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The paper aims to develop a useful tool that can reliably and accurately find the critical paths of high-rise buildings and provide optimal solutions considering the uncertainty based on Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to enhance project implementation performance by assisting site workers and project managers in high-rise building engineering.

This research proposes an approach integrating the improved nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) considering uncertainty and delay scenarios simulated by MCS with the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution.

The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of generating optimal solutions, which can improve the construction performance of high-rise buildings and guide the implementation management for shortening building engineering project schedule and cost under the delay conditions.

In this study, only the construction data of the two floors was focused due to the project at the construction stage, and future work can analyze the whole construction stage of the high-rise building to examine the performance of the approach, and the multi-objective optimization (MOO) only considered two factors as objectives, where more objectives, such as schedule, cost and quality, can be expanded in future.

The approach proposed in this research can be successfully applied to the construction process of high-rise buildings, which can be a guidance basis for optimizing the performance of high-rise building construction.

The innovations and advantages derived from the proposed approach underline its capability to handle project construction scheduling optimization (CSO) problems with different performance objectives under uncertainty and delay conditions.

New (post‐1949) Chinese local gazetteers are one of the major primary resources for contemporary China Studies in the field of history, social sciences, humanities and sciences. Major research libraries in North America have collected them; however, the research value of this series of publications has not yet fully explored. This paper aims at examining how new local gazetteers have been compiled, the scope of their content and research value, and how scholars have used them.

The paper explores the scope and importance of the new Chinese local gazetteers collection through reviewing relevant regulations, policies and guidelines regarding compilation of the new local gazetteers, and randomly examining over 30 provincial, city and county gazetteers.

The paper provides a detailed account of publishing history of this collection; rich and unique research information available; and approaches to collection development, including utilizing digitized gazetteers by Chinese governments.

The paper explores the development of new Chinese local gazetteers in a more systematic way and adds to the current literature on the unique research value this collection has to offer.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

This work aims to address source and dynamics of institutional change. It seeks to develop analytic tools by adaptation of Schumpeterian notion on entrepreneurship, Nelson's work on basic institutions and specific institutions, and Nonaka's middle‐up‐down framework of knowledge management in contrast to top‐down process. Pragmatically it attempts to understand how to improve policy capacity that challenges China seriously.

The work adopts a detailed case study method. A paired case is chosen with the criteria that they have widespread impact in China, and are representative of general and specific institutional change, respectively. Data came from mixed sources: field work and publications. Comparison of the paired cases identifies similarities and differences of different institutional change.

Similarities in the cases are in the important role of institutional entrepreneurs, crucial necessity of field experimentation, and regulatory and legislative means of knowledge processing. Differences are that centralized “top‐down” process of knowledge development, together with committed and centrally guided field experimentation, characterizes general institutional change. In contrast, coordinated and distributed “middle‐up‐down” process, together with autonomously emerged creation at the grassroots, characterizes specific institutional change.

This is a new research area. Many more empirical and theoretical works are needed.

As to how China should improve policy capacity, the study indicates: to focus policy learning on specific parts and facets of institutional settings; to change policy‐makers' role from omni‐competent controller to catalyst/promoter of institutional change; to assign an active role to middle levels and allow broader participation and diverse experimentations.

The author explores interesting details of institutional entrepreneurship and institutional changes based on the two case studies. This work fills the gap of how to analyze institutional change from the innovation/innovation systems perspective.

This study aims to examine the problems encountered during the establishment of the Central Police Academy (CPA) under the Nationalist regime from 1936 to 1949. While the authoritarian party-state unified the police academies by forceful means, this catalyzed the cleavage between the schools of police studies and resulted in power struggles over police education, intellectual thought, collectivity and even the national reform of police administration. More than narrating the progress of power consolidation, this study attempts to identify the problems underlying the factional strife and to reveal the interwoven pattern of these power struggles, exploring the confusion regarding what the police is, a question that troubled Chinese policemen from the mainland to Taiwan.

This paper explains the emergence of the factional strife from the beginning of the preliminary growth of the Police Academies in Nanking and Chekiang. It widely makes use of the official archives from Japan Center for Asian Historical Records and Historica Academia to show the dynamic situation in police education and administration. Rather, the official publications of the Police Academies and their affiliated associations reveal the hidden political agenda behind a unified framework as the party-state claimed. Moreover, official gazettes, memorials and newspapers are also used to strengthen the core argument of this study.

This paper examines the impact of the factional strife between the police leaders Dai Li and Li Shizhen on the CPA from 1936 to 1949. It illustrates that the establishment of the CPA ostensibly unified the nationwide police force but triggered power struggles over the control of the police administration. More importantly, it also shows how the factions strove for larger shares of power under the supreme doctrines that Chiang Kai-shek and the party-state imposed.

The failure of police education to become powerful was a special case among other more typical institutions. The governors coercively merged the police academies and created robust conditions for growth under the shelter of state authority. The police force did not follow the same path of national monopoly as what recent studies found but drifted apart with its vested interests and incompatible beliefs. Hence, the greater the demand for centralized control by the state, the greater the tension of the factional strife.