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Election procedures in rural China have improved greatly over the last 20 years and a good number of reasonably free and fair elections have been held. But changes in the 'exercise of power' have not kept up with changes in the 'access to power'. In many communities, township authorities, Party branches, and social forces (such as clans, religious groups, and underworld elements) continue to impede democratic rule. This suggests that a purely procedural definition of democracy is problematic and that democratization depends on the power configuration in which elected bodies are embedded. Putting grassroots democracy into place goes well beyond getting the procedures right, and 'high quality' democracy rests on much more than convening good village elections every three years. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

ObjectiveMetabolic syndrome (MetS) has been associated with increased prevalence of aortic valve calcium (AVC) and with increased progression of aortic stenosis. The purpose of this study was to determine whether MetS is associated with increased risks for the development of new ("incident") AVC or for progression of established AVC as assessed by CT.Research design and methodsThe relationships of MetS or its components as well as of diabetes to risks for incident AVC or AVC progression were studied among participants with CT scans performed at baseline and at either year 2 or year 3 examinations in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).ResultsOf 5,723 MESA participants meeting criteria for inclusion, 1,674 had MetS by Adult Treatment Panel III criteria, whereas 761 had diabetes. Among the 5,123 participants without baseline AVC, risks for incident AVC, adjusted for time between scans, age, sex, race/ethnicity, LDL cholesterol, lipid-lowering medications, and smoking, were increased significantly for MetS (odds ratio [OR] 1.67 [95% CI 1.21-2.31]) or diabetes (2.06 [1.39-3.06]). In addition, there was an increase in incident AVC risk with increasing number of MetS components. Similar results were found using the International Diabetes Federation MetS criteria. Among the 600 participants (10.5%) with baseline AVC, neither MetS nor diabetes was associated with AVC progression.ConclusionsIn the MESA cohort, MetS was associated with a significant increase in incident ("new") AVC, raising the possibility that MetS may be a potential therapeutic target to prevent AVC development.

Rural protest leaders in China play a number of roles. Among others, they lead the charge, shape collective claims, recruit activists and mobilize the public, devise and orchestrate acts of contention, and organize cross-community efforts. Protest leaders emerge in two main ways. Long-standing public figures initiate popular action on their own or in response to requests from other villagers; and ordinary villagers evolve into protest leaders when efforts to seek redress for a personal grievance fail. Rural officials sometimes attempt to co-opt or buy off protest leaders, but more often turn to repression. Although cracking down may inhibit further contention, at other times it firms up the determination of protest leaders and makes them more prone to adopt confrontational tactics, partly by enhancing their popular support, partly by increasing the costs of withdrawal. © 2008 The China Quarterly.

Social movements research points to the role of networks in recruiting intimates and public spaces in recruiting strangers. But for Chinese Protestants, creative outreach strategies can be a substitute for existing relationships and initiate recruitment. In China, public proselytizing is forbidden, religion is rarely mentioned in the media, and direct contact -with potential converts is discouraged. To attract strangers, evangelists in China rely on door-todoor proselytizing in the countryside, cultural performances embedded with religious messages in the cities, and one-on-one conversations when the opportunity arises. By contacting targets in the ordinary flow of life and fashioning appeals using resonant language, Protestant recruiters have become adept at attracting non-networked individuals in "safe-enough" spaces that appear in the creases of a reforming Leninist regime. At a general level, the analysis suggests that networks sometimes play a smaller role in recruitment than is commonly thought, at least at first, and that social bonds may be as much a result of recruitment as a precondition for it. © Mobilization: An International Quarterly.

The severity index is a new echocardiographic measure that is thought to be an accurate indicator of aortic leaflet pathology in patients with AS. However, it has not been validated against cardiac catheterization or Doppler echocardiographic measures of AS severity nor has it been applied to patients with aortic sclerosis. The purposes of this study were to compare the severity index to invasive hemodynamics and Doppler echocardiography across the spectrum of calcific aortic valve disease, including aortic sclerosis and AS. 48 patients with aortic sclerosis and AS undergoing echocardiography and cardiac catheterization comprised the study population. The aortic valve leaflets were assessed for mobility (scale 1 to 6) and calcification (scale 1 to 4) and the severity index was calculated as the sum of the mobility and calcification scores according to the methods of Bahler et al. The severity index increased with increasing severity of aortic valve disease; the severity indices for patients with aortic sclerosis, mild to moderate AS and severe AS were 3.38 +/- 1.06, 6.45 +/- 2.16 and 8.38 +/- 1.41, respectively. The aortic jet velocity by echocardiography and the square root of the maximum aortic valve gradient by cardiac catheterization correlated well with the severity index (r = 0.84, p < 0.0001; r = 0.84, p < 0.0001, respectively). These results confirm that the severity index correlates with hemodynamic severity of aortic valve disease and may prove to be a useful measure in patients with aortic sclerosis and AS.

Protest outcomes in rural China are typically an outgrowth of interaction between activists, sympathetic elites, targets, and the public. Popular agitation first alerts concerned officials to poor policy implementation and may prompt them to take corrective steps. As a result of participating in contention, certain activists feel empowered and become more likely to take part in future challenges, whereas others feel disillusioned and lapse into passivity. In the course of observing collective action, some onlookers are sensitized to protesters' concerns and public opinion is affected. Without popular action, better implementation, biographical change, and effects on the public would not emerge, but nor would they without involvement from above. Studying the impact of this protest thus sheds light on two issues that have long troubled students of contentious politics: (a) how to get a grip on indirect, mediated consequences; and (b) how to think about causality when change is a result of popular action as well as openings provided by sympathetic elites. © 2005 Sage Publications.

In studies of popular politics a split exists. Some scholars focus on rather tame forms of participation while others become interested mainly when political action spills out onto the streets. This article considers acts located near the boundary between official, prescribed politics and politics by other means. It explores popular pressure that is arguably legal, permissible in some eyes but not in others. The episodes of boundary-spanning contention examined center on implementing elections in rural China. What is to be gained by investigating this form of contention? First, it promises a better understanding of causal processes insofar as it draws attention to state and movement trajectories. Second, it can help close the gap between analysts who study the dynamics of contention and those who are concerned with the consequences of contention. Third, it promises to bring the relationship between states and contentious politics into clearer focus. Finally, studying boundary-spanning acts can help locate a regime across a number of dimensions: what is institutionalized and what is not, what is participation and what is resistance, who is a challenger and who is a polity member, what citizenship entails and who enjoys it.

China has seen a surge of working class protests in recent years. Many of these have involved retirees. Pensioners are found to be particularly prone to take to the streets because their grievances are intense and are widely perceived to be legitimate, they are "biographically available," and they often feel nostalgic for aspects of the Maoist past. Their actions also display elements of moral economic resistance. This article draws on the available literature as well as interviews with 30 workers, retirees, laid-off workers, managers and local officials in five cities.

In this article, I assess the state of political citizenship in rural China. After discussing the often local and rural origins of citizenship and the meaning of the term itself, I review the limited reforms that have taken place in the election of high-ranking state leaders and people's congress deputies. I then turn to a more promising avenue of inclusion: the villagers' committee (VC) elections that began in the late 1980s. Here, we see notable efforts to heighten cadre responsiveness and draw rural residents into the local polity. At the same time, sizable obstacles to inclusion remain, not least because many electoral rules and practices do not enfranchise villagers reliably. The inescapable conclusion that villagers enjoy (at best) a partial citizenship needs to be qualified, however, owing to evidence that some rural people are starting to challenge improper elections using the language of rights. Building on a rules consciousness and a sensitivity to government rhetoric that have existed for centuries, as well as exploiting the spread of participatory ideologies and patterns of rule rooted in notions of equality, rights, and the rule of law, these villagers are busy advancing their interests within prevailing limits, forcing open blocked channels of participation, and struggling to make still-disputed rights real. In this regard, certain citizenship practices are emerging even before citizenship has appeared as a fully recognized status, and we may be observing the process by which a more complete citizenship comes about.

When residents of a few Guangxi villages decided to elect their own leaders in late 1980 and early 1981, none of them could have known they were starting a historic reform. What began as a stopgap effort to fill a political vacuum, after much debate and two decades of uneven implementation, is now enshrined in a national law. Procedures for holding elections have been spelled out and implementing regulations are being formulated at all levels. Voting is now mandatory every three years in every village, bar none.

Campaign nostalgia is an indicator of frustration and unmet expectations. Its origins trace to an unwillingness on the part of the Party leadership to rely on mass mobilization to check cadre corruption. Under Mao, political campaigns at least occasionally afforded ordinary Chinese opportunities to hold grassroots leaders who transgressed regime norms accountable. Nowadays, some villagers chafe at the lack of such opportunities. They see electoral reforms, potentially beneficial policies (such as limits on peasant burdens), and laws that grant them rights (such as the Administration Litigation Law and the Villagers' Committee Law) ignored or undermined somewhere in the hierarchy. These individuals long for a romanticized version of the rectifications of old and dismiss clean government drives and bureaucratic supervision as feeble replacements for centrally sponsored, direct struggle against wrongdoers. Particularly in places where 'local emperors' lord it over them and anti-corruption efforts sputter without much effect, nostalgic villagers fondly remember the days when work teams swept in and malfeasant cadres shook with fear. Although one may question whether nostalgics have underestimated the downside of mass movements while conjuring up an idyllic era of official probity, it is more difficult to fault their assessment of the current anti-corruption struggle. Compared with those who express unbounded confidence in legal remedies, nostalgics are sober realists. They understand that relying on propaganda and cadre education is a non-starter and that law in China, such as it is, is not the rule of law. They know that many laws and policies are poorly implemented and that, in a pinch, political exigency can trump nearly anything. Nostalgic villagers and like-minded intellectuals have recognized that treating legal punishment, Party discipline, and mass reports as cure-alls is equivalent to acquiescing to a high level of corruption. Will campaign nostalgia wane with time? Perhaps. Where villagers' committee elections are run well and economic growth benefits the majority of villagers, nostalgia will not find a receptive climate in which to grow. Where lodging complaints or filing lawsuits check corruption and the imposition of illicit fees, villagers may gradually build up confidence in rule by law and find mass mobilization unnecessary. As today's nostalgics age, younger generations may find little to recommend in a form of inclusion characteristic of their elders. Even increasing mobility and the growth of a rural middle class may gradually shift the locus of political conflict away from the village.

The undergraduate study of religion is predominantly undertaken by non-majors who are meeting a general education requirement. This means that, while curricular discussions make important distinctions between the work of lower- and upper-division courses, many religion and theology faculty are teaching hybrid courses that we call "introductory upper-level courses." These play an introductory role in general education while also serving the study of religion in a more advanced way. Attention to how these courses fit into multiple curricular goals will be important for the scholarship of teaching and learning in religious studies and theology. This essay draws on scholarship about introductory teaching and a survey of faculty about introductory upper-level courses to argue that the content of such courses should be understood as serving the study of religion at an advanced level, the context should be understood as introducing general education goals, and the goals for intellectual growth must strike a challenging balance between the two.

Some leaders of Chinese local people's congresses emphasize autonomy in order to promote decentralization and enhance representation. Other legislative insiders favor sacrificing autonomy in order to strengthen capacity and improve oversight. Tight coupling between congresses appeals to local legislators because it offers opportunities to mobilize supporters, obtain resources, and expand jurisdiction, while representatives of higher congresses often oppose closer ties in order to preserve local initiative, safeguard elections, and reduce conflict with Party committees. In a reforming communist state, single legislatures may not be the right unit of analysis for assessing autonomy. Established boundaries, in the early stages of institutionalization, may apply to the legislative system as a whole rather than to its parts. And softening boundaries between congresses at different levels can harden boundaries against other bureaucracies.

The academic and industrial communities have proposed two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors as a future option to supplant silicon transistors at sub-10nm physical gate lengths. In this Comment, we share the recent progress in the fabrication of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices based on stacked 2D TMD nanoribbons and specifically highlight issues that still need to be resolved by the 2D community in five crucial research areas: contacts, channel growth, gate oxide, variability, and doping. While 2D TMD transistors have great potential, more research is needed to understand the physical interactions of 2D materials at the atomic scale. 2D semiconductors have been proposed as a potential option to replace or complement silicon electronics at the nanoscale. Here, the authors discuss the recent progress and remaining challenges that need to be addressed by the academic and industrial research communities towards the commercialization of 2D transistors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It all began when angry villagers accused the Party secretary of turning off the electricity to an ice lolly(binggunror popsicle) factory whose owner had refused to pay bribes. The lolly maker had not been paying his rent but that was no reason, they said, to melt his stock and to cause the bank to foreclose on the village's most profitable enterprise.

This article examines the ongoing tug-of-war between the centre and lower levels by analysing the implementation of the Organic Law of Villagers' Committees. The law provides a framework for reorganizing China's villages and rejuvenating local political institutions and is the centrepiece of a central program designed to enhance cadre accountability and village autonomy while reaffirming state control over the countryside. However, some villagers' committees scarcely function and many operate in a fashion quite unlike that prescribed by the Organic Law. The author suggests that success has largely hinged on the amount of bureaucratic attention a village has received and on how villagers and local cadres have perceived their interests and understood their resources in relation to each other and to higher levels. In many localities, assorted forms of cadre resistance and villager skepticism have been important causes of patchy implementation, and balancing demands both to complete state tasks and to increase popular participation have frequently impinged on the interests of cadres and villagers for separate but reinforcing reasons. -from Author

In the past, the loyalty most Chinese people's congress deputies felt toward the state completely overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to constituents. Deputies in the Maoist era faced simple and clear expectations to represent the regime to the people and often devastating sanctions if they did not. Ambiguities were few and deputies had limited opportunities to define their own role or to expand their constituency focus. More recently, however, evolving expectations, rapid societal change and institutional reforms have transformed the duties of “people's representatives” and have created deputy identities that are increasingly multi-layered and fraught with contradictions. Deputies now have unprecedented opportunities to improvise on conventional scripts and some have taken on new roles: roles that clash with their traditional responsibilities, and that appear very difficult to reconcile.

Courses about religion and the environment should work toward a synthesis of critical thinking--teaching students to examine and question the interplay of environmental degradation, religious traditions, and new religious movements--and advocacy--helping students to embrace, articulate, and refine their own environmentalist commitments, in religious terms when appropriate. To meet these goals, teachers of religion and the environment can learn from literature on balancing faith and critical analysis in other religion courses. This literature will help us to clarify the goals of our courses, critically examine the environmental movement with our students, and remain trustworthy to those who do not share environmentalist commitments. See a companion essay in this issue of the journal (Jennifer R. Ayres, "Learning on the Ground") and a response to both of these essays (Forrest Clingerman, "Pedagogy as a Field Guide to the Ecology of the Classroom") also published in this issue of the journal.

Many scholars have analysed bargaining between supervisory bureaucracies and Chinese large and medium-sized factories. Walder identified a web of informal, semi-bureaucratic relationships that structures negotiations over revenues, payments and subsidies. Granick and Tidrick pointed out that divided bureaucratic control increases the parties to bargaining, while conflicting interests present opportunities to play supervisors off against each other. Huang found collusive behaviour that occurs when local government agencies and firms rob the state treasury by increasing central subsidies and reducing central exactions in exchange for fees that go directly to local coffers. Numerous authors have noted that the focus of bargaining has shifted from material to financial transfers and have used (or questioned using) Kornai's “soft budget constraint” to explain the persistence of bargaining since the onset of reform.

Critical deputy speeches and opposition to draft bankruptcy, enterprise, and villager committee laws have led some observers to conclude that the National People's Congress (NPC) is a conservative, obstructionist force in Chinese politics. This article reviews the evidence for this claim and finds that the NPC's institutional impact is more accurately described as procedurally conservative than as substantively conservative. Not a staunch opponent of market reforms nor of redefining the role of the Communist Party, the legislature instead stands for rationalizing and legalizing policymaking and for guaranteeing policy implementation; it weighs in on the side of caution, carefully-planned change, and minimizing risks, and against campaign-style politics and reliance on revolutionary enthusiasm and charisma.

This article provides a personal viewpoint on the history of orthodontic research since the inception of the British Journal of Orthodontics. The author reflects on the early years of the journal, which focused on clinical retrospective investigations and case reports. The article then discusses the evolution of orthodontic research, including the use of epidemiological studies, randomized controlled trials, and systematic reviews. The author also highlights the need for future research to focus on measuring the effects of orthodontic treatment on patients' well-being and to explore more complex areas of treatment. Additionally, the article raises concerns about the standards and practices of orthodontic journals and suggests the establishment of a free, electronic journal that prioritizes high-quality, concise publications. [Extracted from the article]

This response to a study by D. Strauss and T. Kastner, which compared mortality rates for individuals with mental retardation in either community or institutional settings, notes that all previous research on this subject had found institutional mortality rates higher than those in the community. Methodological concerns are raised about the study. (DB)