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This research investigates the rise, transformation, and contested persistence of blockchain and AI within China’s digital governance ecosystem, tracing how AI inherits and transforms blockchain’s discursive legacy: the libertarian imaginaries of decentralization and cryptographic trust are rearticulated into new narratives of centralized data infrastructures, computational power, and algorithmic authority. Seen through this inheritance, blockchain’s trajectory appears not as a linear transition from hype to repression, but as a process of paradoxical infrastructuring, where blockchain’s affordances for decentralizing possibilities are alternately valorized, domesticated, and strategically redeployed within contradictory regimes of power. Bringing together Foucault’s theory of governmentality, developed to interrogate Cold War modernity, and Michael Szonyi’s framework of “the art of being governed,” which captures the tactical adaptations of subjects under premodern Chinese statecraft, this analysis reveals how infrastructural governance in China is shaped by the agonistic interplay between historically sedimented repertoires of rule and their contemporary rearticulation through participatory contestations and adaptive strategies enacted by a plurality of stakeholders. Since the reform and opening-up era, these logics have not coexisted peacefully but clashed in painful and dramatic ways, producing new modes of infrastructural subjectivation. The study foregrounds intermediary actors, including crypto developers, influencer-entrepreneurs, and policy-facing venture capitals, who perform decentralization while materially benefiting from its state-sanctioned translation. These figures occupy the ambiguous space between resistance and complicity, tactically navigating regulatory opacity and ideological elasticity. The discourse once attached to blockchain has not disappeared; it re-emerges in the AI era as tools for imagining trustworthiness and legitimacy, enabling blockchain actors to revalorize themselves after the burst of the earlier hype. Ultimately, what appears as a shift from blockchain to AI is better understood as a recursive recalibration of infrastructural power: blockchain’s imaginaries and architectures do not vanish but are folded into the emerging socio-technical apparatus of AI, that is, the interlinked infrastructures, institutions, and discourses through which governance and contestation are exercised. In this process, ideological contradiction functions not as a failure in governance but as a generative feature of China’s evolving techno-infrastructural governance.

This thematic issue examines how artificial intelligence, metaverse imaginaries, and decentralized Web3 systems have become arenas for states to build infrastructures, set technical standards, and project geopolitical power. It reconceptualizes technology not merely as an object of regulation but as a medium of statecraft through which sovereignty, security, and leadership are contested and remade in a multipolar digital order. This issue analyzes three interconnected dimensions: (a) the impact of global AI competition on state-making processes, enhancing coercive, extractive, delivery, and informational capacities similar to earlier state formation phases; (b) the nature of technological leadership as a relational and dynamic process influenced by interactions between leading and following states; and (c) the role of security logics in transforming external rivalry and internal governance through securitization. Through comparative analysis of the US, China, the EU, and emerging economies, this issue explores how diverse political systems encode openness, sovereignty, and accountability into their technological regimes, demonstrating that technological governance is inseparable from state-making. The contributions map competing logics—sovereign, liberal, entrepreneurial—showing that digital governance emerges not as convergence toward a singular model but as recursive entanglements of imagination and infrastructure.

In this work, an Inconel 625 thin-wall structure was fabricated by the gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) hot-wire arc additive manufacturing process. The microstructure and mechanical properties of the Inconel 625 samples, extracted from different orientations and locations of the thin-wall structure, were investigated and compared. The results showed that the additively manufactured Inconel 625 component, made by hot-wire GTAW, had good quality. Its microstructure consisted of dendrites, equiaxial crystals, and cellular crystals. The average hardness from the bottom to the top was similar, indicating that the thin wall had good consistency. The plasticity in the deposition direction was better than those in the other three regions, which was related to the dendritic structure in the sedimentary direction.

Because low thermal conductivity and high viscosity are common characteristics of austenitic steel, it is easy to cause a large amount of heat accumulation in the chip area, resulting in tool edge collapse or wear, and the traditional preparation method is unsuitable for preparing large and complex austenitic steel components. Wire + arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) provides a great application value for austenitic stainless steel because it can solve this problem. The cold metal transfer (CMT)-WAAM system with good control of heat input was used to fabricate the multi-trace and multilayer stainless steel 321 (SS 321) workpiece in this study. The microstructure and corrosion properties of the SS 321 workpiece were observed and compared with those of an SS 321 sheet. The results showed that the microstructure of the SS 321 workpiece from top to bottom was regularly and periodically repeated from the overlapping remelting zone, inter-layer remelting zone, and primary melting zone. There was white austenite matrix and black ferrite, and a small amount of skeleton and worm ferrite was distributed on the white austenite matrix. The average hardness value from the top to the bottom region was approximately uniform, indicating that the workpiece had good consistency. The corrosion properties in 0.5 mol/L H2SO4 solutions were compared between the SS 321 workpiece and the SS 321 sheet. The results showed that the corrosion properties of the top region of the workpiece were better than that of the middle and bottom part, and the corrosion properties of the SS 321 workpiece were better than that of the SS 321 sheet.

Antecedent moisture conditions are essential in explaining differences in the translation of flood-producing precipitation to floods. This study proposes an empirical residual-oriented antecedent precipitation index (RAPI) to estimate and further link antecedent moisture conditions with flood predictive uncertainty. By developing a fully kernel-based residual error model without functional presumptions, the proposed RAPI is calibrated as the regressor of the deterministic model residual. Furthermore, the MI-LXPM algorithm is applied to search for optimal parameters in mixed-integer constraints. The rationality of the proposed framework is demonstrated by its application to a case study in South-East China. The quality of probabilistic streamflow predictions is then quantified using reliability, precision, and the NSE of the prediction mean. The results show that the RAPI closely connects to the uncertainty of hourly flood prediction as a proxy of antecedent soil moisture. The influence of RAPI is mainly on the precision and unbiasedness of flood prediction. Compared with the deterministic model output, the RAPI provides a better flood prediction of small to median flood events as a regressor. Along with the proposed date-driven residual error model, the framework can be applied to any pre-calibrated hydrological model and help modelers achieve high-quality probability flood prediction.

This article examines how great power aspirations and national identity are aesthetically constructed through political animation. We analyze how the animated series Year Hare Affair (..., YHA) transforms geopolitical hierarchies into an anthropomorphic menagerie where China emerges as a vulnerable yet determined rabbit navigating relations with the American eagle, Russian bear, and other animal-nations in the zoopolitik. Through critical discourse analysis coupled with computational examination of audience engagement, we theorize zoopolitik as a gendered symbolic economy that renders abstract international relations emotionally intelligible and emotionally compelling. The rabbit's oscillation between kawaii vulnerability and paternalistic authority exemplifies what Bhabha terms colonial mimicry, where the animation portrays China as showing a critical distance to power domination yet mirrors the future trajectory of China to this domination. Our analysis demonstrates how institutional support transforms YHA into an effective apparatus of civic pedagogy. The series' transpacific visual grammar demonstrates how postcolonial states refunctionalize the allegorical aesthetic forms in representations of global order in major powers (e.g., US, Japan) to naturalize their aspirational trajectories. While gesturing toward decolonial futures, YHA transforms complex international relations into emotionally accessible patriotic narratives. What emerges, therefore, is not a clear rupture with the colonized past, but a re-enchantment of geopolitical power, repackaged for a new generation to form their political subjectivities under the aesthetic veneer of animated play.

In this paper, we use wireless sensing technology to conduct an in-depth study and analysis of data-driven power energy equipment in the context of carbon neutrality. For the high-order uncertainty of renewable energy power generation and the nonlinearity of the tidal equation, a set of orthogonal bases under arbitrary probability space can be constructed by itself using the high-order information of renewable energy power generation statistics, and then, polynomials fit the state variables such as voltage in the tidal equation using the orthogonal bases and calculate the fitting parameters using the stochastic Gallatin integration method. Based on the analysis of the online monitoring project of the main power equipment in the substation, a substation power equipment condition monitoring system is designed to realize the real-time monitoring of the temperature status of power equipment, substation smoke and temperature, and humidity environment, and the feasibility and advanced of the system are verified by elaborating the analysis. Using wireless transmission to send real-time temperature information to the monitoring background, the infrared thermal imaging online monitoring system is designed around the front-end data acquisition system, transmission network, background data processing, and display module. Saving-investment equilibrium means that total investment equals total savings; government budget balance can be achieved through government savings or deficits. When both supply chain approaches enter into the same environmental competition, the added value that consumers value the product because of the carbon-neutral approach becomes smaller in the coefficient constraint of green effort investment cost due to the competition between the two supply chains, which in turn increases the green investment cost of the supply chain with the green effort carbon-neutral approach, indicating that in the case of competition, consumers, when faced with two products produced by two supply chains, are interested in the product with the carbon-neutral approach has less value-added, and some of the demand is shifted to the product not produced with the carbon-neutral approach.

The objective of this study was to develop a statistical lumbar spine geometry model accounting for morphological variations among the adult population. Five lumber vertebrae and lumber spine curvature were collected from CT scans of 82 adult subjects through CT segmentation, landmark identification, and template mesh mapping. Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and multivariate regression analysis were conducted to develop the statistical lumbar spine model. Two statistical models were established to predict the vertebrae geometry and lumbar curvature respectively. Using the statistical models, a lumbar spine finite element (FE) model could be rapidly generated with a given set of age, sex, stature, and body mass index (BMI). The results showed that the lumbar spine vertebral size was significantly affected by stature, sex and age, and the lumbar spine curvature was significantly affected by stature and age. This statistical lumbar spine model could serve as the geometric basis for quantifying effects of human characteristics on lumbar spine injury risks in impact conditions.

Based on the 45-year natural runoff time series from 1956 to 2000 of Golmud hydrological station, the control station of Golmud River basin, the inter-annual variation characteristics involving tendency, periodicity and abrupt change and intra-annual distribution of runoff were researched by using the linear tendency estimate method, cumulative departure method, Mann-Kendall method, Morlet wavelet analysis method, Yamamoto method and Pettitt method, combined with the analysis of annual average distribution process and complete adjustment coefficient. The results indicate that the overall inter-annual fluctuations of the runoff in the Golmud Basin are relatively small, and the overall annual runoff shows a significant increasing trend. After the abrupt change occurred in 1966, the runoff increased significantly. The variation of runoff has 3-year, 6-year and 18-year periods, and the 6-year period is especially obvious. Furthermore, there is a change rule of wet and dry with an 8-year alternation in the 18 years periodic variation. The intra-annual distribution of runoff is uneven, showing a \"single peak\" distribution, and the degree of unevenness tends to more concentrated.