Suchergebnisse

What is the long-term impact of China's territorial and maritime security policy in East Asia on regional security? To address this question, we compared China's claims and actual policies related to the East China Sea and South China Sea and explored the motivations behind Beijing's position and behaviour in the two disputes. More specifically, we examined a few interrelated issues: (a) similarities and differences in China's claims in these two disputes from historical and legal perspectives, (b) China's strategic and security calculations and its changing tactics in handing these two disputes in the past few years and (c) the major factors affecting China's behaviour in the two disputes. Our conclusion is that China is unlikely to make any major concessions in the near future, and that regional security in East Asia will remain fraught with many uncertainties for a fairly long period of time.

Using country-level data, this study proposes and tests a multivariate model explaining levels of media penetration around the world, with special interest in the impact of an increasingly global economy on media industries. This study finds that countries with more open economies (i.e., those more exposed to the world market) tend to have higher penetration rates of newspapers, personal computers, Internet hosts, and main telephone lines, even after controlling for GDP per capita, literacy, urbanization, population, levels of democracy and freedom, and regional variables. The data cover most of the countries in the world. The results indicate a link between a global economy and an "information age"—an enormous expansion of world communication. This study complements earlier research on the economic constraints of media penetration; most of the earlier work was done in a U.S. setting and focused on GDP per capita in explaining media penetration.

We examined indirect health-related social control and the underlying mechanisms of its association with psychological functioning in patients with type 2 diabetes. Singaporean late middle-aged and older adults (N = 199) completed questionnaires measuring indirect social control,
self-efficacy, internal diabetes locus of control, and psychological functioning. We used a bootstrapping approach and structural equation modeling to analyze the data. Results showed that indirect social control was associated with diabetes-related emotional distress and depressive symptoms
via the mediator of internal diabetes locus of control, but self-efficacy did not mediate this relationship. More specifically, indirect social control was positively associated with higher internal diabetes locus of control, which, in turn, had a negative impact on diabetes-related emotional
distress and depressive symptoms.