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The growing presence of Chinese enterprises in Africa has attracted public attention to their employment practices. Critics blame Chinese for not hiring local workers, paying low wages, having precarious working conditions, and providing little training. Addressing these issues, this article first examines the reality of Chinese companies' employment practices in Africa. Doing so reveals the diversity of Chinese enterprises' employment patterns and the reasons behind these patterns. The paper argues that the criteria for evaluating the benefits of employment are diverse and related to comprehensive social background. Efforts for improvement need to take various socio-cultural contexts into account. It is through mutual learning and the convergence of various cultural traditions that hiring practices can benefit both Chinese and Africans.

As Chinese investors set up business operations in Africa, disagreements between Chinese and Africans regarding work attitudes have emerged. A prevailing view is that cultural differences cause tensions between groups with regards to the meaning of “hard work,” “discipline” and “eating bitterness.” However, we argue that conflicting perceptions of work ethics between Chinese and Africans are instead caused by evolving notions of time that accompany a transition from a pre-capitalist manner of production to that of industrial capitalism. First, we refute the assumption that culture determines work ethics. Second, we show that when a society industrializes, its notions of work ethics and time perception change; we then show how China's industrialization impacts its approaches to operations in Africa. Third, we use two case studies of Chinese investments in Tanzania and Ethiopia to illustrate how Chinese managers are changing African workers’ attitudes through time discipline. Finally, we discuss the implications of a convergence of work ethics between Chinese and Africans. 在非洲日益增多的中国企业雇用了数以万计的当地劳工。然而, 关于 “勤奋” 的中国人与 “懒惰” 的非洲人的刻板成见导致了不少歧视性的管理行为, 同时也影响了对非洲员工的培训和使用。有观点认为中非不同的文化是两个地区工作伦理差异的主因。但本文对近现代的工作伦理演变过程进行回顾分析后认为这一观点无法成立。中非之间工作伦理的差异, 更主要体现在现代标准化时间观念及传统任务型时间观念所导致的不同习惯。随着中国的市场化改革, “时间就是金钱”的观念作为工业资本主义的基本原则普遍被中国民众接受, 当他们在非洲建厂时, 也试图改变非洲员工的时间观念与工作方式, 使其能适应工业化生产的需要。基于坦桑尼亚与埃塞俄比亚的两个案例对比展示了在不同文化社会环境中, 中国企业如何通过实践摸索来逐渐培养了非洲员工的现代工作伦理观。

This article examines recent Chinese efforts to construct a series of official economic cooperation zones in Africa. These zones are a central platform in China's announced strategy of engagement in Africa as ‘mutual benefit’. We analyse the background, motives and implementation of the zones, and argue that they form a unique, experimental model of development cooperation in Africa: market-based decisions and investment by Chinese companies are combined with support and subsidies from an Asian ‘developmental state’. Though this cooperation provides a promising new approach to sustainable industrialisation, we also identify serious political, economic and social challenges. Inadequate local learning and local participation could affect the ability of the zones to catalyse African industrialisation. The synergy between Chinese enterprises, the Chinese government and African governments has been evolving through practice. A case study of Egypt provides insight into this learning process.

China's rapidly growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused intense debates, but these debates have often generated more heat than light. The Chinese government is clearly pushing its companies to move offshore in greater numbers, and state-owned firms figure prominently in many of the major investments abroad. Yet relatively little research exists on when, how and why the Chinese government intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. China's state-sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. This article examines China's programme to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. It traces the process by which they were established and implemented, and investigates the characteristics of the 19 zones initially selected in a competitive tender process. The article concludes that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones were overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects. Particularly in the Asian zones, China is following in the footsteps of Japan. The zone programme, and the Chinese foreign investment it hoped to foster, represents a clear case of the international projection of China's developmental state. However, in Africa (but not generally elsewhere) discourse surrounding the zones publicly positions them as a transfer of China's own development success, thus potentially enhancing China's political relationships and soft power on the continent.

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is recognized as major cause of foodborne illness of global public health concern. This study collected 107 strains of V. parahaemolyticus during active surveillance of diarrheal diseases in hospitals in Zhoushan during 2013 to 2014 and investigated their serotypes, virulence genes (tdh, trh, and orf8), antimicrobial resistance, and genotypes. The dominant serotypes of the 107 clinical strains were O3:K6, O4:K8, and O4:KUT with 87.9% and 3.7% of the strains carrying the virulence genes tdh and trh, respectively. Molecular typing by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis indicated divergence among the clinical strains. Most isolates were sensitive to the common antimicrobial agents used against the Vibrio species except ampicillin. We conclude that continuous surveillance of V. parahaemolyticus in diarrhea patients is a public health priority and is useful for conducting risk assessment of foodborne illnesses caused by V. parahaemolyticus.

Spore-forming bacterial species pose a serious threat to food plants and healthcare facilities that use high-temperature processing and sterilizing techniques to sanitize medical equipment and food items. These severe processing conditions trigger sporulation, which is the process by which spore-forming bacteria, such as those of the Bacillus and Clostridium species, begin to produce spores, which are extremely resilient entities capable of withstanding adverse environmental circumstances. Additionally, these spores are resistant to a wide range of disinfectants and antibacterial therapies, such as hydrolytic enzymes, radiation, chemicals, and antibiotics. Because of their ability to combat bacteria through several biological pathways, selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) have emerged as an effective method for either eliminating or preventing the formation of spore-forming bacteria. This review aims to investigate every potential pathway of entry and mechanism by which SeNPs impact bacterial species that produce spores. Additionally, SeNPs’ antibacterial efficacy against several infections is reviewed. To precisely explain the antibacterial mechanism of SeNPs and the various factors that can affect their effectiveness, more research is necessary.

Agriculture is a rapidly growing arena for China's economic engagement in Africa. Drawing on new field research in East and West Africa, and in Beijing and Baoding, China, as well as earlier archival research, this article investigates the dimensions of China's agricultural engagement, placing it in historical perspective. It traces the changes and continuities in China's policies in rural Africa since the 1960s, as Chinese policies moved from fraternal socialism to amicable capitalism. Beginning in the 1980s, the emphasis on aid as mutual benefit began to blur the lines between aid, south–south co-operation and investment. Today, Beijing has established at least 14 new agro-technical demonstration stations using an unusual public–private model that policy makers hope will assist sustainability. At the same time, a stirring of interest among land-scarce Chinese farmers and investors in developing farms in sub-Saharan Africa evokes a mix of anticipation and unease.

A cost-effective algorithm is presented, using a virtual dataset of growth rates from a cocktail of Bacillus cereus strains, for developing an open access, extended-range secondary growth model. Extended-range growth models can span the range of processing conditions typically used in food manufacturing and are therefore more relevant for industry. The open access extended-range secondary growth model for a cocktail of B. cereus strains was created using publicly available data, and the methodology can be adapted for modelling growth of other pathogens. An extended-range model can help manage B. cereus hazards in novel food categories with non-traditional formulations as estimations of B. cereus risks in these foods become more precise. This open access model, however, needs to be validated using data from B. cereus strain cocktails isolated from production facilities. Once validated, these independent factor models are valuable tools, in a pathogen decision support platform, which are tuned to local production environments. Such a platform can address the needs of current and future food product portfolios, effectively mitigating risks associated with B. cereus and other relevant pathogens.

When performing hydrological model parameter calibration, equifinality inevitably reduces the simulation and prediction ability of hydrological models. To lessen the impact of equifinality, a novel algorithmic improvement framework is proposed in this paper. This framework allows the parameters to be searched hierarchically in order of sensitivity size and shrinks the original ranges of the parameters before the final search. The shuffled complex evolution (SCE_UA) algorithm, which is the most popular method for addressing hydrological model calibration issues, is improved using this new framework yielding HSRS_SCE algorithm, which stands for the SCE_UA algorithm with hierarchical search (HS) and range shrinkage (RS). A 26-dimensional parametric calibration problem is constructed and solved in this study utilizing 12 schemes based on the HSRS_SCE algorithm with various parameters and a control scheme based on the SCE_UA algorithm. The results show that the HSRS_SCE algorithm can not only produce calibrated parameter results significantly superior to those of the traditional scheme (p < 0.05) but also produce objective function values 26.1% better than those of the traditional scheme and reduce the search time through parallel computing.