chinese consumers participating in blend-box consumption. These factors include brand familiarity emotional value and speculative potential. Conceptual issues discussed include the role of emotions and cognition as forces underpinning shopping behavior. The paper also highlights the marketing strategy features that have successfully driven the blend-box consumption experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper takes a dynamic view of culture to re-examine the tradeoffs between positive and negative aspects of guanxi in China. Because of cross-border collaboration and the wide use of the internet, Chinese employees are now exposed to more diverse values. Considering this cultural shift, the current paper discusses how the widely publicized negative aspect of guanxi relations in Chinese organizations can be mitigated. We suggest that employees are likely to withdraw from peer-to-peer guanxi relations that involve ethical concerns, and the likelihood and speed of this relation change would vary in part on the focal party's heritage of Confucian cultural values. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a dynamic approach to reconcile the controversy about peer-to-peer guanxi's role in Chinese organizations. This dynamic examination can invite further research on the complicated evolution of guanxi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space and bodies have been conceptualized as products and producers of social relations. They are woven together to shape identities, belongings, and cultures. This paper links culture to the mutual construction of space and bodies to spatialize the embodied lives of rural Chinese boys. Stories from a qualitative study of two middle schools illustrate how these rural boys experience embodied exclusions during the making of a learning space. These students also redefine the dominant meaning of the school space through an embodied-discursive construction of their lives. They shift their interests away from academic learning and move to emphasize social knowledge that focuses on social relations and social abilities. However, their re-appropriation of the space is interpreted as a gendered expression of noncooperation, which leads to their further marginalization within the academic-oriented space. This analysis examines in which body and which space is the rural boys' resistance produced. Turning to spatiality and embodiment provides an alternative interpretation of the counter-school culture of rural Chinese boys, which helps us more fully recognize the need for re-placing rural bodies in the Chinese education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses simulation results from a dynamic computable model as well as estimates by the United Nations of trends in China's population in 2010–2050 to determine the impact of the aging of the population on changes in commodities and price factors at the macro level. Then, the paper uses a top-down and bottom-up cyclic link to connect macroeconomic variables to a micro-level family simulation model, based on the regional characteristics of the distribution of population aging in the country. The empirical results suggest that, with an aging population, the working population decreases, which induces increases in income inequality. Moreover, older families in western China would suffer from the most severe income inequality, and gaps between groups in different regions are progressively increasing as the population ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang's representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang's works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang's visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of "Mongoloid" or "Yellow" racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of "Mongoloid/Yellow." His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant studies have deployed variable-centered methods to examine predictors of children's nutritional status, and few focus on the double burden of malnutrition among young Chinese children. This paper adopts a person-centered approach and leverages data from large samples of Chinese families (the China Health and Nutrition Survey, CHNS 2004–2015, and China Family Panel Studies, CFPS 2010–2018) to examine trends in the prevalence of stunting, overweight, and stuntingoverweight in early childhood. We developed a hierarchical structure of socioeconomic indicators, including region (Eastern-Central-Western), urbanicity (urban-rural), and family socioeconomic status gradient (four quartiles). We assessed relative risks for malnutrition for 24 subgroups of children from varying socioeconomic strata. Results indicate that the prevalence of stunting decreased consistently while the prevalence of being overweight increased first, followed by a decreasing trend. Moreover, a small group of stuntedoverweight children (4.7%) was identified. Data from the CHNS indicated that children from affluent families in the Central region were prone to being overweight. Data from the CFPS indicate that underprivileged groups (children from poor rural families living in Western China) were at higher risk for both undernutrition and overnutrition than their more advantaged peers. The findings suggest that children in poor, rural areas in Western China should be targeted for malnutrition alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the construction of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge as a case study, this paper explores transnational co-production of technology between the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s. Focusing on the invention of the non-caisson method, it argues that non-state actors played an important role in the process, because successful construction of the bridge could not be separated from reciprocal wills and long-term face-to-face interactions between Chinese and Soviet engineers. Moreover, by examining Chinese workers' contribution, this paper enriches the idea of hybrid technology, including not only the mingling of national identities in the process of knowledge making but also the combining of knowledge of both elites and masses. As a core project of China's First-Five-Year Plan, the cooperation boosted China's confidence in technological development and the Chinese Communist Party started to re-evaluate the Soviet technical aid, which to some extent influenced China's science and technology policies afterwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore what the travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the changing geographies of mobilities and the making of homo sacer, the latter constituted through differentiated control of mobilities. Implemented to protect U.S. public health, travel restrictions imposed on travelers from Mainland China during the early days of the pandemic exemplify how sovereign power that declares a state of emergency and creates bare life can be readily applied to groups of people who previously had privileged access to global mobility. In this sense, bare life does not refer to fixed and disadvantaged social categories but is rather contingently and contextually constituted, through the works of hybrid sovereign regimes. At the same time, however, these travelers are not reduced to a state of zero-agency but reside within a liminal space between soft and hard cosmopolitanisms, as they can still deploy agency and cosmopolitan capital to achieve certain degrees of mobility. By examining how Chinese travelers navigated various travel restrictions and the constantly changing policies to travel to the U.S., this paper explores new spaces of exception and forms of bare life, and argues that homo sacer is dynamically, relationally and recursively constructed, both through apparatus of control and the agency of travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China grows in international importance and influence, more and more countries worry about how it will behave, and are preoccupied with the hard question of how to tame it. As a middle power Australia has sought ways to influence the thinking and behaviour of Chinese policymakers. The Australian approach to taming China represents an academically puzzling and politically intriguing case, which, unfortunately, has not been studied in detail. The paper has argued that the concept of taming offers significant intellectual advantages in its reconsideration of Australia's China policy and has called for Australian scholars and policymakers, to critically rethink unspoken and understudied Australia's taming practices and policies. To this end, this paper has proposed an experience-based theory of taming as a key research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Chinese involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean is primarily motivated by increasing the country's economic role within the region through Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper uses case study analysis methodology dwelling on the evolution and content of Chinese involvement in Greece and Cyprus. Primarily focusing of the nature of the Chinese investments in strategic sectors of the two cases in question the role that that China plays in Eastern Mediterranean is described as a 'silky involvement'. China's policy choices are also perceived to be an opportunity for Greece and Cyprus to combat the negative effects of 2007–2008 economic crises and to increase their geopolitical stronghold in the post-Cold War geopolitical environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The soft power literature has indicated that American soft power use has been declining while Russian and Chinese soft power use has been increasing. Until now, the only way scholars could test such claims was to compare these countries' soft power rankings. This paper uses a new soft power dataset that can evaluate countries' soft power use. Using this dataset, this paper tests three hypothesis regarding China's, Russia's and the US' soft power use for the time-period of 1995–2015. The findings indicate that surprisingly the US is still using more soft power than Russia and China. The data analysis also reveals that the US is leading in economic soft power actions over China and in military soft power actions over Russia as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between extreme temperature and online complaints to local government officials. We show that the number of complaints significantly increases by 11.1% on extremely hot days relative to the benchmark temperature. Such effect is most pronounced on the day of extreme weather conditions and muted immediately after the extreme weather day. Among all the complaint areas, we find that 28.6% of the increase in complaints on hot days is related to public service, 42.8% to urban construction, 21.4% to noise, and 7.2% to safety. Moreover, we reveal that the primary motivators of increased complaints on hot days are not likely to be psychological factors; instead, the complaints are more likely to be associated with inadequate provision of public facilities to cope with extreme weather and inadequate management of other environmental disamenities caused by extreme temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While promoting the prosperity of China's social commerce in recent years, celebrity live streaming has been criticized for not being conducive to establishing a strong emotional relationship between brands and consumers. Our study focuses on the non-celebrity live streaming held by brands, called brand live streaming. Our research regards brand live streaming as a new form of brand community. According to IT affordances, We construct a structural model to examine whether and how brand live streaming affects Chinese consumers' brand attachment. We empirically test the model through the questionnaire distributed to brand live streaming viewers. Our results show that metavoicing affordance, guidance shopping affordance, and trading affordance positively affect consumers' brand attachment, while visibility affordance does not affect consumers' brand attachment. In addition, this paper also reveals that symbolic value and sense of community mediate the relationship between IT affordances and brand attachment in brand live streaming. Our study validates the importance of brand live streaming as a viable social commerce form and provides marketers with ways to build brand attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amyloid light chain (AL) amyloidosis is the most common systemic amyloidosis. The objective of this scoping review was to map the available literature on the diagnosis of AL amyloidosis in China. The published academic papers related to the diagnosis of AL amyloidosis were screened from 1 January 2000 to 15 September 2021. Chinese patients who have suspected AL amyloidosis were included. The included studies were categorized into accuracy studies and descriptive studies based on if the studies supplied the diagnostic accuracy data or not. The information on the diagnostic methods reported by included studies was synthesized. Forty-three articles were included for the final scoping review, with 31 belonging to descriptive studies and 12 having information on diagnostic accuracy. Although cardiac involvement was second top in Chinese patients with AL amyloidosis, a cardiac biopsy was rare. Next, we found light chain classification and monoclonal (M-) protein identification were essential methods for the diagnosis of AL amyloidosis in China. In addition, some combined tests (e.g. immunohistochemistry and serum free light chain, immunohistochemistry and immunofixation electrophoresis, and serum free light chain and immunofixation electrophoresis) can increase the sensitivity of the diagnosis. Finally, several adjuvant methods (e.g. Imaging, N-terminal-pro hormone BNP, and brain natriuretic peptide test) were important for AL amyloidosis diagnosis. This scoping review details the characteristics and results of the recently published studies on diagnosing AL Amyloidosis in China. Biopsy is the most important method for AL Amyloidosis diagnosis in China. In addition, combined tests and some adjuvant methods played essential roles in the diagnosis. Further research is required to determine an acceptable and feasible diagnostic algorithm after symptom onset. REGISTRATION: INPLASY2022100096 This scoping review details the characteristics and results of the recently published studies on diagnosing Amyloid light chain (AL) Amyloidosis in China. Biopsy is the most important method for AL Amyloidosis diagnosis in China. Combined tests and some adjuvant methods played essential roles in the diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the implementation of youth football policies in China following the 2015 national football reform. It asks the question 'To what extent have contextual and organisational factors facilitated and/or constrained the effective implementation of Chinese youth football policies?' Guided by a critical realist ontology, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in the implementation process of the youth football policy including members of the national and local football associations, schools, and professional football clubs. The findings reveal a number of policy conflicts that restricted an effective implementation of the youth football policies. The main conflict lay in the ambiguous intertwinement of two dominant policy coalitions (i.e. sport and education), which consequently led to confusion and conflicts among key implementers in the three pathways. Other factors such as the continuous mismatch of traditional values and beliefs held by actors towards youth football participation, as well as the emphasis on excellence over participation by some actors are also identified as having potentially inhibited effective implementation. This paper contributes to the debate of the positioning of youth sport in an increasingly elite-driven sporting context. It argues that policymakers, implementers, and the overall society, even if they are willing to foster a positive youth sport development, can also generate an adverse effect if they do not work together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, the approach of the Chinese government remains under the spotlight, obscuring the complex landscape of responses to the outbreak within the country. Drawing upon the author's social media experiences as well as textual analysis of a wide range of sources, this paper explores how the Chinese public responded to the outbreak in complex and nuanced ways through social media. The findings challenge conventional views of Chinese social media as simply sites of self-censorship and surveillance. On the contrary, during the COVID-19 outbreak, social media became spaces of active public engagement, in which Chinese citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities. This paper situates this public engagement within a broader context of China's health-care reforms, calling attention to persistent structural and political issues, as well as the precarious positionalities of health-care workers within the health system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a theoretical discussion of fashion studies by using the framework of creative industries to analyze the Chinese fashion system. First, the paper relates the robust theoretical discussion about the term fashion system. Next, the paper considers how the concept of fashion system has been interwoven with the creative industries policies in China. The paper thus provides an empirical case on fashion diversity by describing how Chinese top-down governmental allocation and acceleration policies has uniquely created a new pathway to construct the fashion system in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) (Taiwan) have taken divergent paths in the area of human rights. Since the two leaders Xi Jinping and Tsai Ing-wen came to power, the differences in the area of human rights have further increased. The paper analyses and compares their external human rights strategies based on realist assumptions and the soft and hard power resources of the PRC and the ROC. The PRC's objectives are to deflect international criticism of its human rights situation and to weaken the global human rights system and its underlying human rights norms. Taiwan's objective is to use its record as a human rights leader in Asia to expand its limited international space and to strengthen its ties with other consolidated democracies and the global civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incessant food safety scandals in China have given rise to a loss of public trust in food safety, stimulating a series of studies focussing on food safety governance, accountability, and trust restoration. Against this backdrop, Chinese scholars are keen to reflect on different strategies for ensuring food safety public accountability and credibility, presenting different perspectives on issues like responsibility, trust, risk communication, and transparency. In this paper, we aim to get more in-depth insight into how Chinese scholarly debates co-construct public accountability for food safety as a public issue. We selected 51 articles from 10,790 candidates drawn from four Chinese academic databases for content analysis. Drawing from political theories on public accountability as well as science and technology studies, the analysis shows that arguments for a specific public accountability model (more or less centralised, more or less stakeholder participation) are intertwined with the specific role of scientific expertise (more or less authoritative, more or less democratising). As such, the analysis shows how scholarly debates on public accountability for food safety in China co-construct a public forum for discussing supervision and accountability, risk assessment, and transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obesity and overweight have become increasingly prevalent in developing countries like China. This paper explores the evolvement of body mass index (BMI) of the Chinese population using a nationally representative sample. Focusing on familial transmission of BMI, we model married couple's BMI jointly and explore how parents' BMI affect children's BMI. In particular, we use spousal and parental characteristics as proxy variables to account for potential omitted variables bias and explicitly model common couple effect with the correlated random-effects model for couple' BMI. Our analysis suggests strong and positive spousal dependence and intergenerational transmissions of BMI in Chinese families. The influences of spousal BMI, parental BMI and a variety of social economic characteristics are found to depend on gender, region of residence (urban versus rural) and evolve over time. We find positive effects of spousal BMI that are significant, asymmetric (greater for wife than for husband), and generally vary across regions. For grown children, we find parental BMI to be the most important predictors for children's BMI. Since families can play an essential role in preventing obesity, our results can be useful for developing health intervention programs and promoting healthy lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the problem of elderly poverty in China has been addressed in many studies, few systematically examine the capacity of public pension benefits to reduce poverty. To fill the research gap, this paper aims to understand better the effect of China's public pensions on poverty relief. The paper shows that, while the majority of Chinese people have been covered by public pensions, the pension that pertains to those outside the formal labour market does not effectively prevent substantial numbers of pensioners from poverty because of pension inadequacy. The phenomenon of pensioner poverty suggests that, to minimise poverty in old-age, as important as expanding pension coverage is guaranteeing pension adequacy, particularly for the informal workforce. China's experience for tackling elderly poverty through public pensions may provide insights for other countries considering the expansion of pension coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many renovations of former industrial sites in China have failed to respond to the different contexts of location within their design. Resulting from an international funded research project, this paper considers Human-Centred Emotional Design and cultural strategy as urban renovation tools that can attract capital, mark the city as a distinctive brand and encourage interaction and sensual engagement from citizens. This paper pinpoints the project's initial discoveries and captures a range of personal narratives reflecting the real experiences of Chinese people. The findings unlock potential opportunities for culturally coherent regeneration strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case of "trauma by omission" as a product of the attachment process. The absence of intimate and specific recognition and response by the caretaker of a child can create, by their omission, a "freeze" version of the fight/flight/freeze trauma response. The frozen moments, then dissociated, can become confusion and paralysis at the cusp of adulthood. This state is illustrated in the case below of a 23-year-old Chinese woman being treated by a 29-year-old Chinese male psychoanalytic fellow. The role of cultural context in "omission" is highlighted regarding development and treatment, which is taking place in a Communist society with a recent violent history of extinguishing individuality, modifying how attachment and individuation are expressed. A relational/interpersonal treatment orientation is applied and advocated at this intersection of individual and social realities. This paper contributes to attachment theory by raising awareness of how its many forms and outcomes may or may not be deemed healthy and functional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid social-economic and science development, and the improvement of people's cognitive level and demand, it is urgent to further study the relationship between human and ecosystem. Landsenses ecology is a comprehensive discipline, a bridge which links ecosystem services and sustainable development. Based on the analysis of the relationship between the principle of landsenses creation and the ecological aesthetics experience, as well as the practice of Chinese traditional culture, this paper preliminarily presents a framework of applying landsenses ecology to explore ecological aesthetics. The principles of landsenses creation have many manifestation forms similar to Chinese traditional culture. Chinese classical landscape poems is a kind of carriers for ancient Chinese people to present their cultural manifestations with their simple ecological view, which shows their simple ecological thoughts, sustainable development consciousness and corresponding vision at that time. The paper discusses the manifestation forms of Chinese traditional culture, and systematically analyzes the landsense creation ways and the spatiotemporal scales in the two poems, Out of the Great Wall (凉州词in Chinese) and On the Stork Tower (登鹳雀楼in Chinese). These two poems combine the ecosystem elements organically, integrate visual landscape with psychological perceptions, and reflect the ecological aesthetics through the combination of landscape spatiotemporal scales, as well as the interactivity of physical senses and psychological cognitions. The approaches of landsenses ecology can expand the cultural ecosystem service in a spatiotemporal way, and contribute to deeply integrate traditional culture with ecological civilization to promote sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A statistical model comparing national and cultural differences in luxury consumption tendencies is presented in this paper. The objective is to investigate the factors influencing luxury consumption tendency, such as social influence, conspicuous consumption, and brand image, and their impact on consumer purchasing behavior and life satisfaction. Specifically, the Tend and Befriend Theory, the Compensatory Control Theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model are utilized to analyze the model. The quantitative analysis is based on cross sectional data with 401 valid questionnaires from Portugal and 369 from China. Comparative analysis is conducted to evaluate attitudes toward luxury consumption tendencies in both Chinese and Portuguese samples. The results indicate that social influence, conspicuous consumption, and brand image have a positive effect on luxury consumption tendencies. Moreover, luxury consumption tendencies are positively correlated with life satisfaction, the urge to buy, and luxury spending. Differences between Portuguese and Chinese consumers are observed, attributed to cultural variations. This study enhances our understanding of consumer behavior in luxury markets by elucidating influential relationships that impact consumer decision-making and life satisfaction, while also highlighting cultural influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2022, the dynamic zero-COVID control policy came to an end, marking the conclusion of a three-year pandemic that affected 1.4 billion Chinese people. The pandemic and related policies created a unique, temporary, and historic social ecosystem where walking became more crucial than ever before. The pandemic not only severely restricted people's movement in public spaces but also exposed the longstanding contradictions between human bodies, modern mobility, and urban space. Over the three years of the pandemic, walking became an aesthetic survival attempt by Chinese people to cope with their limited freedoms under the pandemic. As the pandemic stagnated and worsened over time, walking-dominant activities gradually became a widespread social phenomenon that encouraged urban residents to participate in rebuilding society across various fields such as politics, art, nature, etc. The development of walking as an artistic form during this period represents a new aesthetic strategy and political awakening while reflecting humans' need to reconnect with land, social space, and their own bodies. This paper reviews how walking art has evolved historically through three periods – before, during, and after the pandemic – aiming to highlight both the public value of walking art and challenges within China's social ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the world, the wearing of medical facemasks has become a hot topic on social media. In China, the relevant discourses are entangled with codes of medical science, national self-esteem and appropriated modernity. These discourses can be dated back to the narrative established by Dr Wu Lien-teh, the great fighter in the Manchurian plagues of 1910–1911 and 1920–1921. This paper reveals that Wu and his colleagues used different strategies when displaying to the Western world their achievements in the anti-plague battle and when proving the effectiveness of the Western medical and hygienic system to Chinese people. Wu and his colleagues used metonymies, analogues and metaphors on or related to medical facemasks to illustrate the possibility of building a modernised nation with sovereignty. Because the construction of a sanitary system in China has always been labelled as a patriotic movement (Rogaski, Ruth. 2004. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 285–298), the wearing of medical facemasks has constituted an important part of the narrative of nationalism and hygienic modernity. This discourse continues to play a significant role in today's campaign against the coronavirus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where do Chinese gender norms come from and how did they culturally evolve through time? This question receives ample debate in the context of Warring States, pre-Imperial, and Imperial China. Many archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholars contend that earliest China treated its women relatively well. This paper's interdisciplinary examination of bioarchaeological evidence from Neolithic and pre-Imperial sources synthesizes new information to enrich this debate. Discussed are studies of sex-linked DNA drawn from human remains, sex ratio data from burials, and indicators of diet quality including isotopic studies of nitrogen and carbon as well as dental pathologies. The paper focuses on data drawn from polities within the phylocultural cultural trunk leading to Imperial China. Evidence indicates that women in pre-Imperial China were treated less well than in other early societies. Comparative lessons about the cultural evolution of Chinese gender norms in the context of norms in other early civilizations are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of publications, including a recent paper in World Archaeology, have developed theories on why stone suddenly became a popular material for tomb construction in Han Dynasty China and how foreign masonry techniques were brought to China from across Eurasia. The object of this paper is to examine further the reception of foreign masonry architectural techniques through an analysis of stone-carved tombs from early China. It argues that the reception of foreign masonry techniques was based on the demands generated by using stone as the primary tomb building material during the Han Dynasty. Through the introduction of advanced masonry techniques, new understandings of the material world were incorporated into masonry architecture in a Chinese cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese sense of "balance" has been widely researched in the literature from several perspectives including culture (where it has been traced back to Confucian, neo-Confucian and Taoist roots), and business and market entry (where it has been linked to issues such as the development of trust, relationship building, and guanxi between foreign companies and Chinese partners). However, far less attention has been placed on how this sense of balance (in its various forms) actually, and specifically, affects the structure and process of undertaking strategic alliance activities between Chinese and foreign companies. This paper deals with this issue by examining agreements and associated activities undertaken between 206 Chinese universities and foreign education partners to identify whether there is any specific sense of balance between the two sides. The paper notes that successful agreements and alliances do reflect a tangible sense of balance in the way the agreements were structured and in terms of the processes used to implement and undertake associated activities. The value of the paper is that it notes that foreign universities and their Chinese partners need to organise and undertake balanced alliances in the Chinese strategic alliance context. The fact that all respondents indicated that balanced alliances were a key to success makes this observation even more useful. This paper, therefore, adds the concept of balance to the literature of strategic alliance in the higher educational field, at least in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares government-led agenda and public-led agenda setting during the COVID-19 pandemic in China to investigate whether or not the pandemic enhances the government's role in agenda setting. Within-case comparison, aided by big data analysis and case study, finds an overall public-led pattern of agenda setting in China, and a mixture of government-led and public-led agenda setting during the pandemic. It is also found that Chinese government bodies pay attention to and are responsive to citizens' emotions expressed through social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I show that narratives of historical conflicts between the Han Chinese and Muslims have been deployed to justify anti-Muslim sentiment and practices in modern and contemporary Northwest China. My study analyses Han Chinese narratives during and after the Northwest Muslim Rebellion—the largest ethnic conflict in nineteenth-century China. The historical narratives about the rebellion have been passed down inter-generationally and have been reiterated and reconstructed to fuel contemporary bias against Muslims in the twentieth century and beyond. My study contributes to the debate of Chinese Islamophobia by revealing how narratives of ethnic conflicts could help legitimize hostility against Muslims in modern-day China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confucius Institutes are one of the major ways China invests Soft-Power in the world. This paper will examine the Confucius Institutes in universities in Arabic speaking countries from 2006 to 2020. It will focus on the response and reception of China's Soft-Power in these countries. An initial index for examining the success of these institutes will be offered, which can also be applied to educational-cultural institutes in general. The following review and analysis of data point to the conclusion that Confucius Institutes, as a tool of Chinese Soft-Power, have effectively penetrated the Arab world and are welcomed without significant criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper qualitatively analyzes the most recent, transnational graduate-level tourism program in China to follow the country's so-called Chinese-Foreign Cooperation Model. Approved by the Chinese government in 2015, the program involves cooperation between one university from the U.S. (Colorado State University) and one from China (Central China Normal University). Analysis of this program is organized around adaptations, characteristics, and recommendations crucial for the development and delivery of transnational tourism education programs in China and abroad. Findings hold broader implications for educating tourism professionals to manage the expected growth in travel among Chinese citizens in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the genealogy of 'Chinese' political geography, which, to a certain extent, can be read as a national report of the status of political geography in Chinese scholarship. It begins by outlining the short duration of the development of political geography in China, compared to the longer history of western political geography. Looking at the extant studies related to political geography in China, this paper suggests an existence of a duality in this field. One strand of scholarship is termed 'exogenous political geography', which is largely influenced by western scholarship with a particular focus on theories and vocabularies from classical geopolitics and geo-economy. The other strand is termed as 'endogenous political geography', which covers rich topics, including, yet not limited to, political and geographical views of inter-state relationships, central-local relationships and emperor-people relationships. Such a duality is important for understanding the condition of current political geography in China. The dualised understanding, however, seems to have undermined the comprehensiveness of political geography in China. In this regard, this paper calls for a more complete, integrated and critical agenda for political geography in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rise as a new economic power has generated many challenges and prospects which have direct origins on how people interpret and adapt to every economic relationship with other developing countries. This paper interrogated the interpretations and the mode of adaptations which actors in the agricultural sector of Ghana have developed toward Chinese capital mobility. The study used qualitative methods involving 6 interviews and 10 focus group discussions with 64 purposively selected individuals, groups, state and non-state institutions in the agricultural sector. The interpretations, as observed, were varied with direct connections with three forms of adaptations. First, agricultural actors' decision to purchase a Chinese product was influenced by a combination of their interpretations, knowledge of the efficacy of Chinese products, as well as the product cost. Second, there were adaptations which served as cultural and social impediments to the efficient use of Chinese products. Third, the adaptations sought to correct the impediments. These interpretations and adaptations suggest that the nature of the Chinese capital mobility could be promising and beneficial albeit challenging and threatening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a multi-sited physical and virtual ethnography of Chinese migrant women's entrepreneurship in Taiwan, this paper illuminates the role of digital migrant entrepreneurship in the making of globalisation. In the digital age of gendered migrant entrepreneurship, it challenges the long-lasting dichotomy between 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' globalisation and contributes to the theoretical debate about migrant transnational entrepreneurship, elucidating how capitalism and globalisation can take multiple forms. Drawing on Chinese women's migratory biographies and the commercial geographies of the objects they trade between China and Taiwan, it shows how our global economic system is simultaneously forged by supply-chain capitalism and migrants' digitalised petit capitalistic practices. Chinese migrant workers firstly manufacture goods whilst working for multinational companies in China, then, after marriage-migration, they commercialise the products in Taiwan via WeChat. Findings illustrate the link between ICTs, migrant entrepreneurship, gendered social networks, and border transgressions in shaping a mutable globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the reconstruction of a county tea industry in order to help map capitalist agrarian change in contemporary China. The concentration of the tea industry in Meitan County, Guizhou, that began in the 1930s was further centralized under a state-owned farm and factory after 1949. Following the 1990s decline of the state-owned industry, the tea industry reemerged in a new form under a process of state-directed capitalist agrarian change in the early 2000s. Contemporary Meitan's almost 500 independent tea processors market their products to the changing tastes of Chinese consumers. With an increased attention to tea "quality," capitalist processors have had to take greater control over the labor process of farmers. Thus the industry has taken on a complex structure through a process of vertically integrating tea growers and processors, making use of a county tea producers association, dragonhead enterprises, specialized cooperatives, contract farming, and new property forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of China's recent massive surveillance initiative often present it as evidence of a path to an Orwellian state with omnipresent fear and discontent among its citizens. However, based on a 2018 survey of a nationally representative sample, this paper finds that a large majority of Chinese citizens support various forms of state surveillance. CCTV surveillance receives the highest support (82.2%), followed by e-mail and Internet monitoring (61.1%). Even the most intrusive policy – collecting intelligence on everyone in the country – receives support from more than 53% of citizens. Further, support for surveillance is positively associated with an individual's preference for social stability, regime satisfaction, and, to a lesser extent, trust in government. Unlike in Western societies, concerns about information exposure and terrorism do not have any significant correlations with citizens' attitudes toward surveillance in China. These findings might help explain why the Chinese state can expand its surveillance capacity without much open resistance from the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of forms and practices of citizenship in China has been well studied, but, unfortunately, studies on industrial citizenship are missing. Moreover, while there has been a growing literature on Chinese workers and their relationship with management in the last decade or so, most of it has focussed on protest and litigation rather than on deliberation and industrial citizenship. This paper fills the intellectual gap by applying T. H. Marshall's idea of industrial citizenship to workplaces in China and examining it through a case study of a workplace deliberation experiment. The workplace deliberation experiment showed that, first, workplace deliberation in China can be seen as a form of industrial citizenship and "participatory management", which still retains an element of hierarchy, but falls short of the radical idea of industrial democracy and unionism. Second, workplace deliberation improved management practices but still faced significant obstacles, such as asymmetric power relationships and the control characteristics of industrial relations. Though Chinese industries are institutionalizing more workers' voice input, Beijing nevertheless forestalls the Polish style of an independent trade union, thus workplace deliberation can be seen as a part of its authoritarian empowerment strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon transitivity and Appraisal within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to study the traumatic discourse of Nanjing Massacre in Chinese Mainland's and Japan's history textbooks. Through corpus analysis, this research finds that the Chinese discourse mainly uses effective process, relational process, verbal process to construe Japan's victimizering experience and China's victimhood, and employs negative Affect, opposite values of Judgment, negative Appreciation, Expand, Raise and Sharpen to construct a critical voice for the Japanese army and a sympathic tone for the Chinese. By contrast, the Japanese discourse largely uses pseudo-effective and middle processes, mental and existential processes to cover up Japan's victimizering experience, and employs negative Judgment, positive Appreciation, Contract and Raise to construct an almost uncritical voice for the Japanese army and the massacre. The difference in the representation and evaluation of Nanjing Massacre results from the politics of official memories in both countries. As China endeavors to strengthen its patriotic education by using Nanjing Massacre as an ideological weapon for national solidarity, Japan expedites its nationalist historiography move to recreate its normal national image by marginalizing the massacre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China took its first tentative steps into the Antarctic around 1980, travelling South with other nations' Antarctic programs. Australia hosted the first Chinese scientists to travel to East Antarctica to conduct research in the early 1980s. China signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1983 and became a Treaty Consultative Party in 1985. Since its first small forays, China's Antarctic activities have grown considerably: it now has two permanently occupied Antarctic stations, other Antarctic facilities and is currently building a station on in the Ross Sea region. China's Antarctic science program is broad; it has economic activities in the region include fisheries and tourism, and has expressed longer-term interest in resource extraction. In recent years, China has become an assertive participant in Antarctic governance. This paper analyses the geopolitical origins of the Antarctic Treaty, China's growing Antarctic presence, and the implications this has for the region, including the policies and strategies of Australia and key Indo-Pacific partner states in the Antarctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Chinese stone arch bridges are an important kind of architectural heritage in China, and they are often threatened by potential collapse problems. The stone arrangements of the arches in ancient Chinese stone arch bridges are quite different from those in Western countries, which may lead to different collapse modes. Thus, the collapse mechanisms of arches with typical "Chinese stone arrangements" urgently need to be studied. In this paper, the stone arrangements commonly used in ancient Chinese stone arch bridges were first investigated and summarized in detail. Then, finite element models of four typical arches with different stone arrangements were established to study their mortar failure processes, collapse modes, and bearing capacities. After that, the influence of the friction coefficients of the voussoirs on the collapse modes and the bearing capacities of these typical arches was analyzed. The results show that the stone arrangements used in ancient Chinese stone arch bridges can generally be divided into three groups according to their lateral linkages. The bearing capacities of the four typical arches are sorted as follows when the friction coefficient is 0.3: the FJBL method > the HLFJBL method > the HL method > the BL method. When the friction coefficient decreases from 0.3 to 0.1, the live-load bearing capacities of these arches decrease by 33%–55%. When the friction coefficient increases from 0.3 to ∞, the live-load bearing capacities of these arches increase by 3%–11%. The study results can provide a scientific basis for the conservation of ancient Chinese stone bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly a half millennia of administration, in 1999 Portugal returned the city-state of Macau to the People's Republic of China, and the territory was designated a Special Administrative Region of the PRC under the "one country, two systems" regime. After the handover of sovereignty, the local government liberalized the city's casino gaming monopoly and opened the industry to foreign investment, and in the intervening years, Macau has been transformed into the world's most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau is visited by more than 35 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China, and whose travel to Macau is enabled by a special PRC exist visa called the Individual Visit Scheme. This paper analyzes velvet ropes which are positioned to manage queues of Chinese shoppers at the entrance to select retail outlets selling luxury branded fashion items in Macau's integrated casino resorts. With attention to the PRC's ongoing governmental efforts to deploy tourist mobilities in order to enhance the "quality" (suzhi) of select Chinese citizens in hopes that their consumption behaviors will contribute to domestic economic growth, the article explores the role of Macau's velvet rope apparatus in producing a post-socialist Chinese subject appropriate to China's economic reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WeChat, a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app, is an emerging social media platform that has been integrated into the daily lives of Chinese people, including travel. However, despite the growing proliferation of WeChat, surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the gratifications obtained by Chinese travelers when using WeChat in travel-related decision-making. Adopting the well-grounded Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT), this exploratory research paper aims to address this void in prior literature and identify why and how Chinese millennial travelers use WeChat to make hotel choice decisions. Findings stemmed from the semi-structured interviews using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling approaches with eighteen WeChat users reveals that hotel choice decisions through WeChat are influenced by various social, process, and content gratifications. As indicated in our findings, hotels in China should be aware of gratifications obtained by travelers in stimulating them to utilize WeChat in the hotel selection process. Further, our study contributes to extant UGT literature by emphasizing that it has specific relevance and should be given more prominence within tourism, hospitality, and social media literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2014, Chinese Internet-users can purchase care and concern online. Customers can hire both male and female virtual lovers (xuni lianren) to talk to them while the lovers perform character roles of their choice. By examining why female customers consume virtual loving services, we argue that women hire male virtual lovers to assuage the frustrations that they accrue in their daily lives, and not to look for offline romantic partners. Inspired by the concept of 'emergent masculinity' (Inhorn & Wentzell, 2011. Embodying emergent masculinities: Men engaging with reproductive and sexual health technologies in the Middle East and Mexico. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 801–815), we coin the term emergent femininity. This term describes how, after a century-long process where the individual breaks free from familial and societal strictures, present-day young and urban Chinese women now exhibit a novel mode of womanhood characterized by historically unprecedented self-confidence, a willingness to openly articulate and purchase what they want, and a high degree of mediatization. Hence, this paper illuminates the appearance of 'new women' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a combined framework of Appraisal System and Ideological Square Model, this paper conducts a corpus-based investigation of the ways in which the image of China is (re)shaped in the English translation of Chinese political discourse in terms of appraisal epithets. The results show that (1) shifts regularly occur in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, though an equivalent translation strategy is a canonical option for the translators of Chinese political discourse; (2) translation patterns of the appraisal epithets vary within the three sub-categories of Appraisal System, with shifts found mostly in the translation of the negative appraisal epithets under 'engagement' and 'graduation' subcategories; (3) discursively, China is more negatively represented in the translated than in the source Chinese texts. A two-layered Ideological Square Model is proposed to account for the research findings in terms of ideological factors in the translation of Chinese political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the international relations (IR) 'polarity' concept as a lens to view the shifting great power dynamics in artificial intelligence (AI) and related enabling technologies. The article describes how and why great power competition is mounting in within several interrelated dual-use technological fields; why these innovations are considered by Washington to be strategically vital, and how (and to what end) the United States is responding to the perceived challenge posed by China to its technological hegemony. The following questions addressed in this paper fill a gap in the existing literature: Will the increasingly competitive U.S.-China relationship dominate world politics creating a new bipolar world order, as opposed to a multipolar one? Why does the U.S. view China's progress in dual-use AI as a threat to its first-mover advantage? How might the U.S. respond to this perceived threat? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the history of the Chinese journalism and typical cases in this field since reform and opening up, this paper analyzes from a historical perspective how the Chinese press has played a constructive role, and how it has changed in parallel with media evolution and technological progress. The "constructiveness" of the Chinese press is manifested as follows: directly participating in public governance through collaboration with the government; supervising public power by starting from and aiming at finding solutions to problems; actively intervening in and helping address issues about people's livelihood with well-planned news reports and relevant activities; mobilizing and organizing the public with constantly updated strategies and methods; and establishing think tanks to extend its services to society. Faced with both societal and industry crises, the Chinese press needs to explore new means to give full play to its constructive role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]