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The tobacco industry has lobbied successfully to obtain the support of the United States government for opening Asian Markets to American tobacco products. This paper comments on two issues arising from these efforts: the development of an atmosphere of invasion and resistance to invasion in Asia; and the change in the image of the United States in Asian nations from that of a leader in health to that of an exporter of death. The threat of sanctions and the effects of the open market and United States tobacco company advertising in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are noted. Parallels are drawn between the opium wars a century and a half ago in China and the current threat of trade sanctions. Reacting to American policy, an Asia-Pacific Association for Control of Tobacco has been formed and linked with the US Coalition Against Smoking.

This study empirically investigates the determinants and drivers of Hong Kong's inbound tourism using data from January 2019 to December 2020. Five of Hong Kong's major regional tourism source markets are selected: Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea. Our empirical results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has had significant negative impacts on the tourism and aviation sectors in Hong Kong that are asymmetric in the source and destination countries. In addition, international travel control imposed by the Hong Kong government is often defined according to the pandemic situation in the tourism source countries, Hong Kong's inbound visitor volume is also significantly affected by the Hong Kong government's response to COVID-19 infection cases in the tourism origin markets. Our empirical results also suggest that the flying distance to Hong Kong and high tourism costs in Hong Kong reduced visitor arrival demand, whereas increased aviation services and tourism market potential contributed to tourism growth. These results suggest that the tourism industry and government agencies should cooperate to recover when the pandemic is under good control, so that Hong Kong will be regarded as a preferred and safe destination for travelers and visitors. Our study emphasizes the complementarity between pandemic control and tourism recovery. Pandemic control involves extra tests and quarantine requirements on passengers, more vigorous border control. These operational and associated financial requirements call for government support to the tourism and aviation sectors in the early stage of recovery to create a positive feedback loop. ; false

While urban rail transit has gained increasing popularity, there are still many problems related to obtaining financial resources for constructing it in China. It is proved that the Land Value Capture (LVC) theory can provide theoretical support for exploring new financing mode of urban rail transit to solve these problems. This paper reviews the concept of LVC and the existing LVC finance mechanisms, in particular, Joint Development (JD). It is revealed that JD can't be directly copied and reproduced in mainland China. The characteristics of land acquisition policy as well as the practice of rail transit construction in mainland China are summarized, and based on the findings, the Predetermined Land Reserve Mode (PLR) is proposed. The essence of this proposed mode is to link the reserve of specific land parcels with the relevant rail transit project and ensure it benefits from the predetermined land reserve. Rail transit companies, with the authorizations from the government, can reserve suitable land parcels prior to the planning and construction of the rail transit system so that they can capture the increased land value after the land transfer. PLR is a new finance mechanism based on LVC and it is different from JD under comparative analysis. Analytical results show that PLR has unique advantages. To demonstrate the performance of PLR, a case study of constructing the urban rail transit system in Wuhan City, China, is presented in this paper, and it shows that the PLR is well suited for financing the urban railway systems in cities of mainland China.