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In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

This paper focuses on governance in higher education in China. It sees that governance as distinctive on the world scale and the potential source of distinctiveness in other domains of higher education. By taking an historical approach, reviewing relevant literature and drawing on empirical research on governance at one leading research university, the paper discusses system organisation, government–university relations and the role of the Communist Party (CCP), centralisation and devolution, institutional leadership, interior governance, academic freedom and responsibility, and the relevance of collegial norms. It concludes that the party-state and Chinese higher education will need to find a Way in governance that leads into a fuller space for plural knowledges, ideas and approaches. This would advance both indigenous and global knowledge, so helping global society to also find its Way.

The aim of this paper is to argue for the values of familial caring and relationships in addition to the provision of social media technology during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong.

The discussion of this paper has adopted an inter-disciplinary approach by integrating health care system and psychological analysis, based on cultural philosophical argument through the hermeneutic approach of classical texts and critical analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the dilemma between the public health measures for COVID-19 and sustaining elderly social psychological health through familial connection. From a Confucian perspective, the practice of filial piety (xiao, 孝), which demands taking care of parents, is essential for one’s moral formation, and for one’s becoming a virtuous (ren, 仁) person. The necessity of taking care of elderly parents by adult children is not something that can be explained in terms of consequentialism. Indeed, the rising trend of instrumental rationality seems to weaken rather than strengthen the sense of filial obligation. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic which tends to separate connections between family members, the author argues that we should emphasize the values of familial caring and relationship because it enhances the elderly’s characteristic of resilience.

This paper shows that while social media technology has mitigated the negative effect of social distancing, such online relationships should never replace the bodily connections between the elderly and their family members from a Confucian perspective.

It is scholars' great mission in this era to creatively develop new implications, paradigms and discourses of China's political economy and establish a theoretical system of political economy with Chinese characteristics based on the fundamental principles of Marxist theory and the practice and historical process of Chinese economic reform, through theorizing and systemizing the practices of China's socialist market economy construction. The purpose of this paper is to give some suggestions to establish a socialist theoretical system with Chinese characteristics.

This paper makes a comprehensive analysis of the principles, objectives, study objects, methodologies as well as the framework of the theoretical system of the political economy with Chinese characteristics.

Additionally, starting from the unity of opposites between public ownership of resources and resource allocation in a market mechanism, which is the fundamental dialectical relation of China's socialist market economy, the authors will adopt the dual dialectical analysis approach to discover and understand the duality features of the socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics.

With adherence to the mission of China's socialist economic system, the goal of China's market economic reform, and the perspectives of Marxist political economy, the authors must explicitly define the so-called Chinese characteristics and then summarize the dynamics and innovations during the evolution of Chinese socialist political economy with high theory confidence and theory self-consciousness.

The purpose of this paper is to comment on Peter Ping Li’s understanding of Zhong-Yong balancing, presented in his article titled “Global implications of the indigenous epistemological system from the East: How to apply Yin-Yang balancing to paradox management.” Seeing his understanding of Zhong-Yong balancing being incorrect and incomplete, the author proposes an alternative perspective on Zhong-Yong as dynamic balancing between Yin-Yang opposites.

The author first explain why Peter P. Li’s “asymmetry” and “superiority” arguments are flawed by referring to the original text of the classical book of Zhong-Yong (中庸) and a comparison between Zhong-Yong and Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. The author then propose an alternative approach to Zhong-Yong balancing that is embedded in the original text Zhong-Yong but somehow has been neglected by many Chinese scholars. The author concludes the commentary by unifying the two alternative approaches to Zhong-Yong balancing under the inclusion-selection-promotion-transition (ISPT) framework of Zhong-Yong balancing.

There are three main findings. First, as the original text of Zhong-Yong does not prescribe asymmetry, Peter P. Li’s notion of “Yin-Yang balancing” is ironically unbalanced or anti-Zhong-Yong due to his emphasis on asymmetry to the exclusion of symmetry. Second, due to the equivalency between Zhong-Yong and Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, Peter P. Li’s assertion that “Yin-Yang balancing” is superior as a solution to paradox management is flawed. Third, his “Yin-Yang balancing” solution is only (the less sophisticated) one of two alternative approaches to Zhong-Yong balancing, i.e., ratio-based combination of Yin-Yang opposites. What Peter P. Li and many other Chinese have neglected is another approach to Zhong-Yong that is embedded in the original text of Zhong-Yong, which I call “analysis plus synthesis.”

As it is a commentary there are no specific limitations except for what can be covered in the space available.

The “analysis plus synthesis” approach to Zhong-Yong can be adopted by practitioners who are demanded to balance between opposite forces in daily life and work.

The rejection of the “Yin-Yang balancing being superior” assertion facilitates reduction of friction and non-cooperation between intellectual traditions.

This commentary contributes to the “West meets East” discourse by debunking Peter P. Li’s assertion that Yin-Yang balancing is superior as a solution to paradox management and his prescription that balancing between Yin-Yang opposites must be asymmetric. It also contributes to the Chinese indigenous management research by identifying a largely neglected approach to Zhong-Yong balancing (i.e. “analysis plus synthesis”) that is alternative to the commonly understood ratio-based combination approach (e.g. “Yin-Yang balancing”). In addition, it contributes to the management literature by proposing the ISPT framework of Zhong-Yong balancing.

Trade and environment are essential issues closely related to the development of the national economy and the improvement of people’s livelihood in the new era. The Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) listed the construction of a strong trading power as an important part of building a modern economic system and pollution prevention and treatment as one of the three key battles to win the decisive victory of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, the relationship between trade and environmental pollution is still very controversial in the existing literature, and there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between trade and environmental pollution based on micro data.

This paper merged China’s Firm-Level Pollution Database with China’s Industrial Enterprise Database and China’s industry tariff rates. Additionally, by virtue of the quasi-natural experiment of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a difference in difference (DID) model was constructed to alleviate the endogeneity issue.

According to the results, the trade barrier decrease (trade liberalization) significantly reduces the intensity of SO₂ emissions, a major pollutant of enterprises, as the intensity of SO₂ emissions decreased 2.16% for each unit decrease of the trade barrier. The analysis of the mechanisms shows that the SO₂ emission intensity of enterprises is mainly due to the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission rather than the decrease of output, and the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission is mainly caused by the enterprises’ cleaner production process rather than the end treatment of pollution emission. The decrease of coal use intensity is an important mechanism of the decrease of SO₂ emission intensity caused by the decrease of trade barriers. Among the technical effects of the change of the trade barrier affecting enterprises’ pollution emission, biased technical change rather than neutral technical change dominates.

The findings of this paper imply that expanding openness can enhance China’s social welfare not only through the economic growth mechanisms identified in the classical literature, but also through environmental improvements. This provides useful policy insights for promoting the construction of a strong trading power and winning the battle against pollution in the new era.

To realise the shared development of the digital economy, people need to transcend the capital logic and advocate the logic of cooperative development, i.e. “co-construction, benefit-sharing and co-governance”. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned statement.

Platform economy is a new economic form produced by the transformation of the social production patterns in the era of digital capitalism. In the neo-imperialist stage, a new stage of capitalist development, capital logic promotes the global expansion of the platform economy and influences its development process, organisational form, contradictions and dilemmas and internal transcendence. Having the spatiotemporal chain of capital circulation repaired, the globalisation of the platform economy is reshaping how the means of production are combined with labour, affecting the local changes in the general relations of production and “international relations of production”.

In the accumulation of digital capitalism, the social contradictions and fundamental contradictions in the capitalist world have been further intensified, making exploitation, income distribution gap, monopoly and other problems increasingly severe. The imbalance and inequality in the global development of the digital economy are increasingly prominent.

Regarding the global governance of the digital economy, China, as a major responsible country, will strive to encourage all countries to co-build a community with a shared future in cyberspace. In the new international development pattern of digital economy globalisation, China must take effective measures to actively safeguard its national security and development interests to meet specific challenges.

The subject of “well-being” has attracted attention from tourism scholars, but differences and misuses in approach have meant that academic contributions and knowledge accumulation to the tourism literature remain relatively little. This paper attempts to clarify the theoretical source of subjective well-being, and critically reflect on the problems existing in the study of well-being when applied to tourism. It is suggested that subjective well-being belongs to the category of “quality of life” and has multiple philosophical foundations and theoretical sources including theories of hedonism, expectation, happiness and various itemised lists of emotions. A hybrid research method is suggested when applying the concept to tourism.