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For scholars with an interest in Chinese society and politics, protest is not a new subject, especially rural resistance and urban strikes. Numerous studies have been conducted which focus on social movements and popular protests, but the online protests by Chinese Internet users have not received the same amount of attention. The focus of this article is on how Chinese citizens use the Internet as a platform to protest against official misconduct or more specifically the emergence of a type of online protest called the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This type of protest has largely been overlooked by the literature on protest in China. This study aims to provide an appropriate and comprehensive definition of HFSE as a form of online protest via exploring its structural characteristics and general contexts. Drawing on the findings, I argue that a full understanding of protest in the digital age is possible only when the Internet and online forms of protest are taken into account.

China is the most populous nation, the largest developing country with relatively high levels of poverty, the fastest-growing economy, and one of the world's most polluted countries. Bearing this in mind, the Chinese central leadership is keen to address environmental and developmental concerns concomitantly and strike a balance between environmental protection and economic development. One way that this can be achieved, in the author's view, is through the development of green technology. Instead of repeating what has been said in the existing literature, this thesis attempts to approach the issue of green technology from a new perspective of law and institutional design, and seeks to stimulate green technological change through the development of a legal system that engages environmental law and patent law in a concerted effort to incentivize the innovation and dissemination of green technology to the greatest extent. This thesis argues that by improving a synergy between the Chinese environmental law and patent law, especially by using the Chinese patent law as an environmental instrument, the innovation and diffusion of green technology can be better promoted. This in turn would contribute to China's environmental improvement without necessarily impeding economic growth or technological progress. Specifically, this thesis puts forward three main ways in which patent law can be used as an environmental tool, i.e., the creation of a rationale governing both environmental law and patent law in a nation's legal regime for including environmental goals in patent law, environmental law's adoption of patent system as an environmental regulatory tool, and the "greening" of patent law. This so-called"three-step approach", in conjunction with the proposed specific provisions, measures or mechanisms developed under each of the three approaches, will constitute a theoretically effective legal framework and can be used as criteria for assessing the Chinese law's effectiveness in synergizing environmental law with patent law and using patent law as an environmental instrument. A total of 28 aspects and sub-aspects of the Chinese law have been examined against the proposed criteria, with a total of 31 points awarded. A notable gap exists between the Chinese law and the proposed theoretically effective law because had all the aspects and sub-aspects of the Chinese law fully met the criteria, the total score would have been 84 points other than 31 points. It is worth noting that such an assessment of the Chinese law is not conducted alone, but on the basis of a comparison with the counterparts of the US and European laws, which makes the evaluation of the Chinese law more meaningful and accurate and helps to identify lessons from the experience of the US and EU. Based on such vertical and horizontal comparisons, this thesis raises specific proposals for China's legislative reform, with a view to synergizing the Chinese environmental law with patent law and using the Chinese patent law as an environmental instrument. ; published_or_final_version ; Law ; Doctoral ; Doctor of Philosophy

While there is growing research on online politics in China some political uses of the Internet have tended to be overlooked. The focus of this article is on an emerging phenomenon in Chinese cyberspace, the human flesh search engine (HFSE), a term first used by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or 'human hunting'. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so-called online 'vigilantes' this study focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norm transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. In order to give readers a comprehensive overview of what an HFSE is, the first section of this article provides basic information about it. In the second part, 20 well-documented HFSE examples are listed to show their varying aims and then HFSEs which focus on local governments and officials are shown to highlight the political dimensions of HFSE. In the third section, four case studies of government/official-focused HFSE are explored in detail to show political HFSEs' internal processes and underlying mechanisms.

ABSTRACTTraditional approaches for modeling and solving dynamic demand lotsize problems are based on Zangwill's single‐source network and dynamic programming algorithms. In this paper, we propose an arborescent fixed‐charge network (ARBNET) programming model and dual ascent based branch‐and‐bound procedure for the two‐stage multi‐item dynamic demand lotsize problem. Computational results show that the new approach is significantly more efficient than earlier solution strategies. The largest set of problems that could be solved using dynamic programming contained 4 end items and 12 time periods, and required 475.38 CPU seconds per problem. The dual ascent algorithms averaged .06 CPU seconds for this problem set, and problems with 30 end items and 24 time periods were solved in 85.65 CPU seconds. Similar results verify the superiority of the new approach for handling backlogged demand. An additional advantage of the algorithm is the availability of a feasible solution, with a known worst‐case optimality gap, throughout the problem‐solving process.