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Since the Chinese were officially plugged into the virtual community in 1994, the usage of the internet in the country has developed at an incredible rate. By the end of 2008, there were approximately 298 million netizens in China, a number which surpasses that of the U.S. and ranks China the highest user in the world. The rapid development of the online Chinese community has not only boosted the information flow among citizens across the territory, but has also created a new form of social interaction between the state, the media, various professionals and intellectuals, as well as China's ordinary citizens. Although the subject of this book is online Chinese nationalism, which to a certain extent is seen as a pro-regime phenomenon, the emergence of an online civil society in China intrinsically provides some form of supervision of state power-perhaps even a check on it. The fact that the party-state has made use of this social interaction, while at the same time remaining worried about the negative impact of the same netizens, is a fundamental characteristic of the nature of the relationship between the state and the internet community. Many questions arise when considering the internet and Chinese nationalism. Which are the most important internet sites carrying online discussion of nationalism related to the author's particular area of study? What are the differences between online nationalism and the conventional form of nationalism, and why do these differences exist? Has nationalist online expression influenced actual foreign policy making? Has nationalist online expression influenced discourse in the mainstream mass media in China? Have there been any counter reactions towards online nationalism? Where do they come from? Online Chinese Nationalism and China's Bilateral Relations seeks to address these questions.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.tandfebooks.com as well as the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project. This book presents a comprehensive examination of Chinese consumer behaviour and challenges the previously dichotomous interpretation of the consumption of Western and non-Western brands in China. The dominant position is that Chinese consumers are driven by a desire to imitate the lifestyles of Westerners and thereby advance their social standing locally. The alternative is that consumers reject Western brands as a symbolic gesture of loyalty to their nation-state. Drawing from survey responses and in depth interviews with Chinese consumers in both rural and urban areas, Kelly Tian and Lily Dong find that consumers situate Western brands within select historical moments. This embellishment attaches historical meanings to Western brands in ways that render them useful in asserting preferred visions of the future China. By highlighting how Western brands are used in contests for national identity, Consumer-Citizens of China challenges the notion of the \"patriot’s paradox\" and answers scholars’ questions as to whether Chinese nationalists today allow for a Sino-Western space where the Chinese can love China without hating the West. Consumer-Citizens of China will be of interest to students and scholars of business studies, Chinese and Asian Studies and Political Science. Kelly Tian is Professor of Marketing and holds the Anderson Chair of Business at New Mexico State University. Lily Dong is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China's recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labour outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fuelled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations. At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Grounded on a series of first-hand interviews with Chinese government officials, this book examines China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, providing an ‘inside’ look at Chinese WTO accession negotiations. Presenting a systematic political economy model in analyzing Beijing’s decision-making mechanisms, the book argues that China’s WTO policy making is a state-led, leadership driven, and top-down process. Feng explores how China’s determined political elite partly bypassed and partly restructured a largely reluctant and resistant bureaucracy, under constant pressure from an increasingly globalized international system. By addressing China’s accession to the WTO from a political analysis perspective, the book provides a theoretically informed and intriguing examination of China’s foreign economic policy making regime. The book highlights contemporary debates relating to state and institutionalist theory and provides new and useful insights into a significant development of this century.

This research aims to investigate the adoption gap in mobile payment systems between Italy and China, focusing on users’ intention to adopt mobile payment. The theoretical framing considers both drivers and barriers when combines the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) with innovation resistance theory (IRT). To empirically verify the proposed model, this study gathers primary data through a web-based, self-administered survey. To analyze the data, we use structural equation modeling, and to test for significant differences between the two groups we run multi-group analysis. The respondents in Italy and China present different behaviors. Social influence plays a significant role in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance, such as Italy. The tradition barrier is the only significant barrier to the adoption of mobile payment.

Do knowledge and information about foreign countries affect people’s evaluation of domestic situations? Using unique survey and experimental data, this research finds that Chinese citizens with more positive perceptions and especially overestimation of foreign socioeconomic conditions have more negative evaluations of China and the Chinese government. Moreover, correcting socioeconomic misinformation about foreign countries improves one’s evaluations of China, indicating that the causal direction is at least partly from rosier estimation of foreign conditions to lower domestic evaluations. The relationship between domestic evaluations and international political knowledge, as measured by familiarity with political affairs and figures in foreign countries, is typically not significant, although awareness of political instability in other countries can increase satisfaction with one’s own country. These results contribute both substantively and conceptually to the study of politically relevant knowledge and information, and shed new light on the nuances of information flow and opinion formation in changing societies.

According to this strategic framework, we have put forward a series of five broad recommendations, covering reproductive health, maternal and newborn health, child and adolescent health, the health system, and social contexts. [...]RMNCAH not only plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing the health of each individual woman, child, and adolescent, but is also a cornerstone for the development of the next generation and the sustainable development of the whole society. RMNCAH have direct effects on the majority of family members—women and children—and men play an important role in contributing to RMNCAH. Because of the forecasted trends for population ageing and low fertility, the proportion of the Chinese population covered by RMNCAH (children aged 0–19 years and female individuals aged 20–49 years) will decline from 46·8% in 2015 to 39·9% in 2030 (appendix pp 1–2).2 Improving RMNCAH is vital for China in the context of rapid ageing and decreasing fertility. Following this, the Global Health Strategy for Women, Children and Adolescents (2016–30), which was developed under the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), explicitly recognised the need to extend the focus beyond mortality alone and to promote health across the developmental years: “By 2030, a world in which every woman, child and adolescent in every setting realizes their rights to physical and mental health and wellbeing, has social and economic opportunities, and is able to participate fully in shaping prosperous and sustainable societies”.

Background Individual protective behaviors play an important role in the control of the spread of infectious diseases. This study aimed to investigate the adoption of protective behaviors by Chinese citizens amid the COVID-19 outbreak and its associated factors. Methods An online cross-sectional survey was conducted from 22 January to 14 February 2020 through Wenjuanxing platform, measuring their knowledge, risk perception, negative emotion, response to official communication, and protective behaviors in relation to COVID-19. A total of 3008 people completed the questionnaire, of which 2845 were valid questionnaires. Results On average, 71% of respondents embraced protective behaviors. Those who made no error in the knowledge test (AOR = 1.77, p  < 0.001) perceived the high severity of the epidemic (AOR = 1.90, p  < 0.001), had high negative emotion (AOR = 1.36, p  = 0.005), reported good health (AOR = 1.94, p  < 0.001), paid high attention to the governmental media (AOR = 4.16, p  < 0.001) and trusted the governmental media (AOR = 1.97, p  < 0.001) were more likely to embrace protective behaviors after adjustments for variations in potential confounding factors. Women and older people were also more likely to embrace protective behaviors. No regional or educational differences were found in the adoption of protective behaviors. Conclusion The majority of Chinese citizens embraced protective behaviors. Higher levels of protective behaviors are associated with higher knowledge, perceived severity, negative emotion, and attention to and trust in the official governmental media. Official governmental communication is the largest single predictor of protective behaviors.

Is foreign aid an effective instrument of soft power? Does it generate affinity for donor countries and the values they espouse? This article answers these questions in the context of Chinese aid to Africa and the competing aid regime of the United States. The study combines data on thirty-eight African countries from Afrobarometer, AidData, and the Aid Information Management Systems of African finance and planning ministries. The authors use spatial difference-in-differences to isolate the causal effects of Chinese and US aid. The study finds that Chinese aid to Africa does not increase (and may in fact reduce) beneficiaries’ support for China. By contrast, US aid appears to increase support for the United States and to strengthen recipients’ commitment to liberal democratic values, such as the belief in the importance of elections. Chinese aid does not appear to weaken this commitment, and may strengthen it. The study also finds that Chinese aid increases support for the UK, France and other former colonial powers. These findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which competing aid regimes generate soft power and facilitate the transmission of political principles and ideals.