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The purpose of this paper is to provide an evolutionary view of the emerging wine industry in China.

Research on industry evolution provides a background for the historical evolution of the Chinese wine industry. Case studies are used to illustrate the different strategies of the leading wine producers in China, and to identify the major concerns and challenges in the Chinese wine industry. Growth potentials and ongoing trends are supported with statistics from authoritative databases and Chinese wine industry associations.

The Chinese wine market is characterized by an increasing concentration where the top four domestic producers dominate with 50 per cent market share. The lack of a wine culture makes brand marketing crucial to business success. Limited international efforts have been made by Chinese wine producers, although one winery has embarked on capturing 50 per cent of the global ice‐wine industry.

The paper provides a historical overview of the Chinese wine industry and its current situation, which could not elude generalization and simplification. Enormous regional diversity in China compels differentiated regional studies in terms of production, consumer behaviors and marketing strategies.

The historical evolution of the Chinese wine industry reveals different settings for wine business in China. The dominance of domestic wine companies and ignorance of foreign wine brands among the general public imply a tough setting for foreign wine makers and distributors to enter the market.

The paper provides some insight into the historical and ongoing development of the Chinese wine market.

In this research, we explore the adverse impact of foreign ownership on operational security, a critical operational implication of the liability of foreignness (LOF).

The empirical analysis is based on a multi-country dataset from the World Bank Enterprises Survey, which contains detailed firm-level information from over 8,902 firms in 82 emerging market countries. We perform a series of robustness checks to further confirm our findings.

We find that a high ratio of foreign ownership is associated with an increased likelihood of security breaches and higher security costs. Our results also indicate that high levels of host countries’ institutional quality and firms’ local embeddedness can mitigate such vulnerability in operational security.

This study is one of the first to uncover the critical operational implication of the LOF, indicating that a high ratio of foreign ownership exposes firms to operational security challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior regarding the construction of transnational railways to help engineering managers and decision makers improve their risk management and lead to sustainable transnational railway construction projects.

This paper adopted the grounded theory methodology to analyze the news stories reported by “Belt and Road Portal” and “The New York Times” about eight transnational railways. They were China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan (Central Asia), Mecca-to-Medina (West Asia), Hungarian–Serbia (Europe), China–Nepal (South Asia), Bi-Oceanic (South America), Mombasa–Nairobi (Africa), China–Laos (Southeast Asia) and Panama railways (North America). The keywords for news search were the names of each railway. After eliminating the problem sentences with semantic repetition and ambiguity, 2,631 effective sentences were formed to screen the information and code. The process included open, axial and selective coding.

It was concluded that the core structure of the formation mechanism was “situation,” “influence factor,” “cognition” and “coping behavior.” The country-of-origin image has served as an adjustment function in the analysis for the host country people. Governance strategies were suggested focusing on risk prevention, risk mitigation and risk response according to social risk management.

The rise of transnational railway construction is encouraged by the process of globalization. But during the long construction period, the host country people's coping behavior would develop into social conflicts and mass incidents, becoming a significant obstacle to construction objectives. Thus, studying the formation mechanism of public coping behaviors can better take measures to prevent social risks.

The contributions of this research are three aspects: first, a formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior based on grounded theory is presented. Second, the country-of-origin image is found to be a factor that cannot be ignored in a transnational context. The formation mechanism of public coping behaviors is improved compared to risk management in the domestic situation. Finally, the host country people pay more attention to the motivations of country-of-origin's controlling interests and their own emotions compared with internal stakeholders.

COVID-19 pandemic has exposed that even the best of the developed nations have surrendered to the devastations imposed on the global supply chains. The purpose of this study is to explore how COVID-19 has exaggerated the supply chain of production and distribution of Taiwan-based face masks and also investigate the conscientious factors and subfactors for it.

In this study, an analytical hierarchy processes (AHP)-based approach has been used to assign the criterion weights and to prioritize the responsible factors. Initially, based on 26 decision-makers, successful factors were categorized into five main categories, and then main categories and their subcategories factors were prioritized through individual and group decision-maker’s contexts by using the AHP approach.

The results of this AHP model suggest that “Safety” is the most important and top-ranked factor, followed by production, price, work environment and distribution. The key informers in this study are stakeholders which consist of managers, volunteers, associations and non-governmental organizations. The results showed that good behavior of the employees under the “Safety” category is the top positioned responsible factor for successful production and distribution of face masks to the other countries with the highest global percentage of 15.7% and using sanitizers to protect health is the second most successful factor with the global percentage of 11.7%.

The limitations faced in this study were limited to only Taiwan-based mask manufacturing companies, and it was dependent on the decisions of the limited company’s decision-makers.

The novelty of this study is that the empirical analysis of this study has been based on a successful Taiwan masks manufacturing company and evaluates the responsible factors for the production and distribution of Taiwan masks to other countries during COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lender-borrower relationship as it relates to Sannong loans for agricultural and rural financial markets by Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs) and other rural lenders. This paper is motivated by recent reforms to the rural credit market designed to encourage increased lending, particularly to farmers. Little is understood about the lender-borrower relationship in rural China. This paper fills that gap.

The paper investigates relational attitudes between 120 loan officers at RCCs in China's costal Shandong province, paired with a field survey using matched questions to 394 farm households in the same region. Pairing lenders’ perception toward borrowers regarding RCC microcredit lending mechanism, against borrowers’ perception toward lenders and how themselves were perceived by lenders in the same regards, the paper investigates the degree of disconnect between lenders and with distinct cluster groupings based on their perceptions, the paper analyzes the influence of demographics on the borrower and lender cluster memberships.

The paper identifies four borrower clusters and two lender clusters. Borrower clusters are segmented on credit access and satisfaction with their rural lender. The paper also identifies two lender clusters, segmented principally on financial incentives and lending activities. While all lenders view farming with higher regard than farmers believe they do, one cluster is clearly pro-farmer while the second is somewhat indifferent. Indifference is more related to current portfolio activities. The paper draws conclusions that policy initiatives should be put in place at RCCs that close the gap between lender and borrower in their credit relationship. Rural lenders should concentrate on advocating RCCs’ care and trust toward agriculture and farm households. At the institutional level, effort should be extended to train a dedicated team of loan officers that specialize in servicing farm households with standardized lending practices. This research provides financial institutions with outreach mechanisms to borrowers, while also training lenders to borrowers’ sensitivities.

Management studies of RCCs are few. This is the first paper that the authors are aware of that studies farmer and lender attitudes on the same scale.