This chapter gives an overview of the changes in the welfare policies of China since 1949 when the Communist Party came to power. It shows that the welfare policies in China are centred on two themes: facilitating economic growth and social stability. Social stability to some extent is partially achieved by sustained growth, but not limited to growth. The development of the welfare state plays two roles: picking up the vulnerability exposed by the changes in economic growth; and responding to the social pressure that threatens instability. Despite the fact that China has moved from a command economy pursuing Communist ideology to a market economy following "Socialism with Chinese Characters", the approaches the state has responded to in changing welfare needs have not really drifted away from economic growth and social stability. Politically, the Communist Party and the government, though reluctant to make radical changes in the political system, had gone through some transformations.
Top-down place-based competition and award (TDPBCA) has a growing presence in the West and a long existence in China. TDPBCA refers to the motivational strategy in which a higher authority sets a series of targets for lower-level governments to compete against each other or to pass the benchmarks set by the higher authority to become a winner. The participants (unit of assessment) are 'places' at the same level of jurisdiction (countries, cities, neighbourhoods, villages). This paper examines TDPBCA as a local motivation policy tool. It first reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies and theorises the motivational impact of TDPBCA. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBCA in China and its influence on local stakeholders' behaviour in terms of public participation, intersectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending. The proposed paper examines TDPBC as a local motivation policy tool in China. The first section reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies. The second section discusses theoretically the motivational impact of TDPBC. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBC in China and discusses its influence on local stakeholders' behaviour in terms of public participation, inter-sectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending.
China's Communist Party has directed the country's welfare system to maintain party authority amidst changing political, social, and economic circumstances. Welfare during the years of central planning was comprehensively provided either directly by the state or through co-operatives with a clear rural-urban divide. Following the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese economy was liberalised and capitalists began to be accepted as members of the Party. From the late 1970s until the early 2000s, welfare provisions from state and business enterprises gradually declined even as individuals began bearing ever-growing personal responsibility in social assistance. While welfare policy had, until the early 2000s, been used to increase economic efficiency, the many social problems that attended the Chinese model of development soon led Beijing to target welfare policy directly at social well-being. Consequently, more recent policy has sought to spread the benefits of economic growth more equitably.
Abstract. The MyData is concept framework that refers to human-centric ways of personal data management. Personal data gained significant attention recently. As the developing of Ubicomp technology, more and more particularly personal data are generating and collecting. Personal data own increasingly important economic, social, and practical value. However, individuals have little or no power to control when and how their data being created or processed by companies, organizations or governments. The MyData aim to provide individuals with practical methods to obtain, access, and utilize their personal datasets and to encourage organizations to give users control over their personal data. In this way, access and trade personal data can expect to build an open data market. Two challenges to achieve this goal is how to gain the individuals trust and permission and how to provide a more human-centric way to support personal data management and utilization. To explore a novel and reliable way to address the challenges in MyData, this thesis utilizes blockchain technology to support MyData framework. Blockchain is a decentralized transparent ledger with the transaction information that shared among all peer-to-peer network nodes. It has the potential to gain users trust and provide a solution to gain users permission in data trade. This thesis work focuses on studying blockchain and smart contract performance in MyData architecture. An Ethereum blockchain based MyData system that combined AWARE platform designed and implemented. The system deploys smart contract that provides users' account management, personal data access, trade services, and information inquiry services in the Ethereum blockchain. Based on this system, two experiments designed to evaluate the performance of the integrated MyData system. The experiments results demonstrate how blockchain can facilitate MyData concept and how gas price influences the system performance. The thesis work shows that the blockchain and smart contract have the potential to provide the necessary technology support to solve the challenge in gain users' trust and permission and support new business models and open data market to benefit both the data consumer and data producer. Additionally, blockchain and the smart contract can provide a more fine-grained and transparent way to help individuals to manage and utilize their personal data.
The "Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)" has been dominated by investment in infrastructures such as energy and transportation. Only a small proportion goes into information and communication technologies (ICT). However, the ICT sector has attracted growing interests among the stakeholders in countries receiving BRI investment and the Chinese investors from both the public and private sectors become more interested in engaging with BRI through ICT investments. It is now gradually developed into a "Digital Silk Road" initiative under the BRI framework which means country governments and enterprises are encouraged to work together on production and trade activities enabled by digital technologies. In theory, digital connectivity and the emerging digital economy can have positive impacts on development (Alexopoulos, 2018). Some Chinese cities had achieved economic success as a result of gaining access to the ICT infrastructures and taking advantage of the business opportunities emerging from it. The Digital Silk Road is, therefore, a possible contributor to delivering Sustainable Development Goals in the BRI countries. However, it is difficult to tell whether practices that worked for China may also work for other countries. In this paper, we review what China has done in relation to the "Digital Silk Road" and the possible contributions to delivering Sustainable Development Goals in these countries. By putting together research findings from multiple sources, the authors mapped out the activities along the Digital Silk Road and the possible impacts on SDG delivery. We conclude that ICT investment has the transformative power to benefit the poorest people in the world. However, its benefits should not be overly estimated. Growing activities in the virtual world need to be matched with those in the real world to deliver sustainable outcomes truly.
China has committed to implement both the 13th Five-Year Plan and the Official Position Paper on the 2030 Agenda. Both comprise components that address the SDGs and thus the following mapping exercise examines both documents together.The two guiding principles of the 13th Five-Year Plan (hereafter 'FYP') are as follows: 1) to undertake further reform to strengthen the decisive role of the market and improve the role of the state; 2) to maintain the leadership of the Communist Party and strengthen its capacity and role. These two guiding principles are intended to modernize and strengthen governing capacity, which is considered essential for the successful development of China.The Sustainable Development Goals (hereafter 'SDGs' or '2030 Agenda') and the 13th Five Year Plan or 'China's Position Paper on the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development' are broadly in alignment, with the exception of gender equality. However, it would be inaccurate to conclude that gender equality issues in China will not be addressed during the period 2016-20. Policies such as poverty alleviation, and improvement of equal access and affordability of education and healthcare services would automatically target women as they are currently the disadvantaged groups in these policy areas. However, some of the other policy areas do not address gender issues at all.Despite broad alignment between the FYP and the SDGs, differences can be observed at the target and indicator levels. The SDGs have 17 goals, 169 targets and 230 indicators, and the FYP contains 25 targets in four categories, of which 13 have quantitative requirements which are therefore binding. Our comparison reveals that 50 indicators in the SDGS are fully covered in the FYP, 70 indicators appear partially, and 119 indicators are not reflected. The highest numbers of common targets between the SDGs and the FYP occur in the areas of poverty reduction, health, clean water and protecting life on land. Conversely, indicators in the areas of reduced inequalities, gender inequality, decent work, peace and partnerships are under-represented in the FYP.The 2030 Agenda stresses the importance of reducing inequality. This is echoed in the FYP, which incorporates targets on narrowing the income gap and significantly improving the income of low income groups, in addition to increasing the proportion of the country's middle class. However, there is a significant divergence between the detailed targets on inequality in the SDGs and the FYP. The SDGs focus on reducing inequality through addressing inter-group disparities, particularly women and children, in all policy areas. The FYP does not have clear targets aimed at reducing inter-group inequality. However, potential exists for the detailed indicators in the SDGs to be built into the Accurate Poverty Reduction Agenda (APRA) and incoming national plans for education and health, respectively. Poverty is a national level priority and a whole set of institutional arrangements have been established to achieve this goal. This allows a considerable degree of certainty in predicting that China will continue as a world leader in eradicating absolute poverty and hunger. Poverty reduction in the FYP primarily focuses on people living below the poverty line. However, two concerns arise from the emphasis placed by the central government on this initiative. First, local governments, under pressure from the top, may take an easy approach to reducing poverty by "giving fish," rather than following guidance from the central government to combine "teaching how to fish" with "giving fish." In this regard, SDG targets such as the empowerment of vulnerable groups and mobilizing non-public sectors may help China to set up more targeted policy targets and make use of diverse resources to achieve poverty reduction goals. . The second concern relates to the near-poor, which are not addressed as part of the FYP poverty reduction initiatives. The concern in the SDGs about people at the periphery of poverty may provide impetus for China to strengthen its poverty reduction program in future.Both the SDGs and the FYP put great emphasis on innovation. The FYP highlights the importance of capacity-building for innovation, and considers innovation to be an important tool to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth. The 2030 Agenda links innovation to the delivery of social benefits and economic growth. The SDGs are therefore of assistance to China in specifying the desired social and environmental outcomes from growth.Many goals and targets in the SDGs and the FYP require inter-sectoral actions. This poses two challenges to China: there needs to be better coordination between different sectors, and measuring the performances in reaching these targets is more complicated. A large part of the FYP is devoted to capacity and institution-building to deliver complex policy agendas. The Chinese government has also established a set of dedicated institutions for planning, implementing and monitoring the progress of SDGs at both the national and global levels. However, these are not sufficient. There needs to be more resources for the implementation, and there should be sound performance measurement and evaluation to be able to implement the policies, and ultimately to be able to tell the actual outcomes. In China, funding and resources at various levels of governments often do not match. The governments' ability to collect data to monitor and evaluate the progress is also not yet up to the challenges posed by SDGs. These challenges, however, may inspire reforms in the tax system and public spending, stimulate technological innovation and create opportunities for public participation.
Located in the northeastern part of China, the stretch of land named Liaoning is a region historically characterised by the convergence of multiple ethnicities and cultures. It used to be the northeastern boundary of central China with an array of military cities and fortresses intensively built for military defence. Unlike palaces and gentry residences, vernacular residences and urban tissue existing widely in historical towns are excluded in the national protection schedule and have thus experienced different levels of damages. They feature a paradox that the general city form is well preserved whilst architectural forms are changed to a large extent. Most vernacular buildings have endured centennial baptisms, as evidenced by their architectural layouts, structures, roofing, walls, decorations etc. As most historical Chinese cities are not renowned tourist destinations, they are faced with various threats and are on the verge of extinction. The threats include the departure of young residents, decay of historical architecture, insufficient financial and technical support for architectural renovation, improper modifications by residents and demolition of entire historical neighbourhoods. Such threats are widespread in Chinese historical cities which are struggling to survive. Prior to the implementation of professional interventions, the urban forms and vernacular architecture of such historical cities should be studied. Through on-site investigation and query of historical data, especially the historical satellite city maps of U.S. Geological Survey, this study analyses the current life conditions in the context of traditional architecture, reveals problems in the use of historical architecture, identifies potential threats and summarises the underlying reasons. Suggestions benefitting local architectural conservation are then put forward.
