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Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.

Aiding employment is an important poverty reduction strategy in many countries’ social welfare systems, as this strategy can help empower the recipients with a better living standard, development and social inclusion. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most significant individual and systematic variables for the employment status of low-income groups in urban China.

The data of this study are drawn from “Social Policy Support System for Poverty-stricken Families in Urban and Rural China 2015” report. The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China appointed and funded the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) at Peking University to deliver the related project and organize a research team to write the report. Multiple binary logistic regression analysis is adopted to identify both individual and systematic factors that affect the employment status among low-income groups in urban China.

According to the results of the binary logistic regression model, individual factors, including: gender; householder status; education; and self-rated health status, play a significant role in determining the employment status of low-income groups in urban China. Clearly, the impacts of individual factors are more influential to marginal families than to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance. In contrast, compared with marginal families, systematic factors are more influential to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance.

This study highlights the importance of precise poverty reduction strategy and the issue of “welfare dependence” among low-income groups in urban China. Policy recommendations derived from the findings are hence given, including: the promotion of family-friendly policies; the introduction of a smart healthcare system; the establishment of a Basic Living Allowance adjustment mechanism; and the provision of related social services.

This paper aims to assess the comparative position of the national innovation system of Chinese state entrepreneurship versus liberal market entrepreneurship. Based on the comparative institutional framework, it asks whether Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage because of its incoherent institutions in liberal or coordinated economies. Hence, does the Chinese institutional system of innovation lag behind that of US or liberal countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies in the transformation of national science into economic products measured as high-technology exports?

This study uses panel data analysis based on 29 OECD economies and the Chinese economy over 23 years. Regarding national science productivity (explorative capabilities), it includes published and patented science streams; regarding technological transformation (exploitative capabilities), it measures the percentage of high-technology exports in gross domestic product (GDP). The interactions between the types of entrepreneurship and national science institutions serve as predictors in the design.

The results show that Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative advantage over liberal economies in published science. However, Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage compared to liberal entrepreneurship in patent science. Regarding the dyadic level of comparability between the national economies, there are mixed results in the transformation of national science.

This study supports the three following theoretical points: national institutions differ regardless of the pressure of convergence through globalization; national science contingencies influence different paths of the transformation of national science to technology; and mixed economies, such as state entrepreneurship, can achieve high performance without fully conforming to liberal markets.

This study emphasizes institutional mechanisms for future research to support the innovation of incoherent institutions and suggests the benefit of cross-pollination of senior managers between state and private organizations for a defined duration.

Theoretically, this research combines an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional level of analysis, and in so doing, it deals with the transformation of national science in scientific publications and patents in the vertical value chain. Empirically, this study links the national published and patented science with the national economic artifacts in high-technology sectors. This novel approach to assess the national and discipline-level interaction sets a context for the future research in other settings. It also informs policy decisions regarding the growth of science, innovation and development.

This opening chapter sets a frame for the chapters of this volume, dealing with how the dynamic dialectic interplay between forceful global societal forces and context shape humanity’s education response in various parts of the world. “Context” as a perennial threshold concept in Comparative and International Education is explicated. It will then be explained how, during its long historical evolution, scholars in the field each time had to contend new contexts, or reconceived the notion of “context” in a new way. Subsequently the problems of an overly fixation on the historical and the present, to the detriment of the future, and inertia are extant in the field, will be explained. The unprecedented, seismic changes currently impacting on the societal context worldwide, will then be enumerated. These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization. The concept globalization is then clarified, and the take of the scholarly community on the impact of globalization on education is then mapped and interrogated. The authors’ stance on this is stated, namely that a dynamic interplay between global focus and contextual realities shape education in various parts of the world. It is in this theoretical frame that the remainder of the chapters of the volume is presented, combing out the main features of education development in each part of the world, as a dialectic between global forces and contextual imperatives.

At present, the Chinese economy has entered the “new normal” phase with the transformation of development stages from the low-income to the middle-income ones. Accordingly, there appear a series of innovations in development theories. Innovations involve creative destructions. Therefore, innovative development theories at the present stage either deny the prevailing principles of development economics, or deny the theories that once effectively guided development at the low-income stage, or even sublate some of the development polices which were propelled and proved effective at the beginning of the reform and opening-up. The fundamental reason is that, as the development stages evolve, there occur new development tasks, new periodical characteristics and new laws of development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Any development theory from abroad will find it difficult to correctly guide and clarify development problems in a socialist country, such as the huge population and the extreme imbalance between the urban and the rural and among regional developments.

In conclusion, China, as a large world economy, has made innovations in its economic development theory, which indicates that it intends to perfect itself rather than seek hegemony. As the world’s second largest economy, China should adapt to the transformation and further free people’s minds instead of adhering to the old patterns of thinking. It should think over the path of development for a great world economy from the historical starting point of a large world economy and find development strategies to transform itself from a large economy to a great economy, so as to realize the dream of the Chinese nation to build a powerful country.

Only political economy studies both the relations of production and the productive forces, and only a theory combining both can correctly guide China’s economic development, which especially needs to be promoted by taking advantage of socialist economic system. Therefore, the first and foremost principle for a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is to insist on liberating and developing productive forces.

Some economic theories have influenced the reform of the socialist open economy with Chinese characteristics. As a new practice of socialism, an open economy is not only driven by China’s productivity level and people’s living standards but also regulated by the law of commodity production and value.

It was popular to participate in economic globalization for most countries in the second half of the 20th century, but not all of them could benefit from it.

The key to the success of the open-economy reform with Chinese characteristics lies in learning from and innovating the comparative advantage theory, thus forming an organic whole of the open economy, including the core of correctly handling the relationship between the government and the market, the method of gradual reform, the breakthrough point of transforming the mode of economic development, and serving people all the time.

Achieving internal and external coordination through the combination of opening-up and independence is a critical principle of China’s economic opening-up, which not only effectively safeguards national interests but also actively promotes the construction of a new global order.