Global financial crisis and women's micro-lending innovations in Pakistan and Malawi

Microcredit/finance as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women in developing countries has been a darling of developed countries. The success stories from microcredit borrowers from Bangladesh, India, and Africa, and global endorsement of microcredit programmes have largely ignored local indigenous initiatives managed by groups of women in rural and urban areas. Evidence from fieldwork in Pakistan and Malawi suggests that although systematically recorded history of such indigenous initiatives is lacking, women in these settings would attest that there exists generational knowledge about such small-scale, group-based micro-lending which can be used to enhance livelihoods in rural households.     

Institutionalising mechanisms for building urban climate resilience: experiences from India

This paper examines how mainstreaming of urban climate change resilience – a crucial consideration in an increasingly urbanised world – is occurring at both the city and national scale, using the case of an internationally-funded resilience-building initiative in India. Surat city's newly-established Climate Change Trust illustrates the importance of an institutionalised mechanism for coordinating and sustaining climate initiatives. Concurrently, climate resilience is being mainstreamed into the national urban development agenda, through a network of Indian institutions. These two nascent mechanisms offer avenues for local city-level experiences to inform national directives, driving and sustaining the urban climate adaptation agenda across India.     

Why Do We Need ‘Myth-Busting’ in the Study of Sino–African Relations?

The literature on Sino–African relations has debated whether or not China's growing presence is a threat to Western or African interests, and has come to the conclusion that China's behavior is not uniquely immoral. Many countries, including Western liberal democracies, similarly give aid to local autocrats to secure natural resources. Why, then, has so much effort been made to come to this perhaps unsurprising conclusion? We argue that the literature on Chinese foreign policy remains heavily influenced by Western states' policy interests, resulting in an impoverished debate that is primarily concerned with the idea of a China threat. In order to recover the diversity in our research on Chinese foreign policy, we argue for the need to go beyond the confines of Western strategic interests.     

Distortion and Credibility within China's Internal Information System

Behind the problems of credibility of public official information in China lie two patterns of internal information distortion, one restricting the downward flow of sensitive general information and the other filtering the upward flow of local information. Information gathered at the center is increasingly restricted as it is transmitted down the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the ‘facts on the ground’ are sifted by local official interests at each level of upward transmittal. Awareness of these distortions has been increased by the Internet revolution, but the structures that encourage them remain in place. An empirical survey of different levels of local cadres in Guangdong Province indicates the different perspectives produced by different positions in the internal information system. Municipal level officials, who have more general information but less diverse local information, tend to be more positive about the quality and objectivity of statistics, while their staff members, further from central sources but closer to messy local realities, are more skeptical.     

Bashing ‘the Chinese’: contextualizing Zambia's Collum Coal Mine shooting

The 2010 shooting of 13 miners at Zambia's small, privately-owned ‘Chinese’ Collum Coal Mine (CCM) has been represented by Western and Zambian politicians and media as exemplifying the ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘amoral’ practices of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Africa. CCM has been used to provide a sharp contrast to the supposed ways of the Western firms that own most of Zambia's mines. Embedded in racial hierarchy and notions of strategic competition between the West and China, the discourse of the CCM shootings further shapes conceptions of global China and Chinese overseas. While examining all the oppressive conditions that have given rise to protest at the mine, we contextualize the shooting and subsequent conflicts. In analyzing CCM's marginal and troubled development, we discuss aspects of the 2010 shooting incident known to miners and union leaders, but ignored by politicians and media. We look at the shooting's political fallout, focus also on the epilogue that was the 2012 CCM riot—in which one Chinese person was murdered and several others seriously injured—and trace the sometimes violent discontent manifested at other foreign-owned mines in Zambia since their privatization in the late 1990s. The empirical data for this detailed study derive from hundreds of documentary sources and interviews with union leaders, workers, officials and others in Zambia from 2011 to 2013.     

反垄断法中银行业合并规则的重构——侧重于金融全球化视角的分析

在金融全球化趋势下,银行合并已成为一种必然趋势。与此相应,维护金融安全应成为银行合并和集中领域中反垄断法的最重要的价值取向。反垄断法律制度应当从传统垄断法上的较为消极的反垄断政策转变到积极的反垄断政策,并充分利用反垄断法律的政策性促进银行力量的合并与集中,并维护金融安全。为此需要在进行反垄断法中有关银行业的制度设计时,从全球化角度考虑对金融安全的可能的正面或负面影响,通过制定反垄断法的规范,促进我国金融的力量提升,并运用反垄断法规则来规范跨国金融并购和垄断,建立有序和适度竞争的市场秩序。     

Battlefield Responses to New Technologies: Views from the Ground on Unmanned Aircraft

How do individuals on the battlefield respond to the introduction of new technologies? How will unmanned and increasingly autonomous technologies be received by ground combat personnel? In this paper we explore tactical-level perceptions of one particular technology—armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—by conducting a survey experiment of ground fires controllers. Our findings reveal that these personnel have strong behavioral reactions to the introduction of unmanned technology. Especially in situations with high risk to ground troops, we find a strong preference for manned aircraft with implications for the future use of UAVs and human–machine relationships in war. These results suggest the need to incorporate behavioral variables into future studies of military adoption and innovation and indicate that the future adoption of unmanned systems may be just as much about the “warm fuzzy” of trust as confidence in unmanned capabilities.     

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again: Financialisation and the Management of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

The subprime mortgage debacle in the USA and the subsequent global credit crunch provoked a wide range of crisis management responses in different national settings. Such interventions are typically figured as the sovereign state coming to the rescue of the markets and the banks. In contrast, and offering a critical analysis of the character and content of the principal interventions of authorities in the heartland of the crisis in the USA and the UK from Autumn 2007 through to 2009, we argue that these responses served to reproduce financialisation tendencies present across the seemingly separable domains of state and market which contributed to producing the crisis in the first place. Understood as a process co-constituted through pervasive but contradictory developments in capital accumulation, the risk management practices of lenders and the disciplining of borrowers, we show how, far from being seriously curtailed by crisis management, the financialisation of socio-economic life was actually buttressed during the very period in which its fragilities were most sharply exposed. In short, the management of the subprime crisis is a story akin to that of trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.     

以改革创新精神全面推进新时期党的建设

党的建设伟大工程同党领导的中国特色社会主义伟大事业密切联系在一起。在新世纪新阶段,要把全体人民的意志和力量凝聚起来,全面建设小康社会,加快推进社会主义现代化,必须以加强党的执政能力建设和党的先进性建设为主线．以改革创新精神全面推进党的建设新的伟大工程。