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Het belastingsysteem is een van de beste startpunten voor een onderzoek naar China's transitie omdat de transformatie van een maatschappij altijd gepaard gaat met snelle veranderingen in het oude fiscale regime. Dit boek ziet de centrale overheid, lokale overheden en ondernemingen als de drie grote spelers en laat zien dat interactie tussen deze drie spelers heeft geleid tot China's unieke, "centraal-lokaal tweesporige" belastingsysteem. De centrale overheid mobiliseert lokale overheden door fiscale decentralisatie, wat resulteert in toenemende lokale autonomie en hen drijft tot maximalisatie van lokale belastingopbrengsten. Zij concurreren voor mobiele belasting bases ondernemingen door het lokale belastingbeleid te manipuleren. Dus, in tegenstelling tot een formeel en gestandaardiseerd nationaal belastingsysteem dat gecontroleerd wordt door de centrale overheid, worden informele en flexibele lokale belastingsystemen geleid door lokale overheden. Dit boek bevat vier essays. Het eerste essay analyseert systematisch de evolutie en huidige status van China's belastingsysteem. Het illustreert hoe de formele en informele interactie tussen de centrale overheid, lokale overheden en ondernemingen vorm geeft aan de instituties van China's belastingsysteem. Het tweede essay onderzoekt de interactie tussen de eerstgenoemde twee spelers in fiscale decentralisatie en laat zien dat deze de grootte van de overheid beperkt. Het derde essay modelleert de interactie tussen de laatstgenoemde twee spelers in een onderhandelingsspel waarin een onderneming een exit en voice strategie gebruikt om te onderhandelen met een lokale overheid voor gunstige belastingen en verklaart daarmee de diversiteit in lokale belastingsystemen. Het laatste essay modelleert de veranderingen van het belastingsysteem als een interactie tussen de drie spelers onder varierende economische, politieke en sociale beperkingen; de veranderingen bereiken een evenwicht waarin efficiency, macht en legitimiteit in balans zijn. ; The tax system is one of the best starting points for investigating China's transitional course because the transformation of a society always involves rapid changes in its old fiscal regime. Seeing central government, local governments and firms as three major players, this dissertation shows that interactions between them lead to the emergence of China's unique "central-local dual-track" tax system. The central government mobilizes local governments by fiscal decentralization, which results in growing local autonomy and thus drives them to maximize local tax revenues. They compete for mobile tax bases firms by manipulating local tax policies. Thus, in contrast to a formal and standardized national tax system overseen by the central government, informal and flexible local tax systems are operated by local governments. This dissertation consists of four essays. The first essay systematically analyzes the evolution history and status quo of China's tax system, which illustrates that the formal and informal interaction between the central government, local governments and firms shapes the institution building process of China's tax system. The second essay, then, examines the interaction between the former two players in fiscal decentralization and finds that it curtails the expansion of government size. The third essay models the interaction between the latter two players by a bargaining game in which a firm employs an exit and voice strategy to bargain with a local government for preferential tax treatments and thus explains the diversity of local tax systems. The last essay models changes of the tax system as a result of interaction between the above three players under var

To address the problem why China, as a communist country, moves in the opposite direction when the public sector has undergoing a continuous growth in most Western economies since the World War I, we offer a new approach that the de facto fiscal decentralization curtails government size in transition China according to Leviathan theory. Meanwhile, by combining time series and cross-section regression analysis and various variables used by previous empirical studies, this paper tests the Leviathan hypothesis for vertical decentralization, horizontal fragmentation and intergovernmental collusion at national and provincial level, respectively, based on the new data set of China. Our empirical results not only explain Chinese shrinking government size, but also lend support to Leviathan hypothesis, especially, under the condition of absence of traditional democratic electoral constraint.

(Last revised version December 2005) To address the problem why China, as a communist country, moves in the opposite direction when the public sector has undergoing a continuous growth in most Western economies since the World War II, we offer a new approach that the de facto fiscal decentralization curtails government size in transition China in addition to conventional explanations. Meanwhile, by analyzing panel data and various variables used by previous empirical studies, this paper tests the Leviathan hypothesis for vertical decentralization, horizontal fragmentation and intergovernmental collusion at central-provincial and provincial-local level. Our empirical results not only explain Chinese shrinking government size, but also lend support to Leviathan hypothesis, especially, under the condition of the absence of traditional democratic electoral constraint.

China like other transition economies needs to establish a tax system compatible with a market economy, in particular, an efficient tax administration system with capable tax bureaucrats. The paper singles out the general and China-specific features by which central government attempts to accompany economic transformation via tax farming to tax bureaucratisation in tax administration. Based on empirical study in two provinces this paper shows that without including local government agencies and their budgets, China's fiscal federalism cannot be analysed and argues that China's emerging tax system depends on the institutional and organizational design that shapes the interaction between central government, local governments and economic agents.

This paper offers a new data set and window to empirically test Leviathan theory in the sense of China's transition economy. By combining time series and cross-section regression analysis and various variables used by previous empirical studies, we test the Leviathan hypothesis for vertical decentralization, horizontal fragmentation and intergovernmental collusion at national and provincial level, respectively. Our empirical results lend support to Leviathan hypothesis, especially, under the condition of absence of traditional democratic electoral constraint.

Bearing the legacy from central-planned system, the tax system in local China still lacks transparency and, in many cases, the liabilities of firms, especially those with extensive influences, are subject to negotiation despite the new tax-reform 1994. Applying Hirschman's Exit-Voice theory, we construct a game model of interplay between firm and local government, in terms of exit and voice for preferential tax treatments, thereby revealing dynamics of these two options under rational entrepreneurship of economizing transaction cost. Suggested by the model, exit not only induces firm to opt for voice, it also underpins firm's voice that forces local government to compromise. Particularly, when holding private information of exit cost, firm is able to mimic behaviors of those with high mobility so as to boost the effectiveness of voice. The empirical cases fully illustrate such rational entrepreneurship of exit plus voice to profit from local preferential policy.

China like other transition economies needs to establish a tax regime compatible with a market economy. The paper singles out the general and China-specific features by which national legislation attempts to accompany economic transformation. Based on an empirical study in two provinces this paper shows that without including local government agencies and their budgets, China's fiscal federalism cannot be analysed. This paper argues that China's emerging tax regime depends on the institutional design that shapes the interaction between firms (as major tax payers at the local level), local government agencies, and the national tax administration.

As the threats from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increases gradually, to recognize and classify unknown UAVs have became more and more important in both civil and military security fields. Classification of signal modulation types is one of the basic techniques for specific UAV recognition. In this paper, to represent the hidden features involved in the transmitted signals from UAVs, we propose a two-dimensional squeezing transform (TDST) to characterize the UAV communication signals in a compressed time-frequency plane. The new time-frequency representation, TDST, retains the instantaneous characteristics of the UAV signal, and is with excellent data reduction and noise suppression capabilities. The TDST plane of different modulation types are then considered as input features, and we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on deep-learning to recognize the UAV signals. We design an interception system and consider 10 types of UAV signals with random initial phase, bandwidth and frequency offset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Ship detection plays an important role in military and civil fields. Despite it has been studied for decays, ship detection in remote sensing images is still a challenging topic. In this work, we come up with a novel ship detection framework based on the keypoint extraction technique. We use a convolutional neural network to detect ship keypoints and then cluster the keypoints into groups, where each group is composed of keypoints belonging to the same ship. The choice of the keypoints is specifically considered to derive an effective ship representation. One keypoint is located at the center of the ship and the rest four keypoints are located at the head, the tail, the midpoint of the left side and the midpoint of the right side, respectively. Since these keypoints are distributed in a diamond, we name our network DiamondNet. In addition, a corresponding clustering algorithm based on the geometric characteristics of the ships is proposed to cluster keypoints into groups. We demonstrate that our method provides a more flexible and effective way to represent ships than the popular anchor-based methods, since either the rectangular bounding box or the rotated bounding box of each ship instance can be easily derived from the ship keypoints. Experiments on two datasets reveal that our DiamondNet reaches the state-of-the-art results.

Abstract. Landslide monitoring is important in predicting the behavior of landslides, thereby ensuring environmental, life, and property safety. On the basis of our previous studies, we conducted the double shear test by using a third-generation optical fiber transducer that uses expandable polystyrene (EPS) as base material. However, the third-generation transducer has poor performance when cohesive force is present between the grout and capillary stainless steel pipe of the transducer. Thus, the fourth-generation optical fiber transducer was invented. Similar to the third-generation transducer, the fourth-generation transducer also used EPS as its base material. Single shear test was conducted on the fourth-generation transducer after being grouted with cement mortar (1 : 1 mix ratio). The micro-bend loss mechanism of the optical fiber was considered, and the optical time domain reflectometry instrument was used. The fact that the loss sequence of optical fibers subjected to loading is different at various locations is found. The relationship of the loading-point displacement vs. optical fiber sliding distance and optical loss were measured. Results show that the maximum initial measurement precision of the newly proposed device is 1 mm, the corresponding sliding distance is 21 mm, and the dynamic range is 0–20 mm. The fourth-generation transducer can measure the movement direction of loadings, thus making this transducer applicable for landslide monitoring.