Truncated Decision Making and Deliberative Implementation: A Time-Based Policy Process Model for Transitional China

The time dimension has not attracted enough attention in policy process research in China, yet speed is the most distinctive feature of China’s recent development. This article, based on observations of China’s policy practices, proposes a new research perspective for understanding how the Chinese government has been able to address policy challenges in an era of rapid transition. The approach adopted by the government allows decision makers to respond quickly to serious problems with a truncated decision-making process, and then implement the decisions through a more gradual deliberative process. The article examines China’s coal-mining industry reform as an empirical case to illustrate how this governance approach has been used to achieve major policy reform, namely property rights reform for coal mines, while simultaneously maintaining stability, regulating production safety, and stimulating industrial development. The article concludes with a discussion of the broad implications of this pattern for improving the effectiveness of public policy both in and outside China.     

BEYOND THE GPN–NEW REGIONALISM DIVIDE IN CHINA: RESTRUCTURING THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY,REMAKING THE WENZHOU MODEL

This article attempts to advance the research on industrial districts and regional development through a study of the restructuring of the clothing industry in Wenzhou Municipality, a regional driver of the Chinese economy. Wenzhou is known for the Wenzhou model of development traditionally centred on family‐owned small businesses embedded in local institutions. The clothing industry is one of the leading industries in Wenzhou, and a cluster with national significance has emerged, where most of the production components can be purchased locally. However, the industry has been scaled up nationally and internationally, with the expansion of sales networks and production facilities across China, and to a lesser extent, abroad. This restructuring has changed the endogenous nature of industrial clusters/districts. The restructuring challenges the orthodox notion of the Wenzhou model and the New Regionalism literature, particularly the orthodox notion of Marshallian industrial districts that overly emphasizes small firms and local assets, and the global production network perspective that highlights coupling with global lead firms in regional development.     

Cattle Slaughter Industry in Qing China: State Ban,Muslim Dominance,and the Western Diet

Cattle slaughter and beef consumption are barely mentioned in the literature on Chinese economic, food, or animal history. This is possibly due to the widely held popular and scholarly assumption that beef was avoided and even considered taboo in the daily diet of Chinese people in premodern times. This article investigates the tangible regulation and practice of cattle slaughter in Qing China—the period when the beef taboo was argued to be formally subsumed into Chinese morality. I ask the following questions: To what extent did the Qing state ban cattle slaughter? How was the ban enforced in the localities? Did Chinese people slaughter cattle for consumption? Were there lawful beef markets in Qing China proper? How did increasing beef-eating Western sojourners since the mid-19th century impact this sector? Accordingly, I demonstrate that with the leeway provided by the state, the cattle slaughter industry developed in many regions of China proper, especially large cities. In this sector, Chinese Muslim merchants played a dominant role, even though the Han merchants could outnumber them. Their efforts have prepared the state and Chinese merchants to better cope with new circumstances since the mid-19th century. Broadly, this paper sheds light on how different religious, ethnic, and national groups affected the economy and the practice of law in the Qing dynasty.     

Research collaboration beyond the boundary: Evidence from university patents in China

Geographical distance constitutes friction in searching for research collaborators. Taking advantage of a quasinatural experiment featured by High-Speed Railway (HSR) lines in China, this paper employs the difference-in-differences model to identify the causal impact of a substantial improvement in the intercity transportation infrastructure on collaborative innovation across cities. The data pertain to a universe of patent applications filed by Chinese universities and their citations. We find that HSR contributes to a substantial increase in the innovation quantity and quality of collaborative patenting innovation between universities and corporates. It contributes to industry collaboration by utilizing university academic disciplines in the related technology fields. Lastly, HSR facilitates universities to search for new research partners with better quality beyond the geographical boundary.     

In Search of Competitive Efficiency: Labour Process Flexibility in Canadian Newsprint Mills

This paper focuses on the strategies for production and work reorganization pursued in the Canadian newsprint industry during the 1990s. Many newsprint mill managers view new pulping technologies and increased labour process flexibility as the important keys to success in their never-ending quest to remain competitive in the U.S. market. These strategies are discussed in the context of two underlying themes: the nature of the particular competitive pressures faced by Canadian newsprint producers in the early 1990s and the specific nature of the labour process in newsprint mills. Evidence points to the central importance of achieving functional labour flexibility in newsprint mills and to the fact that numerical labour flexibility is not a viable strategy, given the continuous-process nature of the industry.
The Economics of Production, Technological Change, and Cost Competitiveness in the Newsprint Industry
Work Practices and Labour Conventions in the Newsprint Industry
Flexibility and the Quest for Competitive Efficiency in Canadian Newsprint Mills     

Lost Country Houses in Lancashire: Reappraisal and Analysis

The ‘destruction of the English country house’ in the period since the late nineteenth century looms large in popular consciousness, and has received increasing attention from historians in recent years. There is no doubt that demolitions did occur on a large scale, especially in the middle years of the twentieth century, but it is arguable that most research has placed too much emphasis on the economic problems faced by estates arising from the great Agricultural Depression: the narrative so far, that is, has had too rural a focus. This article examines the phenomenon in Lancashire, a county characterized by industrialization, demographic expansion, and rapid urbanization. This regional perspective suggests reasons for country house losses that are subtly but significantly different from those pertaining in the more rural counties of England, which have been the primary focus of previous studies.     

Outdoor lighting design as a tool for tourist development: the case of Valladolid

Practices of outdoor illumination have dramatically changed in the last decades as functional lighting has progressively given way to a more qualitative vision of light. Its traditional role for security purposes has been progressively matched by the use of illumination for city beautification. This is now a major consideration for new lighting strategies. As a result, a growing number of European cities explicitly include the development of nocturnal tourism among the objectives of their lighting policies. However, little attention has been paid by academic research to this growing trend. Focusing on the internationally renowned lighting project ‘Ruta de los Rios de Luz’, this research paper explores the use of lighting design for tourism purposes. Through interviews with individuals who played an important role in the project, the discussion below scrutinizes the lighting design decisions and the economic, environmental and political objectives that inspire the growing utilization of spectacular forms of illumination for tourism purposes.     

The Influence of Dowel-Bearing Strength in Designing Timber Pegged Timber Joints

ABSTRACT

The employment of timber pegs in timber structure joints is a widespread technology in the field of timber frame building in the United States, where the Timber Frame Engineering Council has published a special Standard to supplement the National Design Specification for Wood Construction. The authors have been studying the possibility of supplementing the Eurocode 5 design formulas, thought for timber joints with metal connectors, with specifications needed for a reliable design when employing timber pegs. The field of application envisaged is that of restoring timber structures and results obtained until now are quite encouraging. In this step of the research, more attention has been paid to deformation process: fir and chestnut samples have been tested to determine their dowel-bearing behavior with steel and ash timber peg while double-shear plane joints made of the same wood species, and fastened with steel as well as timber pegs, have been analyzed.