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This chapter aims to investigate and interpret China’s educational aid by analyzing its history, philosophies, and practices in Africa. The study is based on review and analysis of governmental documents, reports, academic papers, and news by Chinese and foreign scholars on China’s aid, particularly educational aid to Africa. The analysis unveils three transformations of China’s aid “from pro-ideology to de-ideology,” “from single area to multiple areas,” and “from pragmatic economy driven to sustainable and humane economy focused” in Africa. Meanwhile, it indicates a continuity of the philosophy of solidarity, morality, and reciprocity in China’s South-South cooperation with African educational development.

The analysis also shows China’s educational aid does not match well with the framework of the Western donors. China, under the FOCAC framework, is devoted to higher education cooperation, human resources training program, scholarship, and Chinese language education with African partners. With the growth of its economic and political influence, China will play multiple roles as the biggest developing country and as an active promoter and provider for South-South cooperation in the negotiation and construction of the post-2015 agenda. Nevertheless, we assume China will keep a pragmatic higher education cooperation with its developing country partners to inclusively link it with business, technology transfer, and people-to-people exchange.

This study delivers a comprehensive review and analysis of paradigm shift, philosophy, mechanism, and practice of China’s educational aid to Africa to fill up the literature gap in this field. It also timely presents China’s stance toward discussion on the post-2015 agenda.

A little-known “lottery fever” has spread to many parts of rural China over the past 10 years. This is driven by participation in underground lotteries with local bookies. It is called liuhecai, which is the name of the Hong Kong lottery, and is based on guessing the bonus number of the Hong Kong Mark Six lottery. Such lotteries are illegal, but are an open secret. This chapter seeks to understand the meaning of this apparently irrational lottery fever: why people participate in it, why they believe the conspiracy theory that it is rigged (and yet still participate), and why similar lotteries have emerged in both capitalist Taiwan and post-socialist China at this particular time.

Important developments of China's securities markets within the last two years, namely, the Share Reform, the warrant market, the innovative listed open-end funds (and exchange-traded funds), corporate bonds with detachable warrants, exchange-traded asset-backed securities, are described. The discussion focuses on unique, innovative features of these products, as compared to their counterparts available in more mature markets (when applicable), and points to possible future research themes. The proposed rules with regard to stock index futures and credit trading are also discussed.

Recently, the tourism industry in Asian countries has been adversely affected by two significant drivers: health emergencies and climatic changes. Virus outbreaks such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), Ebola, avian flu, Zika virus and H1N1 influenza virus have caused much greater damage to the tourism and travel industry of Asian countries as compared to the more localized natural disasters and crises such as tsunami, Kathmandu earthquake, Typhoon Mangkhut in Indonesia, etc., resulting in huge job losses, severe financial losses, shutdowns and human casualties. The purpose of this study is to briefly discuss the major viral outbreaks in the Asian countries and discuss their impact on the tourism industry. It will also discuss the resilience strategies taken by the Asian countries to re-emerge their tourism markets from these outbreaks. It will be based on the systematic review of the earlier literature on the various viral outbreaks and the corresponding resilience measures in the Asian peninsula. While the association between the pandemic and travel has been widely discussed in previous studies (Kuo, Chen, Tseng, Ju, & Huang, 2008; Lee, Son, Bendle, Kim, & Han, 2012), there is still no specific study which provides a comprehensive outlook on the various viral outbreaks and the tourism resilience strategies in Asia. It might also help the tourism industry stakeholders from the Asian countries to adequately identify and thoroughly plan for the possible future outbreaks and align resilience measures accordingly.

This chapter highlights the characteristics of Asia through the analysis of policy-related documents by five donor countries, namely Japan, South Korea, China, India and Thailand. It will also examine the roles played by regional bodies such as the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) and ASPBAE (the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education) as the horizontal channels influencing aid policies in respective countries. Together with the analysis of the national and organizational policies, the regional process of building consensus on the post-2015 agenda is examined, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific Regional Education Conference (APREC) held in August 2014.

The analysis reveals that the region has two faces: one is imaginary and the other is functional. There is a common trend across Asian donors to refer to their historical ties with regions and countries to which they provide assistance and their traditional notions of education and development. They highlight Asian features in contrast to conventional aid principles and approaches based on the Western value system, either apparently or in a muted manner. In this sense, the imagined community of Asia with common cultural roots is perceived by the policymakers across the board.

At the same time, administratively, the importance of the region as a stage between the national and global levels is recognized increasingly in the multilateral global governance structure. With this broadened participatory structure, as discussed in the chapter ‘Post-EFA Global Discourse: The Process of Shaping the Shared View of the ‘Education Community’’, the expected function of the region to transmit the norms and requests from the global level and to collect and summarize national voices has increased.

Purpose – This chapter explores the functions of institutional setting, technical requirements and local city characteristics as they affect the implementation of sustainable urban travel policies in China under the pressure of fast motorization and the constraints of energy and resource limitations.

Methodology – We reviewed the documents related to sustainable urban transport vision in China from central government and compared the motorization and urban transport policy at local city level in relation to social equity, urban transport finance, as well as the challenge of an ageing society.

Findings – The concept of sustainable development had been widely talked about in China but has not yet been effectively translated into actions in urban transport. There is a need to strengthen the synchronization of central government and local government strategies on sustainable transport in order to achieve less car-dependent cities.

Research limitations/implications – We need more research to understand the specific characteristics of the Chinese urban transport system and the constraints on the implementation of sustainable transport policy at a local level.

Practical and social implications – The achievement of a higher share of walking and cycling will greatly improve sustainable urban mobility, in terms of social equity, quality of urban life and also fossil energy consumption.

Originality – Current policy documents and implementation practice were analysed to provide the reader with a deep understanding of urban transport policy in China.

This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

Through the ideas of and within Oceania that we outline, and within which we locate architecture and institutions for CIE regionally, we illustrate the identified turning points through analysis of dynamic and intersecting trajectories of the Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES), formerly the Australia and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society (ANZCIES), and the Vaka Pasifiki, formerly the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific Peoples (RPEIPP) project. We offer initial responses to an over-arching theme in posing the question: how, and through what processes, have these groups influenced understandings of ‘regionalism’ for CIE within Oceania? This involves examining the conferences, financing, membership, the Society journal/publications and aspects of CIE education of the two bodies.