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Even though following the laws of nature to construct harmonious nature–human interactions has long been one of the most influential philosophies in Chinese history, nature-based solutions (NBS), an innovative concept referring to the sustainable utilization of nature in solving various social and environmental challenges facing contemporary societies, can hardly be found in research papers and practices in Chinese context until very recently. Yet, some NBS features, and also NBS thinking, have already been successfully embedded within many environmental management decisions and practices, which are commonly characterized by (1) prioritization of nature preservation/restoration to economic activities and (2) functionalization of nature as a countermeasure to environmental and/or social issues. This chapter will present a comprehensive overview of the Beijing Afforestation Scheme, an exemplar case of NBS in the Chinese context. Starting from a description of Beijing and this massive afforestation project, it delineates major characteristics of this NBS, signified by (1) a shift from outcome-driven to integrated ecological resilience, (2) a change from recreating tree rows to restoring natural boreal forest, and (3) an evolution from top-down to adaptive and inclusive governance. Lastly, lessons learnt and future challenges are discussed.

This paper aims to investigate the economic consequence of the tax reductive strategy on stock price. The authors’ theory, empirically reinforced, suggests managerial tax aggressiveness endangers the corporation through a heightened risk in stock price crashing. Information opacity worsens the situation by reinforcing the relationship. Policymakers should emphasize two aspects: market openness and tighter institutional monitoring. The evidence shown in this paper demonstrates that these two weaken the tax aggressiveness impact on risk of a crashing stock price.

The sample in this paper consists of 9,702 observations from listed firms from 2008 to 2013 in China. The tax rate is manually collected and all the other original data used in this study are sourced from Wind and China Capital Market and Accounting Research databases. Both logistic regression and ordinary least squares regression methods are used to test the hypothesis in this paper.

One key insight is in tax aggressiveness to be strongly correlated with a greater risk of future stock price crashing. The authors also found information opacity to exert a positive moderating effect. That is, the higher the information opacity, the stronger and more positive the correlation between tax aggression and stock price crash risk. However, the market process and an institutional investor have opposite, negative impacts. An open market environment reduces their correlativeness. Similarly, stronger institutional vigilance leads to an attenuation of such a co-relationship.

The findings of this paper have wide policy implications for management and control by authorities of listed corporations. Aggressiveness in management of corporate taxes accentuates the risks borne by stockholders. If so, internally within the corporation, such aggression shown by management, if not proscribed, could be subject to scrutiny, possibly by an independent committee. Externally, this may be countered by the authority in emphasizing three key factors: openness in information sharing, the market environment and tighter institutional monitoring.

This study provides a consequential theory of aggressive management of tax, rigorously analyzed and strongly, empirically supported. Overall, aggressiveness in tax management is related with assumption of higher risks in the crashing of stock price. The relationship is enhanced through information opacity, but reduced via market environment and institutional monitoring.

Moderately thick circular cylindrical shells are widely used as supporting structures or storage cavities in structural engineering, rock engineering, and aerospace engineering. In practical engineering, shells often work with micro-cracks or defects. The existence of micro-crack damage may result in the disturbance of dynamic behaviours and even induce accidental dynamic disasters. The free vibration frequency and mode are important parameters for the dynamic performance and damage identification analysis. In particular, stiffness weakening of the local damage region leads to significant changes in the vibration mode, which makes it difficult for the mesh generated in the conventional finite element method to capture a high-precision solution of the local oscillation.

In response to the above problems, this study developed an adaptive finite element method and a crack damage characterisation method for moderately thick circular cylindrical shells. By introducing the inverse power iteration method, error estimation, and mesh subdivision refinement technique for the analysis of finite element eigenvalue problems, an adaptive computation scheme was constructed for the free vibration problem of moderately thick circular cylindrical shells with circumferential crack damage.

Based on typical numerical examples, the established adaptive finite element solution for the free vibration of moderately thick circular cylindrical shells demonstrated its suitability for solving the high-precision free vibration frequency and mode of cylindrical shell structures. The any order frequency and mode shape of cracked cylindrical shells under the conditions of different ring wave numbers, crack locations, crack depths, and multiple cracks were successfully solved. The influences of the location, depth, and number of cracks on the disturbance of dynamic behaviours were analysed.

This study can be used as a reference for the adaptive finite element solution of free vibration of moderately thick circular cylindrical shells with cracks and lays the foundation for further development of a high-performance computation method suitable for the dynamic disturbance and damage identification analysis of general cracked structures.

This paper aims to explore whether drivers would adapt their behavior when they drive among automated vehicles (AVs) compared to driving among manually driven vehicles (MVs).Understanding behavioral adaptation of drivers when they encounter AVs is crucial for assessing impacts of AVs in mixed-traffic situations. Here, mixed-traffic situations refer to situations where AVs share the roads with existing nonautomated vehicles such as conventional MVs.

A driving simulator study is designed to explore whether such behavioral adaptations exist. Two different driving scenarios were explored on a three-lane highway: driving on the main highway and merging from an on-ramp. For this study, 18 research participants were recruited.

Behavioral adaptation can be observed in terms of car-following speed, car-following time gap, number of lane change and overall driving speed. The adaptations are dependent on the driving scenario and whether the surrounding traffic was AVs or MVs. Although significant differences in behavior were found in more than 90% of the research participants, they adapted their behavior differently, and thus, magnitude of the behavioral adaptation remains unclear.

The observed behavioral adaptations in this paper were dependent on the driving scenario rather than the time gap between surrounding vehicles. This finding differs from previous studies, which have shown that drivers tend to adapt their behaviors with respect to the surrounding vehicles. Furthermore, the surrounding vehicles in this study are more “free flow'” compared to previous studies with a fixed formation such as platoons. Nevertheless, long-term observations are required to further support this claim.

This paper aims to investigate structural characteristics of a business network comprising small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), and to explore the relationships between such network characteristics and innovative capabilities of the participating firms.

This paper adopts a survey approach and conducts empirical analysis by drawing data from 92 firms operating in the packaging and printing industry in Shantou City, Guangdong Province.

In relation to the participating firms' innovative capabilities, density, reciprocity and multiplicity of the business network are figured out as factors with positive association, while hypotheses concerning intensity, non‐redundancy and betweenness of the network are not supported.

The authors only conducted a survey in a single industry in one location. Thus the extent to which the results of this study can be generalized remains to be further investigated.

Small and medium‐sized enterprises can enhance their innovative capability by understanding and leveraging the structure of the business network in which they participate.

This paper sheds additional insights to the relationship between a business network and firms' innovative capabilities in a Chinese context.

China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

In today’s Taiwan, sha-cha sauce is an indispensable ingredient for beef hot pot and stir-fried dishes. The purpose of this paper contextualizes the history of sha-cha sauce in Tainan, the oldest city in Taiwan, and argues that sha-cha sauce, introduced by Chaoshan immigrants, has contributed to new styles and habits of beef consumption tastes and habits in the post-1949 Tainan and beyond.

This paper uses documentary materials, oral interviews and diaries to explore the relationship between beef consumption and sha-cha sauce. It begins with an historical overview of Taiwan’s beef consumption during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945). Then, it focuses on two Chaoshan business enterprises: the Bull-Head, which makes the world’s largest “canned sha-cha sauce,” and the Xiao Haozhou, a Tainan restaurant specializing in sha-cha beef hot pot. Finally, this study analyzes Xinrong Wu, a Tainan gentry whose diary entries from 1933 to 1967 documented the changing dietary habits of beef consumption among Taiwanese.

The Chaoshan migrants played an important role in introducing the sha-cha sauce to postcolonial Tainan, and this input bolstered the beef consumption among Taiwanese. The production of sha-cha provided a reliable source of income for these migrants in Tainan, and major businesses like the Bull-Head became the international brands of Taiwanese food products.

The study, though limited to Tainan, reveals the symbiosis between popularization of sha-cha sauce and widespread beef consumption in Taiwan.

This study helps researchers examine the connection between Chinese migrations and food culture.

This paper is an original scholarly investigation of the relationship between food diet and Chaoshan migration in postcolonial Tainan.

In the digital age, the spread of online behavior and real-world information leads to social contagion. This study aims to investigate the contagion phenomenon of online physician choice and then discuss its potential influence on the sub-specialization process in the healthcare service industry. In specific, this study aims to propose the basic mechanism of infection and immunity as follows – exposure to antigen may lead to an immune response, and the success of the immune response may depend on the provision of appropriate immune signaling.

Data collected from haodf.com including 4 disease types and 247 physicians from 2008 to 2015 were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Panel vector autoregression method was utilized to analyze the panel data.

The obtained result shows that social contagion of physician choice over disease type is salient on e-consultation platforms, indicating that physicians associated with/on haodf.com are concentrating on an even narrower type of disease. Disclosing more simple signals (physician history orders) results in more disease concentration for that physician in the future. In contrast, disclosing more detailed signals (physician-contributed knowledge or physician reviews) leads to less disease concentration.

This finding implies that physician-contributed knowledge and physician reviews may act as immune signal which will tend to trigger a success immune response. This study not only suggests managers should be careful about the double-edged sword effect of online physician choice contagion but also provides the useful approaches to promote or restrain such a contagion in a flexible way.

The authors empirically examined social capital factors affecting patients' social support acquisition with the aim of providing guidance to patients seeking social support online.

The authors used social network analysis to extract data about social capital factors from online health communities and text mining to identify forms of informational support and emotional support grounded in online, text-based communication. Moreover, the authors employed a random coefficient model to understand the dynamic influence of social capital factors on both informational and emotional support.

The results from the empirical analyses show that structural connections have a lasting impact on the acquisition of both types of support; that is, social connections developed in the past will have an effect on the future. For relational capital, strong ties were less important; the quantity of connections mattered more than the quality when acquiring informational support. The use of health-related language increased the amount of informational support acquired. Over time, patients gained increasing social support, which primarily came from the patients' historical threads, likely via searches from peers facilitated by accumulated social capital.

The authors' research adds to the literature on social capital and social support in online health communities by exploring how the three dimensions of social capital affect social support acquisition. The authors' research also contributes to the online health care literature by examining social support from a dynamic perspective. Practically, the authors' findings provide guidance for patients on what decisions to make to acquire more social support.