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China has, apparently, more trade union members than the rest of the world put together, but the unions are subservient to the Party-state. The theme of the paper is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Issues analysed include union structure, membership, representation, and the interaction between unions and the Party-state. We suggest that Chinese unions inhabit an Alice in Wonderland dream world and that they are virtually impotent when it comes to representing workers. Because the Party-state recognises that such frailty may lead to instability it has passed new laws promoting collective contracts and established new tripartite institutions to mediate and arbitrate disputes. While such laws are welcome they are largely hollow: collective contracts are very different from collective bargaining and the incidence of cases dealt with by the tripartite institutions is tiny. Much supporting evidence is presented drawing on detailed case studies undertaken in Hainan Province (the largest and one of the oldest special economic zones) in 2004 and 2005. The need for more effective representation is appreciated by some All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) officials, but it seems a long way off, so unions in China will continue to echo the White Queen: “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today” and, alas, tomorrow never comes.

Quality-Oriented Education (su zhi jiao yu) is a national education reform initiative that presents ongoing opportunities and challenges to schools, local bureaus of education, and the overall educational system in China today. This chapter seeks to gain insight into if and how Quality-Oriented Education, 10 years into its enactment, has taken root in practice. We posit that a reform agenda is best manifested through well-aligned and operable standards for school effectiveness. We introduce the policy-driven definition for school effectiveness and an evaluation framework depicting the intended focus of Quality-Oriented Education. Using an iterative and inductive process for content analysis, we compare the policy-driven framework with the coding results of a 2009 national inventory of actual school evaluation schemes in 91 Chinese school districts. Our review points out that the new mission of Quality-Oriented Education advocates educational equity, curriculum reform, and systemic support for school-based management. However, at the operational level, there are great variations in terms of content domain, focus, and function among school evaluation schemes with notable regional differences. Furthermore, schools are still caught between the existing system that measures school performance by achievement and the intended accountability scheme that calls for enhanced student ability. This chapter adds to the empirical foundation for the development of a new framework that not only captures the spirit of the national educational reform but also is informed of the developmental needs of schools in drastically different geo-economical and social conditions.

The kindergarten curriculum in mainland China has evolved through four periods and the current reform began in the end of 1980s. The reform aimed to transform kindergarten practice by shaping ideologies including respect for individual child, active learning, and play-based integrated curriculum. This review of research literatures shows that compared with the practice before the reform, many kindergarten teachers organize classrooms in learning centers, provide more play materials, pay time, and freedom for free play, and pay more attention to individuals. But indoor space organized in rice-seedling-bed model, teacher-led group instruction and teacher-controlled interactions are still often observed after three decades of reform efforts; there still exist great variations among kindergartens of different sponsoring bodies and in different regions. The problems resulted from the innate deficiencies of the top-down and value-priority reform, the conflicts between the advocated value and the traditional Chinese culture with emphasis on Ming-Fen, testing, and the value of children for the whole family and nation, and the unequal distribution of public resources decided by the educational institutions. Therefore, the curriculum reform is not a separate endeavor from other social changes, but a comprehensive and systematic change. To guarantee the success of the curriculum reform, the Chinese society needs cultural transformation and institutional reconstruction.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

This paper proposes that if a political system is more like to facilitate a unified government, to establish a strong executive body and to respond to the needs of the majority, financial reforms are more likely to emerge from the policymaking process and produce positive results. On the contrary, political systems that discourage those governing features are less likely to produce reforms. This chapter compares financial reform processes in China, Taiwan and New Zealand. All of them performed low level of financial reforms in the early 1980s but resulted in different situations later. In the mid-2000s, New Zealand heralded the most efficient and stable financial system; while Taiwan lagged behind and China performed the worst. Evidence showed that China’s authoritarian system may be the most superior in forming a unified government with a strong executive, but the policy priority often responds more to the interests of a small group of power elites; therefore the result of financial reform can be limited. Taiwan’s presidential system can produce greater financial reform when the ruling party controls both executive and legislative bodies, but legislative obstructions may occur under a divided government. New Zealand's Westminster system produces the most effective and efficient financial reform due to its unified government and a strong executive branch with consistent and stable supports from the New Zealand Parliament.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) is growing steadily and Chinese multinationals (MNCs) are playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. Thus, the number of papers focusing on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs has been increasing during the last years. The aim of this chapter is to carry out a review of the empirical papers dealing with Chinese MNCs published between 2002 and 2012 in high-impact international business and management journals.

This chapter reviews 43 empirical papers focusing on Chinese MNCs that were published in nine major scholarly journals between 2002 and 2012.

We report individual and institutional contributions, the theories and methods used, the research topics, and the main findings. We also discuss implications for future research.

Some previous literature reviews have dealt with research on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs. Nevertheless, none of the earlier reviews dealt specifically with empirical papers; neither did they provide an analysis of both individual and institutional contributions.

Purpose and methodology – Focusing on the policy contexts of gender education in Taiwan, this chapter uses data from interviews with elite policymakers and policy documents to examine how feminist activists sought to legitimatize gender equity in education in the wake of the comprehensive social and educational reforms of the 1990s and early years of this decade.

Findings – The embedding of gender in education did not follow a smooth path in terms of policy formulation. Feminist activists drove the process of reform by retaining control over the naming of the legislation, and its wording, thus preserving the language and imperatives of gender equity.

Social implications – In this chapter, I examine the formation of the Gender Equity Education Law, detailing the struggles, contentions, and negotiations that underlay the eventual approval of gender reform in education.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter contributes significantly by identifying the necessity to recognize the nature of the state and its relations with society in order to research gender in education in Taiwan.

Agency problems are more severe for multinational corporations (MNCs) and multinational enterprises compared to their domestic counterparts. As companies develop diversified operations, their managers face more challenges. An incentive compensation structure has been designed to align the benefits of managers with those of shareholders. Additionally, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly crucial for companies. MNCs must gain the trust of more investors to improve their corporate reputation and financial performance. CSR enables MNCs with a high sense of social responsibility to expand their investor base, reduce perceived risks, and decrease information asymmetry. Our empirical findings reveal that Taiwanese MNCs can enhance their performance by implementing cash-based compensation and pursuing CSR activities.