With the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, land exploitation in China has caused a decrease of cultivated land, posing a threat to national food security. To achieve the goals of both economic development and cultivated land protection, China launched an urban–rural land replacement measure supported by a new land use policy of “increasing vs. decreasing balance” of construction land between urban and rural areas in 2008. Setting China’s urban and rural land use policies in a historical context and urban–rural sustainable development, this paper discusses four practices in Jiangsu Province, Tianjin Municipality, Shandong Province, and Chongqing Municipality. These practices achieved success in impelling agricultural modernization development, improving rural infrastructure and living circumstances, releasing the potential of rural land resources, and increasing cultivated land and urban construction land in the past decade. However, in some practices, problems, and even some conflicts, exist in the protection of farmers’ rights and interests. These challenges are discussed in the context of implementation. In order to better implement urban–rural construction land replacement and achieve better results, the authors argue that farmers’ rights and interests must always be put first and their wishes should be respected more, a consolidated urban–rural land market and a better land market mechanism should be founded, the supply of public goods and services for villagers should be further improved, and supervision and evaluation mechanisms should be further strengthened.

Purpose: This study aimed at investigating the influence of corporate governance on firm risk during the Chinese state enterprise reform. The purposes of this study are to examine the effects of board independence, state ownership and other governance variables on firm risk and to check the influence of controlling shareholder types on firm risk. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses the dynamic and static panel model to estimate the effects of board independence, state ownership and other governance factors on return volatility. To examine the influence of controlling shareholder types on corporate risk-taking, this study further used the treatment effect model (or sample selection model) to analyze the effect of private, state-owned enterprise (SOE) entity, central government and local government controls on corporate risk-taking. Findings: It was found that the enforcement of board independence significantly increases firm risk. The strategy of decentralizing state enterprises (from central government to local government) is a good way to achieve stable stock returns. Originality value: This study contributes to existing knowledge in several ways. First, it focused on independent directors rather than on the size of the corporate board. Second, it highlighted the impacts of state ownership and control on corporate risk. Instead of treating all types of state ownership as homogenous, SOEs are further classified into directly controlled and indirectly controlled, in line with prior studies.

This paper provides an overview of catch-up industrialization strategies in East Asia over the past few decades, articulating a theoretical-conceptual change from Akamatsu's Flying Geese Model to a leapfrogging and path-creating catching-up model. Within this intellectual context, this study explores the economic, political and institutional conditions for effective implementation of catch-up strategies (management of state-created learning rents) in South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia. It proposes a new analytical grid that summarizes the current research on China's catch-up industrialization, explicitly acknowledging China's arguably unique multi-pronged mixed-mode model. The strategic models discussed in this paper may provide policy lessons for other developing economies in Asia aspiring to follow the path of technology upgrading.

China’s technological progress is as spectacular as the growth of its economy since 1978. Technology indicators place China just behind the United States, which has a much higher per capita income. China’s progress is material to Southeast Asia because its per capita income, being similar to that of the Association of South East Asian Nation’s, will have considerable relevance for this region; and China’s technological advance will probably intensify competition between its products and Southeast Asian exports. Yet China possesses features that are arguably unique, the most important being its size and the role of the state. The strategies discussed here—technology alliances with foreign firms, learning by exporting through participation in global supply chains, indigenous innovation aided by the state’s heavy hand, forward engineering through institutionalized commercialization of university- and research institute-based research and development, technology acquisition through mergers and acquisitions, and cost innovation through novel methods of cutting costs—all leverage China’s specific characteristics. Even without these characteristics, Southeast Asian countries, early in the catch-up process, can emulate China’s initial strategies such as technology outsourcing. For more developed Southeast Asia, China’s methods to strengthen technological capacity are important lessons.

Although much research has been devoted to urbanization and city growth, urban dynamics also include city decay and renewal. Extant theories and models have been developed to explain these dynamics. They do not, however, fit the experience of China’s “ghost cities”. These cities have been characterized as state-built but minimally inhabited, testimony to planning failure by the monolithic Chinese state. The goal of the article is to provide in-depth insights to China’s ghost city phenomenon and its effects to residents from local stakeholders’ perspectives. A review of Shandong’s new Yintan city reveals many ghost city attributes, but its development trajectory was at odds with this stereotype. Yintan’s lack of success was attributable to too little, not too much, state intervention, reflecting limited state capacity to develop and manage the new city by Rushan, the nearby small city seeking to capitalize on the central government’s development imperatives. These distinctive features notwithstanding, generic key drivers of city growth can help explain Yintan’s lack of development, in a sense, reconciling the city’s experience with extant research elsewhere.

Khalid, M.A. (2014). The Colour of Inequality: Ethnicity, Class, Income and Wealth in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: MPH Publishing