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The purpose of this paper is to propose and optimize plastic optical fiber (POF) probe with macro-bending biconical tapered structure for the relative humidity (RH) sensing.

In this study, the principle is the evanescent wave power modulated by the ambient humidity. The probe is fabricated by using fused biconical taper and heat-setting method and then coated with a fluorescent moisture-sensitive film.

The probe’s sensing performance can be optimized by changing the probe’s curvature radius, biconical tapered transition length and taper waist diameter. The result shows that the sensitivity of the probe is up to 1.60 and 3.40 mV/ per cent, respectively, at low humidity (10-45 per cent) and high humidity (45-90 per cent). Also, this probe has good linearity, repeatability, photostability and long-term stability.

The proposed probe can improve the sensitivity and linearity of RH sensing without complex devices, which is necessary for mass production, remote measurement and convenient operation.

POF probe with macro-bending biconical tapered structure is investigated in this paper, which is proved to be effective in improving the sensitivity and linearity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the process of urban land ownership reform in China. It seeks to illustrate how the detachment of the concept of land ownership from its significance in a planned socialist state has contributed to the development of a real estate sector, and how the concept of land ownership should now be regarded in the new era of marketization. In particular, it focuses on the widespread influences of political forces in these processes.

The paper analyses relevant legislation enacted within the People's Republic of China. This analysis is undertaken within the context of the social, political and economic changes that have occurred within the country during the period under consideration.

Two findings emerge from the study. First, an economic‐based notion of land ownership has evolved in China as a consequence of the economic and social changes accompanying the process of economic liberalisation. This reflects the elimination of political forces in defining land values in the new era. Second, however, the involvement of political power in the process of land asset distribution is shown to have led to market distortion. This may, in turn, lead to market failure and social conflict. For the development of a healthy real estate market, the influences of these political forces should, therefore, be restricted through a process of ongoing reforms.

The paper presents a detailed analysis of the impact of political forces on the changed patterns of land allocation in transitional China. The country's unique social background and system of land tenure have not previously been subjected to detailed scholarly attention. The research published in this paper suggests further possibilities for China's continuing system of land ownership reform and also contributes to a redefinition of the concept of land ownership in the new era of marketization and globalization.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on triadic reciprocal determinism and social exchange theory to examine how “induced-type” and “compulsory-type” union participation influence union commitment and job involvement, and how union participation in the west differs from that in China. It also examines whether the role of both organizational justice and employee participation climate (EPC) functions in the Chinese context.

Cross-sectional data are collected from 694 employees in 46 non-publicly owned enterprises, both Chinese and foreign, in the Pearl River Delta region of China. A multi-level moderated mediation test is used to examine the model of this research.

Union participation is positively related to organizational justice, union commitment and job involvement. In addition, organizational justice acts as the mediator among union participation, union commitment and job involvement. Specifically, the mediating role of organizational justice between union participation and union commitment, and between union participation and job involvement, is stronger in high-EPC contexts than low-EPC contexts.

Instead of examining the impacts of attitudes on union participation, as per most studies in the western context, this research examines the impacts of union participation in the Chinese context on attitudes, including union commitment and job involvement. It also reveals the role of both organizational justice and EPC in the process through which union participation influences union commitment and job involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to present the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China and reveal its trend since the late 1990s.

This study is based on the analysis of 168 university documents regarding the cash-per-publication reward policy at 100 Chinese universities.

Chinese universities offer cash rewards from USD30 to USD165,000 for papers published in journals indexed by Web of Science, and the average reward amount has been increasing for the past ten years.

The cash-per-publication reward policy in China has never been systematically studied and investigated before except for in some case studies. This is the first paper that reveals the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China.

Discussion of China's one-child policy generally centres on its demographic effects. Bereavement among parents of singleton children and the role of social capital in the bereavement process have been under-explored. The purpose of this paper is to focus on mothers who lost their only children during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The paper aims to discuss the under-explored yet crucial issues of the one-child policy – the ways in which Chinese bereaved mothers handle the death of their singleton children – and the roles that social capital can play in their bereavement process.

The author conducted eight case studies on bereaved mothers through home visits, semi-structured interviews and participation in public activities during August 2010 and May 2011. In-depth interviews were used to collect information from these bereaved mothers in Sichuan, China.

The case studies reveal two major experiences of bereaved mother whose familial support varies substantially. One major experience is shared by those who had received emotional support from husband (who offered bonding social capital), and were able to get through the psychological pain. Another experience is shared by bereaved mothers who lost their familial relations. Weak social ties (i.e. an NGO which offered bridging social capital) remained the only source of support. Policies can target at the latter group of mothers by helping them to organise themselves into community-based groups and help to relieve their frustration and grief.

These research findings have implications for the development of NGOs, as well as complementary support for community-based bereavement counselling and community care in China.

Lead users are essential participants in crowdsourcing innovation events; their continuance intention significantly affects the success of the crowdsourcing innovation community (CIC). Although researchers have acknowledged the influences of network externalities on users' sustained participation in general information systems, limited work has been conducted to probe these relationships in the CIC context; particularly, the predictors of lead users' continued usage intention in such context are still unclear. Hence, this paper aims to explore the precursors of lead users' continuance intention from a network externalities perspective in CIC.

This work ranked users' leading-edge status to recognize lead users in the CIC. And then, the authors proposed a research model based on the network externalities theory, which was examined utilizing the partial least squares (PLS) technique. The research data were collected from an online survey of lead users (n = 229) of a CIC hosted by a China handset manufacturer.

Results revealed that the number of peers, perceived complementarity and perceived compatibility significantly influence lead users' continuance intention through identification and perceived usefulness.

This work contributes to the crowdsourcing innovation research and provides views regarding how lead users' sustained participation can be developed in the CICs. This work also offers an alternative theoretical framework for further research on users' continued intention in open innovation activities.

This study aims to explore how a buyer's perceived buyer-seller (B-S) guanxi facets (i.e. ganqing, renqing and mianzi) and guanxi positions (i.e. zi-ji-ren, shou-ren and sheng-ren) affect the seller's influence effectiveness (SIE) and purchase intention (PI) in social commerce.

This study conducted an online survey in three cities of Taiwan and collected a total of 364 data. The structural equation modeling and cluster analysis were used to test research hypotheses.

The results indicate that (1) each guanxi facet exerts a different and positive impact on SIE, but only one guanxi facet – renqing – helps improve PI, (2) guanxi facets can be used to predict the buyer's perceived guanxi position toward the seller, (3) the effect of guanxi facets on SIE and PI varies across B-S guanxi positions and (4) the SIE positively mediates effects of guanxi facets on the PI.

This study demonstrates the individual effect of each guanxi facet on SIE and PI and affirms the implicit guanxi position features guanxi facets and determines the buyer's perceived SIE and PI as well. To the best of our knowledge, these findings are rarely proposed in previous research and are beneficial for understanding the guanxi mechanism in social commerce.

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Rogaski defined it as a ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This essay focuses on the transformation of the Tianjin cityscape during the last 150 years, and aims at connecting the hyper-colonial socio-spatial forms with the processes of post-colonial identity construction. Tianjin is currently undergoing a massive renovation program: its transmogrifying cityscape unveils multiple layers of ‘globalizing’ spatialities and temporalities, throwing into relief processes of power and capital accumulation, which operate via the urban regeneration's experiment. This study uses an ‘interconnected history’ approach and traces the interweaving ‘worlding’ nodes of today's Tianjin back to the global connections established in the city during the hyper-colonial period. What emerges is Tianjin's simultaneous tendency towards ‘world-class-ness’ and ‘China-class-ness’.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether negative reports by state-controlled media affect firms’ CSR performance. Negative reports by state-controlled media indicate the signals of deteriorating relationships between firms and the government and then generate greater political pressure on firms, which may force firms to engage in more CSR activities. This study first examines the influence of negative reports by state-controlled media on CSR performance. Then, we further figure out whether the degree of dependence on the government exhibits an impact on the relationship between negative reports by state-controlled media and firms’ CSR performance.

The sample for this study is based on all Chinese A-listed firms from 2010 to 2020. The study employs CSR scores data released by HEXUN to measure firms’ CSR performance. HEXUN is one of the most professional institutions that sell CSR-related products. Following You et al. (2018) and An et al. (2022), the authors identify the nine most popular media consisting of state-controlled media. The ordinary least squares (OLS) method is adopted for regression, and various robustness tests are conducted including using alternative measures, expanding the regression model and instrumental variable method.

The empirical results show a significant positive relationship between negative reports by state-controlled media and firms’ CSR performance. The cross-sectional analyses indicate that the effect of negative reports by state-controlled media on firms’ CSR performance is stronger for firms with mandatory CSR disclosure requirements, firms with political connections and firms with more severe financial constraints. Furthermore, improved CSR performance resulting from negative reports by state-controlled media indeed helps repair firms’ relationship with the government and thus leads them to attain government benefits, such as more government subsidies and lower tax rates.

This study finds that media reports issued by state-controlled media can be treated as signals of the relationships between firms and the government, which generate political pressure to push firms to take CSR as a strategic management tool to repair their relationships with the government. It helps policymakers and investors more comprehensively understand firms’ incentives behind their improved CSR performance and develop more effective policies. This study focuses on firms’ overall CSR performance. We anticipate that future research can extend the analysis of the impact of negative reports by state-controlled media on specific aspects of CSR investment.

This study illustrates the significantly positive effect of negative reports by state-controlled media in promoting CSR performance. It fills the research gap in studying the role of state-controlled media in CSR, especially for emerging markets. Moreover, the study also contributes to the strand of literature on strategic CSR management.