The Rescaling of the Chinese State and Sino-North Korean Relations: Beyond State-Centrism

While Beijing has repeatedly signed up to multilateral sanctions against North Korea, it is widely regarded as having failed to enforce them. Indeed, China’s deepening economic engagement with the country has led observers to debate the causes of this seemingly duplicitous approach. Constructivist and realist approaches have relied on state-centric frameworks that serve to reduce Sino-North Korean relations to the high politics of Beijing-Pyongyang diplomacy in the context of broader geopolitical dynamics. This article argues that such approaches pay insufficient attention to the profound rescaling of the Chinese state in recent years and the implications this process has for bilateral relations. This article sheds light on how Sino-North Korean relations are being driven by actors at multiple scales and by a multitude of objectives as a result of decentralisation and marketisation alongside increasing geographical unevenness within China and new challenges to continued capital accumulation. North Korea has come to play an increasingly important role in efforts to facilitate economic recovery in the northeastern border regions through serving as spatial fix for Chinese manufacturing capital. These new cross-border flows of capital and labour suggest an emerging pattern of Sino-North Korean relations that is by no means static but in considerable flux.     

New Perspectives on Malaysia and a Rising China: Essays Honouring Lee Poh Ping

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the feature collection titled Malaysia and China in a Changing Region: Essays in Honour of Professor Lee Poh Ping. As well as introducing the six articles in the collection, this article pays tribute to Professor Lee, who passed away in late 2016. The article links some of the key themes of Professor Lee’s research and publications to the themes of the six articles, each of which is concerned with the rise of China and the various impacts this has for Malaysia’s political economy.     

The Philadelphia predictive policing experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This place-based, randomized experiment explored the impact of different patrol strategies on violent and property crime in microscale predicted crime areas....     

Hydropower Development and Resettlement Policy on China's Nu River

Hydropower represents an important alternative form of energy in China, a country that currently uses coal to supply 78% of its electricity. However, evidence from large hydropower projects in China shows that the socio-economic and environmental costs of hydropower development are substantial. Construction on the first of the 13 planned dams on the Nu River began in the summer of 2008, and villages are already beginning to be displaced. Based on fieldwork in the area, we find that the local resettlement policies infringe upon the national regulations governing resettlement caused by major infrastructure development. This infringement includes high prices for resettlement homes, forcing villagers to leave agricultural production, a lack of programs for long-term economic development, and a lack of transparency in decision-making processes.     

Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital – Parliamentary Intention and Damages Caused by Maladministration of a Contractual Dismissal Procedure

In Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust [2011] UKSC 58 [2012] 2 W.L.R. 55 the Supreme Court addressed the following question: is an employee, who can establish that (a) if a contractual disciplinary process had been correctly administered he would have been exonerated, and (b) thereafter employed until retirement, able to sue for loss of the earnings that he would have acquired until retirement? Three members of the Supreme Court held that such a remedy was not reconcilable with the enactment, originally in the Industrial Relations Act 1971, of a statutory unfair dismissals protection regime. It was Parliament's intention that an employee should not be able to outmanoeuvre the statute's compensation limitation rules by deploying a superior common law remedy. This note considers that reading of Parliament's intention.