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The purpose of this paper is to understand the role Confucianism has in affecting domestic and foreign policy which is accomplished by looking at historical trends and contemporary developments and arguments posed by leading scholars. This paper finds that Confucianism has had a significant impact on current Chinese policy; however, it has been a selective application. In particular, the Chinese Government has focused on the traditional Confucian moral framework and the mandate to rule, which has allowed the Chinese Government to work toward further securing their right to rule and enhance a more assertive foreign policy abroad.

This study based on historical, theoretical and empirical discussions.

It is clear that Confucianism has had profound influence on Chinese politics and foreign policy. As rulers in the past of Chinese history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has also utilized Confucianism to enhance nationalist sentiments among the people. Confucianism, therefore, has been served as the codifying ideology to further secure the CCP’s right to rule domestically, and to enhance a more assertive foreign policy abroad. With confidence, one can argue that Confucianism will continue to serve as a leading source of ideas in China for its effort to pursue modernization.

This paper focuses on the impact of Confucianism on Chinese politics and foreign policy. In the field of international relations and foreign policy analysis, it is well known that ideas are always critical to any changes of a country’s foreign policy. That is to say, a country’s politics and foreign policy would be heavily influenced not only by the changes of tide in contemporary world politics, but also heavily influenced by its traditional thinking and heritage. In this paper, the author will examine the influence of Confucianism on Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy. The analysis will cover recent arguments about the role of Confucianism from several leading contemporary thinkers. It will also make some brief comparisons between China and other East Asian societies, including Japan and Korea.

Regardless of economic interdependence, there is possibility that two countries occasionally have severe international stress. This is especially true between rising and ruling countries, which is referred to as “Thucydides’s Trap.” In order to analyze how a rising country can manage its growing presence in the world, the purpose of this paper is to examine the case of Japan as a rising power in the past.

There seem to be similarities between the “Japan problem” and the “China problem” such as the economic ascendance of a rising country and the failures of American leadership in spite of different time periods. Thus, analyzing Japan’s experience in the past can help understand how the growing international presence of a rising country can be managed.

When Japan created international economic policies, it aimed for the following three effects: for its trade liberalization to reduce western countries’ restrictions on its export products, for its economic assistance to contribute to developing countries’ stabilization and for its trade liberalization and its economic assistance to contribute to promoting its international trade and upgrading its international status. To accommodate an emerging country into the international system smoothly, not only the country itself but also others require comprehensive measures while considering policy interactions.

Most previous studies that analyze the relationship between a rising and a ruling country examine conflicts between the two parties from a bilateral perspective. However, since the conflicts do not only involve the two countries, but also other countries in the world, it is important to consider how the two countries and other affected countries manage the growing presence of a rising power. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how an emerging country integrates itself into the existing international system from a multilateral perspective based on the case of Japan.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the liquid sloshing behaviors in two-dimensional tanks with various porous baffles under the external excitation.

Adopting the finite element method (FEM) and control variable method to study the impacts of the height, length, number, location, shape, porous-effect parameter of the porous baffle, the external load frequency and the shape of the tank on the liquid sloshing response.

The amplitude of the free surface can be reduced effectively when the baffle opening is appropriate. The anti-sway ability of the system increases in pace with the baffle’s height growing. Under the same conditions, the shapes of the baffles have an important effect on improving the anti-sway ability of the system.

As there exist the differences of the velocity potential between each side of the porous baffle, which means that there are two different velocity potentials at a point on the porous baffle, the conventional finite element modeling technologies are not suitable to be applied here. To deal with this problem, the points on the porous baffle are regarded as two nodes with the same coordinate to model and calculate.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the rationale, strategies and significance of Chinese investment in the USA and its impact on US–China relations.

Through empirical analysis, this preliminary study examines the rationale, strategies and impact of Chinese investment in the USA.

Chinese investment has promoted economic growth in both countries, but it faces several challenges including security concerns and cultural clashes.

This paper is one of the first, comprehensive studies of the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the reasons and development trend of the new round of restructuring of regional division of labor in East Asia after the global financial crisis and the role of China in the process.

The paper probes into four factors leading to the adjustment of regional division of labor in East Asia before analyzing its development trend trough comparing the change of roles of China and ASEAN in the process.

After the flying-geese division and regional production network, East Asia’s regional division of labor is getting a new round of structural adjustment. The analysis of this paper shows that this adjustment is mainly due to global financial crisis, post-crisis de-globalization, the rebalancing of East Asian economies and China’s economic transformation. From the adjustment direction, the main trend is ASEAN gradually replacing China to become the new assembly plant area, while China becomes a new manufacturing power by its rising status in the global value chain.

The paper describes the development trend of the new round of restructuring of regional division of labor in East Asia in the future and gives the policy implications for the East Asian countries.

As the service time of bridges increases, the degradation of bending capacity, the lack of safety reserves and the decrease in bridge reliability are common in early built bridges. Due to the defective lateral hinge joints, hollow slab bridges are prone to cracking of hinge joint between plates, transverse connection failure and stress of single plates under the action of long-term overload and repeated load. These phenomena seriously affect the bending capacity of the hollow slab bridge. This paper aims to describe a new method of simply supported hollow slab bridge reinforcement called polyurethane–cement (PUC) composite flexural reinforcement.

This paper first studies the preparation and tensile and compressive properties of PUC composite materials. Then, relying on the actual bridge strengthening project, the 5 × 20 m prestressed concrete simply supported hollow slab was reinforced with PUC composites with a thickness of 3 cm within 18 m of the beam bottom. Finally, the load test was used to compare the performance of the bridge before and after the strengthening.

Results showed that PUC has high compressive and tensile strengths of 72 and 46 MPa. The static test revealed that the measured values and verification coefficients of the measured points were reduced compared with those before strengthening, the deflection and strain were reduced by more than 15%, the measured section stiffness was improved by approximately 20%. After the strengthening, the lateral connection of the bridge, the strength and rigidity of the structure and the structural integrity and safety reserves were all significantly improved. The application of PUC to the flexural strengthening of the bridge structure has a significant effect.

As a new type of material, PUC composite is light, remarkable and has good performance. When used in the bending strengthening of bridge structures, this material can improve the strength, rigidity, safety reserve and bending capacity of bridges, thus demonstrating its good engineering application prospect.

Parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) coupled with support-vector machine (SVM) was carried out to identify and discriminate between the fluorescence spectroscopies of coconut water brands.

PARAFAC was applied to reduce three-dimensional data of excitation emission matrix (EEM) to two-dimensional data. SVM was applied to discriminate between six commercial coconut water brands in this study. The three largest variation data from fluorescence spectroscopy were extracted using the PARAFAC method as the input data of SVM classifiers.

The discrimination results of the six commercial coconut water brands were achieved by three SVM methods (Ga-SVM, PSO-SVM and Grid-SVM). The best classification accuracies were 100.00%, 96.43% and 94.64% for the training set, test set and CV accuracy.

The above results indicate that fluorescence spectroscopy combined with PARAFAC and SVM methods proved to be a simple and rapid detection method for coconut water and perhaps other beverages.

Polyurethane concrete has a high strength-to-weight ratio in the short term, and the strength-to-weight ratio stage during the maintenance period is critical. Freeze-thaw cycles have a noticeable damaging effect on the durability of polyurethane concrete. The engineering specification of polyurethane concrete with incomplete hydration reaction must be studied, as well as the development of internal structure during curing. In this paper, the polyurethane concrete tests were set up under eight distinct maintenance settings based on the climate features of the northern area and the service environment. The test results were evaluated to determine the effect of the number of early freeze-thaw cycles and the time node of early freeze-thaw cycles on the mechanical characteristics of polyurethane concrete, which revealed that the time node of freeze-thaw damage impacted the freeze-thaw resistance of polyurethane concrete susceptible to early freeze-thaw damage.

The early-age freeze-thaw damage polyurethane concrete was experimentally studied by controlling the time node of the freeze-thaw cycle and the curing environment. The test considered the time node, frequency of freeze-thaw damage of polyurethane concrete and the influence of subsequent curing environment and observed the mass change, relative dynamic elastic modulus, relative durability index, compressive strength and apparent damage of polyurethane concrete. The early mechanical properties of polyurethane concrete were studied by analyzing the change of numerical value. The microscopic mechanism of strength formation of polyurethane concrete was analyzed by XRD, FTIR and SEM image.

The closer the time of freeze-thaw damage was to the specimen hardening, the worse the mechanical properties and structure were, according to SEM photographs. For specimens with serial number of 12-groups, its compressive strength is only 82.39% of that of the standard group, even if the curing process continues after 20 times thawing, which increased early environment exacerbate strength loss in polyurethane concrete and also reduced freeze-thaw resistance. The findings of the tests reveal that curing can restore the freeze-thaw resistance of damaged polyurethane concrete. Curing in water has a better recovery impact than curing in air; the mechanical properties can be restored by sufficient re-curing time and good re-curing conditions.

By studying the freeze-thaw cycle test and test results of polyurethane concrete in different curing time nodes, the relationship between the mechanical properties of polyurethane concrete and the time node, number of freeze-thaw cycles, and subsequent maintenance environment was explored. Considering the special mechanism of strength formation of polyurethane concrete, the polyurethane concrete damaged by freeze-thaw has the ability to continue to form strength under subsequent maintenance. This experimental study can provide an analytical basis for the strength formation and reconditioning of polyurethane concrete structures subjected to freeze-thaw environments during the curing time under extreme natural conditions in fall and winter in actual projects.