Search results

The purpose of this paper is to target on individual perceptions of BIM practice in terms of BIM benefits, critical success factors (CSFs) and challenges in Chongqing which represented the less BIM-developed metropolitan cities in China.

Adopting a questionnaire-survey approach followed by statistical analysis, the study further divided the survey population from Chongqing into subgroups according to their employer types and organization sizes. A further subgroup analysis adopting statistical approach was conducted to investigate the effects of employer type and organization size on individual perceptions.

Subgroup analysis revealed that governmental employees held more conservative and neutral perceptions toward several items in BIM benefit, CSFs and challenges. It was inferred that smaller organizations with fewer than 100 full-time employees perceived more benefits of BIM in recruiting and retaining employees, and considered more critical of involving companies with BIM knowledge in their projects.

This study contributed to the body of knowledge in managerial BIM in terms that: it extended the research of individual perceptions toward BIM implementation by focusing on less BIM-mature regions; it contributed to previous studies of influencing factors to BIM practice-based perceptions by introducing factors related to organization type and sizes; and it would lead to future research in establishing BIM climate and culture which address perceptions and behaviors in BIM adoption at both individual and organizational levels.

The purpose of this paper is to reargue the great controversies surrounding marketization, by the concept of intrinsic value and to give a panorama of China's marketization and social development during last 30 years.

The concept of intrinsic value is elaborated, and marketization and closely linked concepts such as price, wealth, happiness, freedom, etc. are reargued. An intrinsic value account (IVA) is constructed and the enhancement and weakening of some intrinsic values could be clearly shown. A panorama of China's marketization and social development is exhibited by IVA.

The basic point of this paper is that social development is a concept with strong but implicit ethical assumption and should be explicitly based upon intrinsic value. Without concrete definition and consensus on intrinsic value, it will face great disputes on judging human history as social development or social degradation. Market is not only an objective value‐neural system, but a subjective moral entity. China's maketization has enhanced economic value greatly, but suffered great loss by other intrinsic values.

IVA could be a practical instrument to evaluate social development and clarify the possible academic controversies on market. The arguments of China's marketization experience could be of benefit to other developing countries.

This paper could encourage people, particularly policy makers, to consider their value assumptions, value priority, some basic concepts in market, and what human kind is really pursuing.

The paper shows that IVA could be a new instrument to better evaluate social development, similar to the National Income Account or National Happiness Account.

This policy review paper is an analysis of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) of China that was promulgated in July 2021. It looks into its rationale as well as different stakeholders' early reactions to the policy.

Critical policy analysis (CPA) method was used to identify (1) the artefacts, such as language, objects and acts, that were significant carriers of the DRP; (2) communities of meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP and its implementation; (3) the local discourses relevant to the DRP; and (4) the tension points and their conceptual sources (affective, cognitive and/or moral) by different DRP stakeholders. As per the comparative education field, this paper compares the pre-DRP and post-DRP periods to tease out how the policy affects different stakeholders of education.

The DRP in China could be attributed to diverse factors such as demography, socialist economic and developmental visions and manpower structure. The implementation of the DRP has generated uneven reactions among different stakeholders and geographical regions both in speed and scale. While education stakeholders have no choice but to adopt the policy, they face challenges derived from a sudden halt of private educational resources and subsequent increased duties of parents and schools.

The significance of this early policy analysis lies in offering an insight into education development in China by analysing and deliberating the DRP from different perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to give an answer to the questions whether China can make the quantum leap in automotive technology from engines that burn fossil‐fuel to those that do not and whether China will take an “alternative Asian path of development.”

This paper is based on a sociological approach to prove potential technical innovations reflecting the social conditions of radical innovations like post‐fossil mobility concepts.

Innovations like a post‐fossil car concept consist of more than new technical infrastructures and mere imitations, they require decentralized spaces for incubation and experimentation. Translated into conditions governing the policy milieu, that need means that potential promoters of innovations need fundamental political freedoms, equality before the law, legal certainty, and the advancement and protection of personal rights vis‐à‐vis the state. In a sociological perspective, China needs social modernization in the sense of differentiation, individualization, and internalization of external constraints.

This paper reflects the opportunities and restrictions of radical change in car technology in china. It does not give evidence for the future of conventional mass motorization as the continuance of the state of the art in car technologies.

This paper implies – as a practical consequence – that the established car industry in the triad is furthermore responsible for progress in car and motor concepts being more energy efficient and less dependent from oil.

The original contribution of this paper is that it connects the technical debate on the future of cars and their drive system with the discussion of social and political terms of collective capacity of radical innovations.

This paper aims to examine how the official discourse of frugality evolved in China between 1979 and 2015.

The study uses historical and textual analysis. It divides the Chinese official discourse on frugality between 1979 and 2015 into four periods: 1979-1992, 1993-2002, 2003-2012 and 2013-2015.

A Chinese official discourse on frugality persisted between 1979 and 2015, even though during the same period, China transformed from a socialist economy of central planning and insufficient supply to a market economy of excessive supply and weak consumer demand. The intensity of this official discourse frequently vacillated, adjusting to both economic and political conditions of the time as part of the larger political-economic contestation between competing ideas and policies.

There have been calls for more studies on how frugality discourses have evolved in international markets, especially in terms of how they are shaped by local historical antecedents and long-standing tensions. Through the Chinese case, this article illuminates why some traditional values persist and obtain a paradoxical co-existence with consumerist ethos in our modern society.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between ethical self-fashioning and citizenship practices in the ongoing revival of “Chinese Traditional Culture” pursued in tandem by the party-state and by private actors in present-day China.

Adopting an anthropological approach, the author draws from three sets of resources: (1) research literature on China’s political history and key texts of early Chinese thought, (2) contemporary state discourses on citizen formation, and (3) participant observation notes and interviews with organizers and followers of the Wu-Wei School (a pseudonym). The author conducts a textual analysis of primary and secondary literature and a critical discourse analysis of the ethnographic data and examines emerging themes.

Firstly, the author identifies a crucial dimension in the historical and cultural roots of Chinese citizenship practices: an enduring conception that binds individual ethical self-improvement with socio-political flourishing. Secondly, examining contemporary state discourses on “citizen quality” and “reviving China’s outstanding traditional culture”, the author showcases how party-state authorities call on individuals to self-reform for national rejuvenation. Thirdly, the author investigates how members of the Wu-Wei School construe their individual pursuits of ethical self-improvement as significant for societal progress.

Based on these findings, the author demonstrates the ways in which autochthonous conceptions of Chinese citizenship give a central place to private acts of self-fashioning. The author argues that the entanglement between individual ethics and citizenship practices constitutes a crucial but largely understudied dimension of Chinese citizenship.

Since the Land Revolution of 1949, China has continuously practiced collective ownership of land resources and local governance at the village and township levels. This chapter argues that based on Chinese experiences, a socialist transformation is largely dependent on socialization of land resources, with the majority having access to land, food, and shelter, as well as on community organization of livelihood. This is not only the legacy of land revolution but also the foundation of Chinese society, which acts as social stabilizer. China in the past 70 years has completed primitive capital accumulation and proceeded to industrial expansion and financial adjustments. Rural China has played an important role in absorbing the shocks of cyclical economic crises induced by external and domestic factors. China adopts policies of land distribution in favor of the small peasantry and promises to defend the agrarian sector – comprising three irreducible dimensions: peasants, rural society, and agriculture, together known as Sannong, as well as the current policy of rural vitalization – against the background of macroeconomic crises, particularly amid the current economic downturn and health crises, that is, United States–China trade war, the crisis of globalization, New Cold War, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The experiences of Zhoujiazhuang Commune and Puhan Rural Community will be provided as examples to show that the bedrock of maintaining socialist transformation is the resilience of small peasantry and rural communities.

The purpose of this paper evaluates the effects of the Great Western Development (GWD) policy on agricultural intensification, land use, agricultural production and rural poverty in western China.

The authors collect county-level data on land use, input application, grain crop production, income, poverty and geophysical characteristics for 1996–2005 and use a quasi-natural experimental design of difference-in-differences (DD) in the empirical analysis.

Results suggest that the GWD policy significantly increased the grain crop production in western China. This increase resulted from higher yield, with increased fertilizer use and agricultural electricity consumption per hectare, and more land allocated to grow grain crops. The policy also increased land-use concentration, reduced crop diversity and alleviated rural poverty in western China.

This paper makes three contributions. First, the authors add to the growing literature on the GWD policy by evaluating its effects on farm household decisions and exploring the mechanisms and broad socioeconomic impacts in western China. Second, the authors take advantage of a quasi-natural experimental design to improve the identification strategy where input use, land allocation, production and off-farm labor participation are all endogenous in a farm household. Third, the authors explore a long list of variables within one integrated dataset to present a comprehensive picture of the impact of the GWD policy.

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.