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In order to provide readers with a better understanding of China’s approach to quality management, this paper presents China’s quality management history, the main quality management efforts adopted by the Chinese government, the product quality situation, and the reasons for product quality problems. Finally, it has been concluded that governments can only play a role in shaping the context and institutional structure surrounding companies, while governments cannot create competitive industries; only companies can do that. If the quality of people, especially governmental officials, top management, and employees does not improve, it is very difficult for the country to improve product quality.

This article presents how to use the technique of experimental design in developing a new product ‐ an extrusion press. Using experimental design has significantly reduced the time needed to develop the extrusion press and improved the quality of the new product. This clearly demonstrates that experimental design is an efficient technique for new product development. To ensure success when undertaking experimental design in new product development, there are some prerequisites which have to be taken into account. These include, for example, the need for a better understanding of customer requirements and expectations, a carefully planned design, and sound knowledge in the subject‐matter. It may be suggested that an experimental design similar to the one presented in this article can also be used for developing other new products.

From an extensive review of the literature in the field of total quality management (TQM), 11 constructs of TQM implementation were identified. An instrument measuring these constructs was developed. The reliability and validity of the instrument were tested and validated using data from 212 Chinese manufacturing companies. Various methods were employed for this test and validation. Comparisons between this instrument and the three other quality management instruments were made. It was concluded finally that the instrument presented in this paper was reliable and valid. Researchers will be able to use this instrument for developing quality management theory. Industrial practitioners will be able to use this instrument to evaluate their TQM implementation so as to target improvement areas.

This paper aims to anticipate the possible development direction of WAAM. For large-scale and complex components, the material loss and cycle time of wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) are lower than those of conventional manufacturing. However, the high-precision WAAM currently requires longer cycle times for correcting dimensional errors. Therefore, new technologies need to be developed to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency WAAM.

This paper analyses the innovations in high-precision WAAM in the past five years from a mechanistic point of view.

Controlling heat to improve precision is an effective method. Methods of heat control include reducing the amount of heat entering the deposited interlayer or transferring the accumulated heat out of the interlayer in time. Based on this, an effective and highly precise WAAM is achievable in combination with multi-scale sensors and a complete expert system.

Therefore, a development direction for intelligent WAAM is proposed. Using the optimised process parameters based on machine learning, adjusting the parameters according to the sensors’ in-process feedback, achieving heat control and high precision manufacturing.

This paper aims to provide a typical example of accounting for the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in underdeveloped cities, especially for the Poyang Lake area in China. The accounting can increase public understanding and trust in climate mitigation strategies by showing more detailed data.

The paper uses the “Global Protocol for Community-scale greenhouse gas emission inventories (GPC)” method, a worldwide comparable framework for calculating urban CO₂e emission (CE). The empirical case is an underdeveloped city, Nanchang, in China.

The results show the total CE of Nanchang, containing the electricity CE of Scope 2, grew rapidly from 12.49 Mt in 1994 to 55.00 Mt in 2014, with the only recession caused by the global financial crisis in 2008. The biggest three contributors were industrial energy consumption, transportation and industrial processes, which contributed 44.71-72.06, 4.10-25.07 and 9.07-22.28 per cent, respectively, to the total CE. Almost always, more than 74.41 per cent of Nanchang’s CE was related to coal. When considering only the CEs from coal, oil and gas, these CEs per unit area of Nanchang were always greater than those of China and the world. Similarly, these CEs per gross domestic product of Nanchang were always bigger than those of the world. Thus, based on these conclusions, some specific countermeasures were recommended.

This paper argues that the CO₂e accounting of underdeveloped cities by using the GPC framework should be promoted when designing climate mitigation policies. They can provide more scientific data to justify related countermeasures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between the prices of rice, crude oil, wheat, corn and soybean in China and estimate the long-run and short-run price relationships.

Using monthly price date over the period of January 1998-December 2013 in China, this paper employs an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test to explore the cointegration relationship among the price variables and estimate the ARDL long-run price relationship and the short-run error correction process (ARDL-EC).

The empirical results indicate that crude oil, as one of the forcing variables along with wheat, corn, and soybean prices, is effecting rice price in China. Both the long-run and short-run price transmission elasticity estimates suggest the importance of crude oil price on the formation of rice prices. Furthermore, the adjustment speed coefficient is found to be statistically significant, supporting the notion that there is an error correction mechanism for maintaining the long-run price relationship facing short-run shocks.

This paper adopts four types of commodity food prices to explore the relationships with crude oil price. The evidence of market integration, including the degree of price transmission and the speed of adjustment, remains a crucial step to proceed with the government intervention.

The conventional design method relies on a priori knowledge, which limits the rapid and efficient development of electronic packaging structures. The purpose of this study is to propose a hybrid method of data-driven inverse design, which couples adaptive surrogate model technology with optimization algorithm to to enable an efficient and accurate inverse design of electronic packaging structures.

The multisurrogate accumulative local error-based ensemble forward prediction model is proposed to predict the performance properties of the packaging structure. As the forward prediction model is adaptive, it can identify respond to sensitive regions of design space and sample more design points in those regions, getting the trade-off between accuracy and computation resources. In addition, the forward prediction model uses the average ensemble method to mitigate the accuracy degradation caused by poor individual surrogate performance. The Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is then coupled with the forward prediction model for the inverse design of the electronic packaging structure.

Benchmark testing demonstrated the superior approximate performance of the proposed ensemble model. Two engineering cases have shown that using the proposed method for inverse design has significant computational savings while ensuring design accuracy. In addition, the proposed method is capable of outputting multiple structure parameters according to the expected performance and can design the packaging structure based on its extreme performance.

Because of its data-driven nature, the inverse design method proposed also has potential applications in other scientific fields related to optimization and inverse design.

Increased ethanol accumulation during ethanol fermentation generates stress in yeast cells, which finally reduces the fermentation performance and efficiency. Trehalose, a potential stress protectant, has been reported to regulate the response of yeast to diverse environmental stresses. This study aimed to explore how exogenous trehalose application affects the survival, transcriptome and antioxidant enzymes of Wickerhamomyces anomalus grown under ethanol stress conditions.

Exogenous trehalose was applied to the growth condition of W. anomalus, and optical densitometric method was used to detect contents of intracellular trehalose and MDA and activities of CAT and SOD. The survival was evaluated using spot analysis. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified through transcriptomics analysis.

The results showed that ethanol stress induced the accumulation of intracellular trehalose, with further exogenous trehalose application improving the survival and alleviating oxidative stress in ethanol-stressed W. anomalus. Transcriptomic results showed that trehalose has pleiotropic regulating effects on ethanol-stressed W. anomalus since most DEGs annotated to energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, translation, folding, sorting and transport were affected post trehalose addition. Therefore, it is found that trehalose protected W. anomalus against ethanol stress, and these findings provide interesting insights into the mechanistic role of trehalose in improving ethanol stress tolerance of W. anomalus.

(1) Protective effect of exogenous trehalose addition on the survival of ethanol-stressed W. anomalus was proved. (2) Exogenous trehalose addition could partly alleviate oxidative stress induced by ethanol stress and affect transcriptome in W. anomalus.

This paper analysed survey data of 715 rice-producing households in China to assess the determinants of adoption of five mutually exclusive soil conservation practices (SCPs) and their impact on rice yield and chemical fertiliser use.

The multinomial endogenous treatment effects model was used to account for selection bias and endogeneity arising from both observed and unobserved heterogeneity.

Farms that adopted SCPs as a package experienced an increase in rice yield and decrease in chemical fertiliser use. Adoption of SCPs as a package led to a 12.0% increase in yield and 15.2% decrease in chemical fertiliser use; these results have policy implications for the non-point source pollution control in the agricultural sector. In contrast, adoption of straw retention only significantly reduced yield by 4.9% and increased chemical fertiliser use by 18.1%.

The authors evaluate and compare multi-type of SCPs, such as straw retention, deep tillage and use of organic fertiliser, separately or in combination, and their impacts on smallholder farmers’ rice yield and chemical fertiliser usage.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse the fermentative properties of a strain of indigenous Wickerhamomyces anomalus (W. anomalus) from Rosa roxburghii Tratt (R. roxburghii).

Morphological and molecular methods were used to determine the species of the selected strain W. anomalus C11. The physiological tolerances to glucose, ethanol, citric acid and sulphur dioxide (SO₂) were further assessed by checking the growth of cells, and the oenological performances were proved to measure the related fermentative properties of R. roxburghii wines.

The W. anomalus C11 strain could be grown faster than commercial S. cerevisiae X16 in its logarithmic growth period and had preferable tolerances to glucose, ethanol, citric acid and SO₂. Moreover, this strain of native R. roxburghii yeast W. anomalus C11 produced less sulphuretted hydrogen and had a higher β-glucosidase activity. Furthermore, W. anomalus C11 could reduce the volatile acids, reduce the sourness and enhance volatile aroma richness and complexity of R. roxburghii wines including types of aroma and content thereof. Taken together, the R. roxburghii native yeast W. anomalus C11 may have potential for use in R. roxburghii winemaking.

(1) The fermentative properties of a strain of indigenous W. anomalus (named as C11) from R. roxburghii was evaluated. (2) The strain of W. anomalus C11 had preferable tolerances to glucose, ethanol, citric acid and SO₂. (3) This strain of native R. roxburghii yeast W. anomalus C11 produced less sulphuretted hydrogen and had a higher ß-glucosidase activity. (4) W. anomalus C11 could reduce the volatile acids, reduce the sourness and enhance volatile aroma richness and complexity of R. roxburghii wines including types of aroma and content thereof.