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AbstractConfucianism has a system of Ethical argumentation that is based on Three Cardinal Principles and Five Constant Virtues, directed towards the cultivation of virtue. Neo-Confucianism, especially Lixue 理学 that is initiated by Chengyi 程颐 and developed by Zhuxi 朱熹, puts great emphasis on the theory of cultivation that usually converges instead of being emanative, tinged with the characteristic of the Way of Kun 坤道 that is directed towards the Virtue of Kun 坤德. This cultivation of the mutual dependence of knowing and doing leads to the subordination of the Way of Qian 乾道 and a corresponding change in the relation between the Virtue of Kun and the Virtue of Qian in a range of language levels, as the metaphysical foundation of Zhuxi's female ethics.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is still raging. Similar to other RNA viruses, SARS-COV-2 is constantly mutating, which leads to the production of many infectious and lethal strains. For instance, the omicron variant detected in November 2021 became the leading strain of infection in many countries around the world and sparked an intense public debate on social media. The aim of this study is to explore the Chinese public's perception of the omicron variants on social media. A total of 121,632 points of data relating to omicron on Sina Weibo from 0:00 27 November 2021 to 23:59:59 30 March 2022 (Beijing time) were collected and analyzed with LDA-based topic modeling and DLUT-Emotion ontology-based sentiment analysis. The results indicate that (1) the public discussion of omicron is based on five topics, including omicron's impact on the economy, the omicron infection situation in other countries/regions, the omicron infection situation in China, omicron and vaccines and pandemic prevention and control for omicron. (2) From the 3 sentiment orientations of 121,632 valid Weibo posts, 49,402 posts were judged as positive emotions, accounting for approximately 40.6%; 47,667 were negative emotions, accounting for nearly 39.2%; and 24,563 were neutral emotions, accounting for about 20.2%. (3) The result of the analysis of the temporal trend of the seven categories of emotion attribution showed that fear kept decreasing, whereas good kept increasing. This study provides more insights into public perceptions of and attitudes toward emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. The results of this study may provide further recommendations for the Chinese government, public health authorities, and the media to promote knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 variant pandemic-resistant messages.

We examine whether reported ownership-performance relations systematically differ for government versus private ownership by integrating the diverse empirical results for listed corporations in emerging markets. Our meta-analysis confirms popular perceptions that, compared to private ownership, government ownership is associated with inferior performance. We find that, on average, the underlying ownership-performance relation is negative for government ownership and positive for private ownership, and the difference between these relations is significant. We also find that the positive private ownership-performance relation is stronger for institutional/foreign ownership compared to family/management ownership. Further analysis shows that negative (positive) government (private) ownership and performance relations have weakened (strengthened) over time. Our assessment of the sources of heterogeneity shows that reported relations are biased by estimation methods that fail to adequately control for endogeneity. Our results suggest that the nature of ownership-performance relations in emerging markets remains very dynamic and warrants ongoing research interest.

We show that 70% of Chinese listed companies are ultimately controlled by government agencies, thereby indicating that state ownership remains widespread in China's stock markets. Three questions are considered that are related to government control structures and their impact on firm value: (1) how do government agencies maintain their control of listed companies; (2) what are the impacts of different government control structures on firm value; and (3) are these impacts different in local government and central government-controlled firms? We find that the Chinese government controls listed companies directly or indirectly through solely state-owned enterprises (SSOEs). Taking into account the trade-off between political and agency costs, we show that firm value increases when some control rights are decentralized from the government to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, decentralization improves significantly the performance of local government- controlled, but not central government-controlled firms.