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As competition in the graduate labor market intensifies, extracurricular internships have become increasingly popular among university students. This paper explores whether and how students’ evaluation of the higher learning that they have received changes during extracurricular internships.

We interviewed 47 undergraduate students who had extracurricular internships across five Chinese universities. Data were analyzed innovatively through the lens of cross-cultural adaptation theory, which guides us to view internships as a transition from university culture to workplace culture through the stress-adaptation-growth dynamic.

The findings reveal that participants faced stress from multiple sources at the beginning of their internships, which collectively prompted them to adapt proactively to the workplace culture. While acquiring new habits and trying to acculturate into the surrounding work milieu, many participants deculturated from their old habits and student identity, putting aside higher learning. As the adaptation progressed, over half of the participants even began to critique university curricula and depreciate the value of higher learning.

The study offers theoretical insights into internships and the broader university-to-work transition as well as practical implications for universities in balancing learning and employability goals from a novel cross-cultural adaptation perspective.

Many master’s students enrol in coursework-based programmes to improve their professional knowledge and skills for the job market. Most studies of employability in higher education focus on undergraduates rather than master’s students, although the number of master’s students worldwide has increased significantly in recent years. This study explores the factors involved in the perceived employability (PE) of master’s students in Hong Kong.

The authors first proposed a conceptual model of PE based on the social cognitive career theory. Using survey data from 786 master’s students in Hong Kong, the authors applied descriptive statistics and an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to address the following research questions: How do master’s students gauge their PE? How do person, learning and environment variables influence the PE of master’s students?

The authors found that PE is influenced by students' approaches to learning and their institutional career support.

Few studies examined whether students' learning experiences during the master’s programmes influence their employability. This study highlights the importance of learning experiences and career support in coursework-based master’s programmes for enhancing graduate employability.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive relationship between non-farm employment and mechanization service expenditure.

The study employs an innovative two-stage probit least squares (2SPLS) model to analyze the survey data collected from 1,148 rural households in China. This model not only simultaneously estimates the impact of non-farm employment on mechanization service expenditure and the impact of mechanization service expenditure on non-farm employment, but also addresses endogeneity issues associated with these two activities.

The empirical results show that non-farm employment and mechanization service expenditure are jointly determined. In particular, the study finds that non-farm employment significantly increases mechanization service expenditure, and vice versa. The results are confirmed by an estimation that captures a dichotomous decision of mechanization service usage. The interactive effects of non-farm employment on mechanization service expenditure are heterogeneous between male and female household heads and among households with different member sizes. Further analyses reveal that (1) mechanization service expenditure increases with increasing non-farm working time; (2) local non-farm employment, rather than provincial non-farm employment, has a larger impact on mechanization service expenditure; and (3) the number of household members employed in non-farm works does not affect mechanization service expenditure significantly.

Although mechanization service markets are rapidly growing in many developing and transition countries, little is known about how service purchasing interacts with farmers' decisions to work in the non-farm sector. This study makes the first attempt by investigating the interactive effects of non-farm employment on mechanization service expenditure in rural China. The findings provide significant evidence for policymakers in China and other countries in their efforts to generate non-farm work opportunities and promote agricultural mechanization, with the aim of boosting rural development and improving farm economic performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between farmers' happiness and farm productivity, taking maize production in China as an example.

The conditional mixed process model is employed to account for the endogeneity that inevitably arises in regression models studying happiness and estimate the 2015 China Household Finance Survey data.

The empirical results show that a higher level of farmers' happiness is associated with higher maize productivity. The marginal return in maize productivity changes unevenly with increments in farmers' self-reported happiness on a five-point Likert scale. Farmers' happiness is positively determined by their age, educational level, farm size, machinery ownership, access to agricultural subsidy and car ownership. Machinery ownership and access to credit are two important factors that improve maize productivity.

The finding suggests that promoting the subjective well-being of farmers is conducive to higher productivity and improved national food security. The results have implications for China and other developing countries aiming for sustainable agricultural development.

Firm-level data show that workers' happiness improves productivity. However, it is still unclear whether farmworkers' happiness affects farm productivity. Thus, this study provides the first empirical analysis of the impact of farmworkers' happiness on farm productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of three types of peer monitoring and punishment tools on the performance of a group contract for the control of agricultural non-point source pollution (ANPSP) in China.

Experimental economics.

All the three tools result in efficiency improvement and show little difference in performance. In addition, they break the theoretical Nash equilibrium of the team entry auction and help to better reveal bidders’ private cost information.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study can be the first laboratory experiment study in the area of ANPSP in China and might provide some beneficial lessons for China’s policy-makers.

China has, apparently, more trade union members than the rest of the world put together, but the unions are subservient to the Party-state. The theme of the paper is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Issues analysed include union structure, membership, representation, and the interaction between unions and the Party-state. We suggest that Chinese unions inhabit an Alice in Wonderland dream world and that they are virtually impotent when it comes to representing workers. Because the Party-state recognises that such frailty may lead to instability it has passed new laws promoting collective contracts and established new tripartite institutions to mediate and arbitrate disputes. While such laws are welcome they are largely hollow: collective contracts are very different from collective bargaining and the incidence of cases dealt with by the tripartite institutions is tiny. Much supporting evidence is presented drawing on detailed case studies undertaken in Hainan Province (the largest and one of the oldest special economic zones) in 2004 and 2005. The need for more effective representation is appreciated by some All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) officials, but it seems a long way off, so unions in China will continue to echo the White Queen: “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today” and, alas, tomorrow never comes.

Suggests that misunderstandings frequently occur when trying to understand Chinese language and culture, and so gives the implied meaning of various Chinese expressions and sayings such as greetings, thanks, respect, age, congratulations and taboo subjects.

This paper aims to analyse how both Lin’s birthplace identity and his Christian identity contributed to his fruitful public career and to ascertain which identity became the most significant.

Archival research is the main method used in this paper. The most important archives drawn from are the Daniel Tse Collection in the Special Collection and Archives of the Hong Kong Baptist University Library. Oral history has also been used in this paper to uncover more material that has not yet been discussed in existing scholarly works.

This paper argues that although Lin’s birthplace identity and social networks helped him to start his business career in Nam Pak Hong and develop into a leader in the local Chaozhou communities, these factors were insufficient to his becoming a respectable member of the Chinese elite in post-war Hong Kong. He became well known not because of his leading position in local Chaozhou communities or any great achievement he had obtained in business but because of his contribution to the development of Christian education. These achievements earned him a reputation as a “Christian educator”. Thus Lin’s Christian identity became more important than his birthplace identity in contributing to his successful public career.

This paper has value in showing how Christian influences interacted with various cultural factors in early Hong Kong. It also offers insights into Lin’s life and motivations as well as the history of the institutions he contributed to/founded. It not only furthers our understanding of the Chinese Christian business elite in early Hong Kong but also provides us with insights when further studying this group of people in other British colonies in Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of Chinese industrial relations after the market reform of 1978, while basing its arguments and conclusion on analysis of the interactions of key actors in the labour arena in China. The significant phenomena in the evolution of industrial relations are the coming of transnational capital and the emergence of self‐organising protests by migrant workers.

The paper uses a case study approach.

The Labour Contract Law and the local political economy experience strong effects from TNCs and other business players. Meanwhile, globalisation has introduced the civil society movement to China, which has given rise to an increasing number of NGOs working for labour rights. Tight financial and technical connections between grassroots NGOs and international donor organisations make it possible for bottom‐up labour activities to counteract the unilateral influence of the state and market over the Chinese workforce. Since the ACFTU, the official trade union umbrella, has many institutional constraints to undertake a thorough transition towards labour in the near future, workers' representation is diversified.

One implication for further theoretical studies is that tripartism cannot fully disclose the reality of Chinese labour, and that labour representation derives from both unions and self‐organisation of workers, such as NGOs, which opens more room for the entrenchment of the grassroots labour movement to sustain the balance of power among the state, ACFTU, firms, international market forces and individual workers in the long term.