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All-solid-state metal batteries (ASSMBs) have been regarded as the ideal candidate for the next-generation high-energy storage system due to their ultrahigh specific capacity and the lowest redox potential. However, the uncontrollable chemical reactivity during cycling which directly determines the growth behaviour of metal dendrites, the low coulombic efficiency and the safety concerns severely limit their real-world applications.. Crystallographic optimization based on solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) provides an atomic-scale and fundamental solution for the inhibition of dendrite growth in metal anodes, which has attracted widespread attentions. From this perspective, we summarize the recent advance of the crystallographic optimization for various classes of solid-state electrolytes. We highlight the recent experimental findings of crystallographic optimization for a new generation of all-solid-state batteries, including lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, magnesium-ion batteries, with the aim of providing a deeper understanding of the crystallographic reactions in ASSMBs. The challenges and prospects for the future design and engineering of crystallographic optimization of SSEs are discussed, providing ideas for further research into crystallographic optimization to improve the performance of rechargeable batteries.

Liver fibrosis therapy remains limited due to the inefficiency of drug delivery and inflammation induced by Kupffer cells. In this study, an exosome-liposome hybrid drug delivery system (LIEV) was developed to increase the efficacy of clodronate (CLD)-inhibition of Kupffer cells and to effectively deliver nintedanib (NIN) to liver fibroblasts to ensure enhanced anti-fibrosis therapy. CLD and NIN co-loaded LIEV (CLD/NIN@LIEV) exerted non-specific inhibition of phagocytosis by Kupffer cells, reduced inflammatory cytokines, and showed homologous homing properties mediated by fibroblast-derived exosomes, thereby achieving superior antifibrotic effects in a CCl

Poly-2-hydrobutanedioic acid (P2HBD), produced by the yeast-like fungus Aureobasidium pullulans, is a new type of water-soluble polyhydroxy acid with potential applications in the biomaterial and biomedical fields.

Argyrodite sulfide solid electrolytes, such as Li6PS5Cl (LPSC), have received much attention due to their high ionic conductivity (>1 mS cm–1) and success in all-solid-state batteries (long cycle p...

ImportanceFalls have become a major public health issue in China with population aging. Although falls prevention for older community-dwelling people has been included in the National Essential Public Health Service Package since 2009, there is limited understanding of the implementation of this program.ObjectiveTo identify the associated factors and provide recommendations to inform the better implementation of falls prevention in the Chinese primary health care system.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsThis qualitative study was conducted in 3 purposively selected cities in China from March 1 to June 7, 2021. Health administrators from the local health commission or bureau, staff members from local Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and primary health care facilities and community-dwelling older people were recruited, using a combination of purposive sampling and snowball sampling.Main Outcomes and MeasuresIn-depth interviews were conducted with health administrators and focus groups with other participants. Data analysis followed the guidance of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. Study outcomes included facilitators and barriers of implementing falls prevention for older people in the Chinese primary health care settings. A framework with recommendations was developed to inform the future intervention implementation.ResultsAmong a total of 130 participants interviewed, 77 (59.2%) were female and the mean (SD) age was 47.4 (16.7) years. Clear recognition of the challenges and benefits of falls prevention, adaptive regionally tailored guidance plans, and continuous governmental policy and financial support were the major facilitators, whereas the major barriers consisted of insufficient confidence in delivering interventions and poor understanding of the falls burden, low recognition of the importance of falls prevention, limited multisectoral collaboration, and weak financial incentives. A 7-strategy embedded framework—including data-driven surveillance, audit and feedback, implementation strategy, workforce strengthening, community empowerment, internal services integration, and external enabling environment—was developed to foster successful implementation.Conclusions and RelevanceThis qualitative study identified major facilitators and barriers to the implementation of falls prevention for older people at the primary care level, which have the potential to contribute to better implementation of falls prevention for older people in the Chinese primary health care system.

Urban-centric growth resulting from urban expansion and land redevelopment may result in rural–urban conflicts. Over time, in China, the affected social groups, such as urban residents in the poore...

All-solid-state lithium–sulfur batteries (ASSLSBs) possess higher safety, longer lifespan, and elevated energy density compared to the traditional liquid lithium–sulfur batteries (LLSBs). However, the ion-electron insulating nature along with the large volume changes of sulfur and Li2S significantly hinder the full exploitation of their high theoretical specific capacities, especially in ASSLSBs. In this work, dense composite sulfur carbon (S/C) cathodes featuring sulfurized polyacrylonitrile (SPAN) supported by a macroporous carbon (MaPC) conductive matrix (SPAN@MaPC) are prepared to solve the above issues. ASSLSBs consisting of the SPAN@MaPC-Li6PS5Cl-vapor grown carbon fiber (VGCF) composite cathode are evaluated. With ∼1 mg cm−2 pure sulfur loading in the cathode, the assembled ASSLSBs achieved a high reversible capacity of 1396.2 mA h g−1 under an applied current of 0.1C at room temperature and still retained 715.5 mA h g−1 after 200 cycles. The reason it has achieved such performance is that the sulfur in SPAN, which is uniformly dispersed at the atomic level and covalently bonded to the polyacrylonitrile (PAN) carbon skeleton, has higher electrochemical reactivity. Further, the electrochemical behavior of SPAN@MaPC in the first cycle is revealed. Also, it is evidenced that the irreversible C–Li bonding contributes partially to the super-theoretical capacity.

Despite being disproportionately affected by poor mental health, culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) individuals seek help from mental health services at lower rates than others in the Australian population. The preferred sources of help for mental illness amongst CaLD individuals remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to explore sources of help in Arabic-, Mandarin-, and Swahili-speaking communities in Sydney, Australia. Eight focus-group discussions (n = 51) and twenty-six key informant interviews were undertaken online using Zoom. Two major themes were identified: informal sources of help and formal sources of help. Under the informal sources of help theme, three sub-themes were identified: social, religious, and self-help sources. All three communities strongly recognised the role of social sources of help, with more nuanced roles held by religion and self-help activities. Formal sources of help were described by all communities, although to a lesser extent than informal sources. Our findings suggest that interventions to support help-seeking for all three communities should involve building the capacity of informal sources of help, utilising culturally appropriate environments, and the collaboration between informal and formal sources of help. We also discuss differences between the three communities and offer service providers insights into unique issues that require attention when working with these groups.

Argyrodite sulfide solid electrolytes, such as Li

This study aimed to explore the effect of repeated low-level red light (RLRL) on axial length (AL), choroid blood flow, and anterior segment components in myopic adults. Ninety-eight myopic adults were randomly divided into the RLRL group (n = 52) and the control group (n = 46). Subjects in the RLRL group completed a 4-week treatment composed of a 3-min RLRL treatment session twice daily, with an interval of at least 4 h. Visits were scheduled before and on 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after the treatment. AL, subfoveal choroidal thickness (SChT), choroidal vascularity index (CVI), and anterior segment parameters were measured at each visit. A linear mixed-effects model showed that the AL of the subjects in RLRL decreased from 24.63 ± 1.04 mm to 24.57 ± 1.04 mm, and the SChT thickened by 18.34 μm. CVI had a slight but significant increase in the 0–6 zone. However, all the anterior segment parameters did not change after RLRL treatment. Our study showed that the choroid’s thickening is insufficient to explain the axial length shortening. The unchanged anterior segment and improved choroid blood flow suggest that the AL shortening in this study is mainly related to changes in the posterior segment.

This special issue brings together original research papers from a diverse range of disciplines in disability studies, media and communication studies, social policy, business and management, commu...

Top-down place-based competition and award (TDPBCA) has a growing presence in the West and a long existence in China. TDPBCA refers to the motivational strategy in which a higher authority sets a s...

This article studies the causes for unequal access to rural community and social development infrastructures in China. We use a dataset in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011–2012), the National Baseline Survey of Communities, to examine the availability of four types of infrastructures: public transportation, sanitation, health care and aged care. Three hundred and seven villages are included in this study. The findings suggest that the primary funder of infrastructures and the status of village governance have impacts on the unequal availability of rural infrastructures. The effects vary by the type of infrastructures under discussion. This is the first attempt to combine planning, finance and governance factors in explaining rural infrastructure availability. It has strong policy implications and shed important light on state–society relations and the urbanisation trends in China.

This article examines the process in which urban families in China renegotiate intergenerational contracts in order to secure old age care and, in particular, emotional support. We argue that as th...

This paper explains the reasons behind the growing social tension and increased number of conflicts in China after a good performance in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. In this paper, we map out the issues with old urbanization (1978–2014) and the problems unsolved by past policy, and analyse whether the new policy changes introduced by the New Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) may help to deal with those problems. We argue that the tensions that evolve into conflicts are often a result of unaddressed social anxiety. Using money to purchase social stability can only be part of the solution. There need to be more serious attempts to improve governance, which involve: improving multi-level governance and inter-regional coordination, enhancing policy transparency and rule by law, adjusting the level of redistribution, and integrating rural and urban community governance structures.

Background: China has the largest number of aging people in need of long-term care, among whom 70% have chronic diseases. For policy planners, it is necessary to understand the different levels of needs of long-term care and provide long-term care insurance to ensure the long-term care needs of all people can be met. Methods: This study combines the 2013 wave of CHARLS survey and the Life Course Survey of 2014. The combination allows us to factor in both childhood and adulthood data to provide life-course analysis. We identified 7,734 older adults with chronic diseases for analysis. The need for long-term care is defined by the presence of functional limitations based on the performance of basic activities of daily living (ADLs) and of instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). Two dummy variables, ADLs disability and IADLs disability, and two count variables, ADLs score and IADLs score, were defined to measure incidence and severity of long-term care need, respectively. The concentration index was used to capture the inequality in long-term care need, and a decomposition method based on Probit Regression and Negative Binomial Regression was exploited to identify the contribution of each determination. Results: At least a little difficulty was reported in ADLs and IADLs in 20.44% and 19.25% of respondents, respectively. The concentration index of ADLs disability, ADLs score, IADLs disability, IADLs score were −0.085, −0.109, −0.095 and −0.120, respectively, all of which were statistically significant, indicating the pro-poor inequality in the incidence and severity of long-term care need. Decomposition analyses revealed that family income, education attainment, aging, and childhood experience played a significant role in explaining the inequalities. Conclusions: The long-term care need among older adults with chronic disease is high in China and low socioeconomic groups had a higher probability of needing long-term care or need more long-term care. It is urgent to implement long-term care insurance, especially for the individuals from lower socioeconomic groups.

There is a shortage of empirical studies on the relationship between Chinese hydropower dams and social sustainability. Comparative research on Chinese-funded and Chinese-built hydropower projects is rare. This article aims to fill parts of this gap by discussing these issues in relation to Chinese overseas hydropower dams in Ghana (Bui Dam) and Cambodia (Kamchay Dam). Both projects are built by Sinohydro and financed by ExIm Bank. This article draws on in-depths interviews and focus group discussions with local communities affected by the dams, institutional actors in Ghana and Cambodia, Chinese actors, and dam builders. The article uses an environmental justice perspective as an analytical framework. The article concludes that the dam projects could improve their social sustainability framework in practice and theory; social benchmarking should be introduced and social policies need to be improved to be in line with international social standards on hydropower projects.

Welfare state is often perceived as a response to help people coping with shocks caused by economic down turn. However, as argued by Hamnett, welfare state can directly assist economic restructuring. Thus, social policies can be responses to unsatisfied social needs or be proactive measures to push for economic changes. Macau is in a somewhat special position in that policy-makers are aware that the economy has been excessively dependent on the gaming industry. The government prevent it from being hit by recess through economic restructuring. In this paper, we examine the current social spending pattern and the nature of the social security system in Macau and establish that social policy in Macau is largely reactive. To achieve economic restructuring, there needs to be more proactive measures to facilitate human development and more stress on social investment.

Intersectoral collaboration is important for policy implementation. However, effective collaboration may be difficult to achieve because of poor internal drive to collaborate, disagreements on framing the problem, institutional constraints and poor leadership. This article examines how competitive campaigns stimulate intersectoral collaboration in the context of healthy urban planning. We examine the case of the Creating Hygienic City Campaign in Jingchang, China from 2006 to 2011, illustrating how the city resorted to intersectoral collaboration to achieve the multiple targets and thus improved public and environmental hygiene. The paper argues that a competitive campaign, when well-organized, can overcome some of the barriers to intersectoral collaboration by building a campaign organization team, legitimizing the leadership, and enhancing public awareness and involvement. The article also suggests that the campaign approach in its current form failed to involve local authorities in setting the targets and was unable to sustain certain efforts.

SUMMARY A fragmented and segmented social protection system can create barriers for labour migration and be socially divisive. A review of the literature on Europe's integration of its social insurance system demonstrates the preconditions for developing an integrated social insurance system. These include political determination, social agreement by the contributors, administrative capacity and financial management ability. In this article, the author explains that there has been an ongoing process of gradual unification of the social insurance system in China. However, this ongoing process has not been able to achieve a universal system for both the rural and urban populations. A recent push towards further unification has been problematic. Not only have difficulties arisen from an unwillingness to implement policies, as often discussed by critics; they are also embedded in a more profound fragmentation of ideas and interests, and in institutional constraints. The author argues that a new, non-contributory basic pension, together with lowered transaction costs between contributory subsystems, may be a more realistic way forwards. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As China continues to urbanise and both intra- and inter-regional migrants move out from their home villages, local economies adapt and form new ecosystems with linked migrants. As a result, local policies targeting one group of migrants may unintentionally affect the other. To reveal it, this paper explores how households' housing choices shaped by local policies have linked upstream and downstream migrants together and how the policy targeting one group of migrants may disadvantage the other. Using a household survey and in-depth interviews in 108 natural villages in peri-urban Shanghai, the research findings reveal that the local government's earlier efforts to ‘urbanise’ local farmers attracted these farmers to resettle in nearby urban areas and lease their rural dwellings to interregional migrants attracted by manufacturing development. The landlords use the rentals to finance their new urban dwellings. Thus, the two groups of migrant families are tied together by the housing market. These linkages mean that new policies trying to dislocate migrants in peri-urban Shanghai are likely to affect migrants upstream and downstream. Interregional migrants might find similar informal accommodation elsewhere or return to their home villages, but ‘urbanised’ farmer families can be trapped and even de-urbanise as a result of their rapidly declining income. This research contributes to the growing international literature on the interdependency of migration and stresses the need for policymakers to consider the externalities of local exclusionary migration policies.

There is a growing, although still far from comprehensive, literature within China on the impacts of climate change in urban areas; also an evolving policy framework at national level to address these concerns and an increased interest in climate change adaptation from many local governments. This paper summarizes the urban risks and vulnerabilities highlighted by the literature, and reviews central and local government responses. It then assesses policy response, including how this considers vulnerability and future risks, formulates an adaptation strategy, engages stakeholders and assesses adaptive capacity. This shows how the Chinese system limits the influence on climate change adaptation of residents and small businesses, and of social scientists. The reasons for this include the tendency to use climate change as an economic growth engine (and GDP growth remains the most important factor for assessing local government officials’ performance), little provision for participation in policy-making, and weak post-implementation evaluation once a policy has been scaled up at national level. These have affected the quality of evidence-based policy-making and make it difficult to draw lessons from unsuccessful practice.

In Chinese cities, about 1.45 million migrant workers stay away from their home villages for longer than six months. The total will reach 230 million if those who work less than six months outside their home villages are also included (National Bureau of Statistics PRC 2010). The scale of migration has put huge pressure on urban housing. Apart from a few local exceptions, little state effort has been dedicated to improve migrant housing for a long time.

The welfare system in China has gone through radical changes in the last 30-plus years. Superficially, reforms in social welfare, either in the direction of state withdrawal or reintroducing the state, have been under strong state control, or paced according to the state's political and development agenda. However, the formal control has been challenged in many ways. Included in this regional issue on China are several articles that may help to illustrate different dimensions of the dynamic relationship between the state and other actors during the welfare reform in China.

Awards and competitions are often used to motivate public servants, and this paper examines how the central government of China uses these to try and motivate cities to improve public hygiene. The authors argue that apart from improving performance,(1) awards and competitions are good at motivating user participation and spreading good practice. However, the design of the schemes used in China tends to prioritize disproportionately the winning mentality, and sometimes causes high costs and social tension.

In Chinese cities, employer-provided housing has played an important part in accommodating low-income, rural-to-urban migrants. Employer housing is often used to study other problems such as management style or worker psychology. In this paper we intend to examine employer-provided housing for its own sake. We use two surveys in the cities of Taiyuan and Tianjin in China to understand the reasons why Chinese employers want to provide housing for employees, the conditions of this type of housing and whether workers are satisfied with it. In doing so, we may identify areas that suffer from serious market failure and will discuss possible solutions to the problems.

This paper uses the cases of four small towns in Shanxi province, PRC, to examine how domestic migration has been used to boost the local economies and generate local revenues. However, how to govern migration is not a priority and as a result, the outcome of migration governance is very much affected by the ways in which towns interact with the higher authorities.

Policies addressing the influx of rural migrants into Chinese urban areas have evolved over time from active opposition, through suspicious ambivalence, to wary tolerance, and now seem to have entered a new phase in which productive engagement is being attempted. Unfortunately, little information or experience is available to inform policy development in this new era. This paper helps address this knowledge gap by studying housing behaviour and choices among a sample of migrants in Taiyuan. The study's results suggest that migrants' housing outcomes in urban areas are influenced heavily by priorities linked to the transitional economic environment and individual migration characteristics. The analysis finds a more limited role for factors such as income and life cycle, which are central to housing choice in other contexts. We argue that migrants' housing outcomes cannot be explained without reference to the specific set of challenges they face, and the resulting decisions that they make, as a result of their immersion in the country's economic transition.

This article uses semi-structured in-depth interviews with rural–urban migrants in Tianjin to look at the personal circumstances of such migrants in China. The interviews suggest that, unlike their predecessors in previous years, many rural–urban migrants now come with the intention of settling down. While there have been major policy changes in the last five years, these migrants are still, in many respects, not integrated into urban society. Meeting these challenges would require further changes in urban policies and urban society, taking account of the needs and interests of rural–urban migrants.