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After the “quantity era,” today higher education has entered into the “quality era” and as “the gate keepers of quality,” quality assurance agencies (QAAs) are playing more and more irreplaceable important roles and their social status are becoming more and more prominent. However, how to guarantee the quality of the QAAs? Who can review the QAAs? The purpose of this paper is based exploration of these questions.

Following the founding of the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR) for Higher Education, the Asia Pacific Quality Register (APQR) became the second in the international quality assurance (QA) networks to implement QA register, in 2015 with initiative of Asia-Pacific Quality Network.

This paper first retrospects the history and process of APQR, and subsequently the implementation of APQR is described in detail from the two aspects of the criteria and the procedure, and at the end, the paper concludes with a summary of the three characteristics of this first formal implement of APQR: APQR is an international register open to all the QAAs; APQR emphasizes characteristics evaluation of diversity; and APQR highlights the combination of quantitative assessment and qualitative assessment.

Today on the international stage of QA, APQR has emerged as “the watchman of quality” in the Asia-Pacific region as counterpart of EQAR in Europe. How far away does such newly emerging form of guaranteeing the QAAs’ quality go forward, what is its future prospects and other concerning issues, are some of the question that need enthusiastic attention and contribution.

This study aims to examine the impact of controversial governance practices on media coverage under a specific context. Based on the attribution theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explore how antecedent factors can influence attribution process under a particular cultural context.

This paper presents a behavioral view of the media and corporate governance to demonstrate how media attributes different reasons for the same controversial governance practice in Chinese-specific context. Using 1,198 non-state-owned listed company observations in China as the study sample, cross-section data are used to build a multiple linear regression mode to test hypotheses.

The analysis indicates that the media imposes fewer penalties on founder-CEO firms than on non-founder-CEO firms for engaging in controversial governance practices, such as CEO compensation. CEO tenure negatively moderates the effect of CEO compensation on negative media coverage in non-founder-CEO firms. The positive media bias evidence for founder-CEO firms exists only when the firm is better performed.

This study’s contribution to the governance literature starts with its logical reasoning of basic assumptions in the agency theory, and that media penalty will arise when managers impose actions that against interests of shareholders or other stakeholders. This study shows that the rule is not always true. The findings also bridge the connection of governance literature and reputation literature to better explain how media can act as a social arbitration role.

This study provides insights into how belief and information of reputational evaluators affect attribution consequences on controversial governance practices. Moreover, this study looks beyond the internal elements and focuses on China’s traditional cultural context as well. Specifically, the authors concentrate on the attribution process by showing the importance of evaluators’ framing tendency with regard to controversial practices. The results extend the knowledge about how conformity makes media coverage shows a bias effect on interactions during the evaluation process.

With the development of social productive forces and the advancement of agricultural practices since the founding of New China, the connotation of agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics has undergone a process from formation to continuous expansion and deepening.

Its evolution can be roughly divided into four stages: the exploration stage, the formation stage, the establishment stage and the deepening stage. The historical evolution of the connotation of agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics demonstrates four typical characteristics, namely increasingly scientific logical premise, continuously diversified orientations, increasingly improved core contents and progressively maturing strategies of development.

The achievements of agricultural modernization have laid a solid foundation for China's industrial modernization and the rapid development of the national economy. Meanwhile, the authors have identified through practical exploration a path of agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics. In recent years, academic research on the connotation of agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics has gradually heated up, and relevant achievements have emerged constantly.

The Communist Party of China (hereinafter “CPC”) has placed considerable emphasis on agricultural issues and has been committed to promoting agricultural modernization since the founding of New China. Through long-term persistence and unremitting efforts, China has made remarkable achievements in agricultural development: significantly improved agricultural production conditions and agricultural output capacity, constantly optimized agricultural structure and steadily increased the income of farmers.