Search results

Academic contention occurs when research evidence is amenable to more than one interpretation. China has a long tradition of Shang Que (商榷), in which authors argue for their preferred interpretation. The modern form of this tradition is the Shang Que article, which often takes the form of research papers in Chinese-language journals and which tends to be question-oriented. Shang Que articles usually take the views of a particular author or article as the focus of independent and complete criticism by another, independent, academic. This paper explains the role of Shang Que articles in Chinese scholarship and their influence on international academia.

A bibliometric analysis was used to explore the characteristics and evolution of Chinese Shang Que articles using 30,577 articles published between 1979 and 2018. Microsoft Excel and Gephi were used for data analysis and visualization.

Findings suggest a decline in the number of Shang Que articles and an increase in the number of co-authors. Shang Que articles remained particularly prominent in Philosophy and Humanities and Social Sciences, where they focused on local issues such as classical Chinese, the Sinicization of Marxism and Chinese literature. This suggests that the number of Shang Que articles is related to the degree of internationalization of a research field.

Shang Que articles, which have been influenced by academic paradigms in English, are a fusion of China's Shang Que tradition and of the modern academic system. Through considering Shang Que articles, this paper explores the benefits of local academic traditions in non-English-speaking cultures.

Aims to evaluate the determinants of international pharmaceutical firms’ foreign direct investments (FDI) in the Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. Focuses on comparing the differences in FDIs between early entrants who started FDI before 1992 and the late entrants whose FDI started after 1992 in China. Field research was mainly conducted in China by personal interview as well as mail questionnaires over a period of three months in 1999 and 44 companies participated in total. The results of index of dissimilarity analysis, t‐test and Wilcoxon test consistently show that both early and late entrants are likely to agree that China’s huge market size played the most important role in motivating international pharmaceutical firms’ FDI in China. The results did not support the traditional FDI theories on domestic market imperfection and firm specific advantages.

Chinese herbal medicine is effective in treating some addictions using, for example, aural acupuncture. Its application outside of China is limited due to a lack of clinical trials and ‘scientific’ evidence. U'finer™ is one of the first herbal remedies to undergo clinical trials, and is so far demonstrating a remarkable ability to improve brain function, restore physical health and enhance recovery from opiate addiction. The drug's pioneer Dr Wei Wang explains his methods and the drug's unique ability to treat the body and mind.

Analyses the features, strategies and characteristics of health‐care reforms in the People’s Republic of China. Since the fourteenth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held in 1992, an emphasis has been placed on reform strategies such as cost recovery, profit making, diversification of services, and development of alternative financing strategies in respect of health‐care services provided in the public sector. Argues that the reform strategies employed have created new problems before solving the old ones. Inflation of medical cost has been elevated very rapidly. The de‐linkage of state finance bureau and health service providers has also contributed to the transfer of tension from the state to the enterprises. There is no sign that quasi‐public health‐care insurance is able to resolve these problems. Finally, co‐operative medicine in the rural areas has been largely dismantled, though this direction is going against the will of the state. Argues that a new balance of responsibility has to be developed as a top social priority between the state, enterprises and service users in China in order to meet the health‐care needs of the people.

Health plays a crucial role in the daily lives and supporting health is the important role of medicine. With the availability of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM), the demands and willingness to pay among users are increasing. Hence, this study aims to determine the psychological factors influencing the willingness to pay for TCAM among Malaysian adults.

In total, 300 completed self-administered questionnaires were collected from Malaysian adults using a purposive sampling method through intercepts at public health-care facilities. A structural equation modelling approach using partial least square was used to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that attitude, subjective norms, perceived price and knowledge have a significant impact on willingness to pay for TCAM. Surprisingly, there was no relationship found between perceived behavioural control and health consciousness on willingness to pay for TCAM.

The findings of this study are expected to provide better insights into TCAM use among Malaysian adults. The results are also important to encourage health-care institutions and practitioners to educate the general public on the safety of TCAM to ensure more health benefits to the users.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have always relied on the experience of TCM doctors, and machine learning(ML) provides a technical means for learning these experiences and intelligently assists in prescribing. However, in TCM prescription, there are the main (Jun) herb and the auxiliary (Chen, Zuo and Shi) herb collocations. In a prescription, the types of auxiliary herbs are often more than the main herb and the auxiliary herbs often appear in other prescriptions. This leads to different frequencies of different herbs in prescriptions, namely, imbalanced labels (herbs). As a result, the existing ML algorithms are biased, and it is difficult to predict the main herb with less frequency in the actual prediction and poor performance. In order to solve the impact of this problem, this paper proposes a framework for multi-label traditional Chinese medicine (ML-TCM) based on multi-label resampling.

In this work, a multi-label learning framework is proposed that adopts and compares the multi-label random resampling (MLROS), multi-label synthesized resampling (MLSMOTE) and multi-label synthesized resampling based on local label imbalance (MLSOL), three multi-label oversampling techniques to rebalance the TCM data.

The experimental results show that after resampling, the less frequent but important herbs can be predicted more accurately. The MLSOL method is shown to be the best with over 10% improvements on average because it balances the data by considering both features and labels when resampling.

The authors first systematically analyzed the label imbalance problem of different sampling methods in the field of TCM and provide a solution. And through the experimental results analysis, the authors proved the feasibility of this method, which can improve the performance by 10%−30% compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

There is a growing interest in understanding how consumer preferences and choices vary with experience in a product/service category. Previous research provides support for a conceptual distinction between self‐assessed or subjective knowledge and objective knowledge. Yet relatively little is known about the impact of these two knowledge types on consumers’ pre‐purchase choice and service loyalty behaviors. To bridge that gap, this study examined the relative influence of subjective and objective knowledge on choosing a physician practicing traditional Chinese medicine, and on remaining loyal to the chosen provider. Our findings indicate that high objective knowledge translates into larger consideration sets and decreased loyalty. Although subjective knowledge also had a positive impact on evoked set size, its magnitude was smaller than that observed for objective knowledge. Furthermore, unlike its objective counterpart, self‐assessed knowledge did not reduce service loyalty.

The post‐1978 micro‐economic reforms have dismantled China’s community‐funded rural health system, relying on paramedics called “barefoot doctors”. Examines the economic behaviour and incentives of village doctors (formerly “barefoot doctors”) as a response to a deregulated market and the private sector in the 1990s. The investigation of 519 village doctors showed that the occupation was male‐dominated. There was minimal labour mobility ‐ 86 per cent worked in the same village; 87 per cent were allocated land, but the majority spent 25 per cent or less of working hours on farming. Suggests that they should provide free patient services, and income should come from payment for medicine. In practice, monopolistic market situations enabled many to charge fees. To maximize income, 41 per cent of western medicine practitioners also sold Chinese medicinal herbs in competition with Chinese medicine practitioners. However, village doctors wanted more regulations on entry to the occupation and looked to government intervention to solve problems. Concludes with some policy implications drawing on the pursuit of private interests by village doctors.