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AbstractAs a result of the new approach to municipal food supply adopted in European cities, the market hall first appeared in China in the foreign concessions in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. While some municipal governments across China had stimulated an increase in the number of market halls constructed from the beginning of the early twentieth century, the introduction of market halls did not achieve the effects that the authorities expected. Although market hall reforms in Suzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu were different in detail, they were similar inasmuch as market halls did not become a regular feature of the daily life of the three cities. However, municipal governments continued to promote the market hall reforms despite their limited achievements and resistance from the public. The main purpose of Chinese municipal governments to promote market halls was not to solve practical problems, but to establish the market hall as a symbol of modernity. While the concessions in Shanghai managed by the westerners had already initiated a form of modernity, other Chinese cities responded by exhibiting a particular appreciation of the myth of modernity, and Chinese cities underwent as swift a process of modernization as the foreign concessions.

Chapter one develops a dynamic model to investigate the paradox of the Chinese state-society relations before and after the reform. By assuming that citizens and the government are both forward looking and protestors in the CCP regime have to pay the durable cost, the model generates several findings. First, the model identifies an increasing number of protests in a transition economy because the decentralized reform has induced such significant changes as the weakened central authority, released social control and increased distributable income. Second, a low level of social unrests is found in both stationary and non-stationary equilibrium in a central planning economy. Third, the model demonstrates the strong capability of a command economy in administrating economic crisis. Finally, the future tendency of the Chinese state-society relations depends on the re-strengthening of central authority and the techniques that the center will apply to respond the mass incidents.Chapter two develops the Crowford and Sobel's cheap talk model (1982) and Hoff and Stiglitz's model of anarchy of demand for the rule of law (2004), and investigates the significance of peasants' rebellions on Chinese dynastic stability and the large variance in the duration of reign within the dynastic cycle. I contend that dynastic stability is determined by the initial land distribution and the center-local relationship in the Central Autocratic System. As the center cannot constrain the local corruption, the portion of peasant proprietors and thus dynastic stability has a tendency of decreasing over time. In addition, the patterns of dynastic longevity are shaped by the type of preceding wars before the dynasty was built.Very few researches focus on the role of judicial system in determining the level of corruption. Employing a formal model with empirical analyses, Chapter three incorporate economic factors with political constraints to investigate the different roles of democracy and judicial independence in determining the level of bureaucrats' corruption across countries. Empirically, the instrumental variable (IV) approach is applied to resolve the endogeneity problems. The evidence indicates that different levels of corruption across countries are significantly influenced by the degrees of judicial independence. To fight corruption successfully, I contend that the judiciary, as a hard institutional constraint to resist bureaucratic corruption, has to be independent from the government.

This article combed the historical materials of translation and research of "Shan Hai Jing" ("Classic of Mountains and Seas") in Russian, and summarized the achievements and deficiencies.

Yu.M. Lotman's ideas on cultural semiotics were introduced in China in the late 1970s' and have been developing for more than 40 years since then. The process of dissemination of Lotman's ideas in China can be divided into three stages: initial introduction (1979-1993), in-depth research (1994-2004), and multiple expansion (2005 - present). The given paper studies the reception of Lotman's thoughts on semiotics in China from a diachronic perspective, and it summarizes the characteristics of different stages in order to understand the whole picture of the research on Lotman's semiotic ideas in China.

This paper analyzes and compares the effects of the monetary policy on the stock price in China based on SVAR models with two different restriction schemes. As suggested by existing literature, there are four major monetary policy instruments used by the People's Bank of China. They are the seven-day repo rate, the one-year benchmark lending rate, the M2, and the total loan. We run SVARs with the monetary policy instrument, the stock index, and the macroeconomic variables and show the impulse responses of the stock index to the monetary policy shocks. After comparing two restriction schemes, the short-run Cholesky restrictions and the short-run and long-run combined restrictions for identification, we conclude that the latter restriction method leads to better estimation than the former one. In general, a contractionary monetary policy shock lowers the stock price, appreciates the Chinese currency, reduces the output gap, injects deflation, and shrinks the commodity price gap. We find that the benchmark lending rate is more effective in regulating the Chinese stock market than the other monetary policy instruments. In addition, a combination of price-based and quantity-based monetary policy instruments is suggested for impacting the stock market and stabilizing the economy in China.