Disaster-mitigating and general innovative responses to climate disasters: Evidence from modern and historical China

In this paper, I show that narratives of historical conflicts between the Han Chinese and Muslims have been deployed to justify anti-Muslim sentiment and practices in modern and contemporary China. My study analyses Han Chinese narratives during and after the Northwest Muslim Rebellion – the largest ethnic conflict in 19th-century China. The historical narratives about the rebellion have passed down inter-generationally and have been reiterated and reconstructed to fuel modern-day bias against Muslims in the 20th century and beyond. My study contributes to the debate of Chinese Islamophobia by revealing how narratives of ethnic conflicts could help legitimize hostility against Muslims in modern China.

Modern China is at a stage of substantial change from tradition to modernity, and the relationship between China and the world has undergone a profound transformation. At the same time, literature, history, philosophy and the fine arts, among others, were on a journey towards modernization to varying degrees. The awakening of traditional consciousness in modern China is closely linked to the issue of comparative national culture. Both nationalists and traditionalists in art history have identified themselves in the context of the historical contrast between China and the West. In response to the relationship between Chinese and Western art, the traditionalists argued from a holistic perspective and slowly established the theory of the two sources of art and culture, East and West, and began to rethink the traditional characteristics of Chinese art in a global context. In addition to this, the discovery and summing up of folk art traditions is clearly a crucial achievement in modern Chinese history. While modern art history has become increasingly sophisticated and mature in its study of China's localisation, Chinese art history is still developing at a rapid pace in the face of persistence and change.

Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of the foremost essayists in modern China, produced many exquisite Chinese translations of ancient Greek mythology and literature, as well as numerous essays on various aspects of ancient Greek culture. Making use of this rich body of work hitherto rarely explored, this essay addresses the following questions: what uses does a culture such as China, which has been essentially non-mythological in its long tradition, make of Greek mythology? What relevance does Greek mythology have at the two critical moments in modern Chinese history that Zhou lived through, i.e. the May-Fourth movement and its aftermath, and the post-1949 era up to the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’? I approach these questions from two interrelated points of view: myth and knowledge and myth and literature. I argue that Zhou’s uses of Greek mythology formed an integral part of a cultural project aimed at defending free thought, which, as Zhou perceptively foresaw, was to be destroyed at the hands of self-claimed “progressive” intellectuals. This reassessment of Zhou’s thought via his life-long work in Greek mythology not only offers a better understanding of his aesthetics and cultural criticism, but also opens up a new perspective to the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern Chinese intellectual history.

Introduction to the Special Issue for Cultures of Knowledge in the History of Chinese Medicine

We propose a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, where our specific moment conditions, where our specific moment conditions ensure that the GMM estimator is asymptotically at least as efficient as ordinary least squares (OLS) and whatever competing weighted least squares (WLS) we wish to consider. With a popular exponential model of heteroskedasticity, our new GMM estimator performs significantly better than OLS or WLS. In an empirical application to a financial wealth equation, we show that the efficiency gains can be nontrivial with real data.

Studying on the history of diseases has become a popular topic in the past years. In the general study on the Chinese medical history across the Strait, the history of diseases is no longer a subject out of favor or one that intimidates historians. Instead, scholars turn to scrutinize the Chinese history of diseases from various viewpoints and try to define how each of the diseases represents a diverse role in certain historical situations. Modern China represent a special era in that Chinese culture converges with the western cultures and that many traditional diseases and medical knowledge pedigrees are redefined with new meanings. This arouses interests of some scholars who have published magnificent research results. This essay purposes to examine the overall researches on the history of diseases across the Strait, including books and essays, expose the specialty of China culture in the modern China, and discuss the issues to be concerned during this period. By reviewing the existing researches, this essay is to find out what subject is worth exploration or unresolved in the field of History of Diseases in Modern China. Personal comments are also put forth in the hope of making contributions to this field.

This study examines the endogeneity effect on autoregressive linear models of AR (1) in small samples, making use of the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimator, Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimator, and Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) estimator, based on the sensitivity analysis of sample size and specification errors in estimator determination in linear regression model through the use of Monte Carlo simulation and application to real-life data. The simulation indicates that 2SLS and GMM estimators show the smallest biases when the sample size is varied from n = 10, 25, 50 to 100. The estimator that performs best when sample size n = 10 across autocorrelation (ρ) and significant correlation (α) at all levels of replication of 10,000 is GMM. In the real-life data, OLS and 2SLS exhibit higher endogeneity characteristics from the dataset used. The empirical analysis base on MSE criteria GMM is the best estimator for dealing with external shock factors to inflations embedded with endogeneity in the linear model. When endogeneity and autocorrelation are bedeviled in a linear AR (1) model, in small samples, using the GMM estimator will provide the best results in small samples than using 2SLS and OLS.

Climate change not only affects weather conditions, patterns, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events but also changes the structure of government spending. Agriculture is an important sector of the European Union (EU). However, by 2050, the industry will most likely decrease by 16%. One-third of the EU’s budget has been spent on agricultural funding, adaptation, and climate action. The effect of climate change on agriculture is mixed and dependent on the location of the region. The southern EU is adversely affected, while the northern EU is positively affected by the changes in weather patterns. The main goal of this paper is to gain insight regarding the effect climate change has on public spending in relation to the agricultural sector of the EU, using the pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) methodology. The study concludes that public spending is influenced by government expenditure and government support in agricultural research and development in the EU region. In the southern EU region, the variables impacting public spending are greenhouse gases from the agricultural sector, temperature, and GDP, while in the northern region, no variable has a significant impact on public spending proxied by agricultural subsidies. The policy recommendations include a better allocation of agricultural subsidies, reconsideration of the efficiency of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and a focus on expanding investment in research and development in the agricultural sector.

Reviews 209 Hard-pressed and facing increasingly difficult choices, die state opted for projects and regions where, from its larger perspective, investment promised the greatest and quickest rewards, even to die point of discouraging and foiling local efforts that might have ameliorated or solved local problems. This is a richly nuanced book that deserves close attention. Its author appreciates analytical models about China's economic and political character and evolution and dieir strengths and weaknesses, but he does not leave diem sacrosanct. How Pomeranz' unravelings will find dieir way into broader surveys ofmodern Chinese history will be the real test. Edward J. Lazzerini University ofNew Orleans David Pong. Shen Pao-chen and China's Modernization in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xviii, 395 pp. Hardcover $54.95. Samuel C. Chu and Kwang-Ching Liu, editors. Li Hung-chang and China's Early Modernization. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. xi, 308 pp. Hardcover $49.95. Paperback $22.50. Much of the contents of these two books will be known to those who keep up with scholarship on the late Qing, but both are nevertheless welcome contributions . David Pong has published over some years a long list ofhigh-quality articles on Shen Baozhen and odier related matters in nineteenth-century history; now it is good to have his full-lengdi treatment ofShen's career. Most ofthe Li book has already appeared, some ofit as a series ofarticles in Chinese Studies in History (CSH) (1990-1991); two articles are new (by Richard J. Smith and Thomas L. Kennedy), and die volume also includes two older articles by K. C. Liu, one from the Harvard Journal ofAsiatic Studies (1970) and one from the 1967 book Approaches to Modern Chinese History. The four articles that were not in CSHadd substantially to the volume's weight. Indeed, it is time to begin thinking ofPro-© 1995 h ? ' tv fessor Liu's articles as classics; Sam Chu was wise to suggest including them. ofHawai'i PressThe two books complement and reinforce each other, and not onlybecause David Pong is also a contributor to the Li anthology and deals widi die relationship between Li and Shen. Professor Pong is careful to point out that there were 210 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 differences as well as similarities between the lives and careers of the two men, but his emphasis rightly falls on the parallels and how die two tried to work together to further their many common modernization aims. The two books thus point to the efforts of two highly talented and farsighted men to promote China's "selfstrengthening " and to die many obstacles that blocked tiieir path. Both books want their protagonists to get their due, and while much is claimed for both Li and Shen their failures are not ignored; still, it is clear that Professor Pong wants Shen to be given more recognition as an important and creative reformer than he has received heretofore, and tìiat professors Liu and Chu want to have existing evaluations of Li revised upward. In a rather brief introductory essay, for example, Professor Liu views Li in the broad historical context of statecraft and finds diat he put into practice what Wei Yuan had sketched decades earlier, concluding that Li pioneered not only in military self-strengthening but also in state building and general economic development : "scholars have yet to do justice" to Li's efforts in these areas, he claims (p. 9). The general conclusion to this chapter is the following: "There were enough cases of comparative success in the record of China's late-nineteenth-century modernization to justify their being considered as precursors ofthe considerable economic development in the China of die early twentieth century __ Research on Li's role in the statecraft and reform of die late Ch'ing [Qing] period has barely begun." Professor Chu, in a lengthier concluding assessment, also suggests tìiat Li has been judged too harshly. In this chapter the evidence is weighed judiciously and widi a palpably strenuous effort to be candid and fair. Every wart is put under the microscope, from allegations of corruption and...

Modern China was an intense period of “body rebuilding.” Within the field of body history in China, the modern Chinese history has been rediscovered and reinterpreted from the view of “body.” In this paper, the author attempts to explore the movement of women’s haircutting in modern China and analyzes its social and political meaning from the view of body organ, gender, politics and culture. The conclusion is that the women’s haircutting movement in modern China was involved in the pursuit of state power, women’s rights, and political power in different levels.

Reviewed by: Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu Daniel Asen Linh D. Vu. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Hardcover ($49.95) or e-book. In Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China, Linh D. Vu examines the questions of “how and why a nation cares about its dead” (2) for a period of Chinese history stretching from the founding of the Republic to the Nanjing Decade, Second Sino-Japanese War, and Chinese Civil War. Vu’s approach is wide-ranging: readers will learn about the narratives and textual genres through which successive early twentieth-century Chinese regimes elevated political martyrs and constructed narratives of national history, the ways in which the state attempted to influence death ritual in order to claim political authority, and the bureaucratic regulations and procedures through which relatives of the war dead were compensated amid expanding domestic military conflict. This book is meant for a wide readership in modern Chinese history. It contains material that will be of interest to those who work in political and military history, social history, and cultural history. Vu’s attention to the details of compensation regulations and the process through which relatives of the dead sought benefits might also be of interest to those who study Republican civil law, given that these issues were so often related to how familial relations were defined in law and social practice. Notably, Vu is attentive to the societal and cultural impacts of wartime mass death and its commemoration in other historical contexts, such as in the United States during the American Civil War and in Europe after the First World War. This attention to the global history of death commemoration—as well as the book’s use of “necrocitizenry” and “necropolitics” as framing concepts, discussed below—suggests the possibility that scholars who work on similar issues in other times and places will find in Vu’s study a useful comparative case. Chapter 1 examines how the anti-Qing Yellow Flower Hill uprising of April 1911 was commemorated under the Nanjing Provisional Government, the regime of Yuan Shikai, and the Nationalist state of the early 1920s. Vu shows that these regimes’ efforts to claim legitimacy by commemorating anti-Qing revolutionaries imbued this uprising with new meanings as a symbol of national identity and unity, Confucian virtue, and partyled revolutionary martyrdom. Chapter 2 turns to the Nanjing Decade and the Nationalist state’s efforts to commemorate and lay claim to a broad range of “martyrs,” including anti-Qing reformers and revolutionaries, Nationalist military personnel who died fighting the forces of the Chinese Communist Party or Japan, and even bureaucrats who died of “overexertion.” The Nationalist government used the memory of these revered figures to augment the narrative of its own indispensable role in China’s recent history and to assert its political legitimacy as the inheritor of the Republic. Chapter 3 examines how relatives of those who were recognized as martyrs interacted with the bureaucracy that provided death benefits in the form of stipends, tuition [End Page E-12] assistance, and burial assistance. Vu shows that in practice this compensation system involved inconsistent regulations, a poorly defined financial base (which relied on local governments’ willingness to follow national compensation policies), and discontent among families who did not receive the benefits for which they petitioned. In chapter 4, Vu examines how widows and other female relatives of martyrs petitioned for compensation, the gendered subject-positions that they claimed for themselves in doing so, and the somewhat ambivalent forms of agency that these interactions with the state involved. Vu argues that, while such women were active agents in engaging the state’s compensation system, their petitioning strategies tended to invoke and thus reinforce “traditional wifely virtues of sacrifice and perseverance” (118). Similar tropes were also deployed in the commemoration of women who died while fighting or resisting the enemy. Chapter 5 examines how the prospect of “mass martyrization” (156) during the Second Sino-Japanese War led to ever-finer compensation regulations and procedures, expanded efforts to collect martyrs’ stories and compile...

This study investigates the relationship between net profit after tax and total assets, total equities, total turnover, current assets and current liabilities. Unbalanced panel Data of 49 Companies from 5 industries listed in Dhaka Stock Exchanges from 2010-2019 were collected from the website of that companies. Ordinary Least Square (OLS), Pooled Ordinary Least Square (POLS), Driscoll-Kraay (DK), Second Stage Least square (2SLS), Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) models are used in this study. This research found that total assets (TA) had significant positive relationship with net profit after tax (NPAT) in all models except POLS and GMM models, total turnover (TT) had significant positive relationship with net profit after tax in all models and current assets (CA) had significant negative relationship with net profit after tax in OLS and 2SLS model in food and allied sector. In Fuel and power sector, it is found that NPAT and TA had significant negative relationship in all models except GMM. In this sector, TE, TT, CA had significant positive relationship in different models but CL had insignificant relationship. In Pharmaceuticals and Chemical industry and Engineering sector, TE, TT, CA and CL had significant positive relationship in different models but in textile industry there is no significant relationship among these variables though the overall model is significant at 10% level.

This study investigates the impact of democracy indices on the literacy rate. Panel Data of 134 Countries from 2007-2018 were collected from the website the World Bank and Gapminder. This study uses Ordinary Least Square (OLS), Pooled Ordinary Least Square (POLS), Driscoll-Kraay (DK), Second Stage Least Square (2SLS), Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) methods. This research has found that political participation index and political culture index has a significant positive relationship with literacy rate in all the method. The functioning of the government index has a significant positive relationship and electoral process and the pluralism index has a significant negative relationship with literacy rate in all the methods except the GMM method. The civil liberties index has a significant negative relationship with literacy rate in POLS and in the other models, there is no significant relationship between the civil liberties index and literacy rate.

The small sample performance of system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and an alternative Transformed Maximum Likelihood (TML) estimator in Monte Carlo simulations is investigated, implementing a data generating process that tracks important features inherent in dynamic panels used in finance & growth regressions. It is allowed for weak exogeneity of the additional control variable and violations of initial mean stationarity. System GMM estimators tend to be biased towards Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates when either the variance of the unobserved heterogeneity is large compared to the variance of the idiosyncratic error term or when initial mean stationarity is violated. Collapsing the instruments matrix tends to improve on mean bias and root mean squared error (rmse), reducing the overall instrument count. TML coefficients are generally downward biased but robust to initial mean stationarity violations and more reliable in estimating the lagged dependent variable. Results from an application to the finance & growth literature suggest that a positive and monotonic relationship might well be an artifact of an upward bias of system GMM towards OLS estimates. An inverse U-shaped relationship is also not statistically robust.

In the current literature, fiscal policy is usually characterized by a single-equation rule, in which primary surplus is generally defined as a function of lagged government debt and other controlled variables. To apply Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method on the single-equation rule has been one of the common approaches to identify fiscal policy behavior. From the rational expectations general equilibrium perspective, this paper illustrates that lagged government debt is generally endogenous and the OLS approach suffers from simultaneity bias. Consequently, the OLS-based identification of fiscal policy behavior is unreliable. As a solution, we apply the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) for estimation and inference. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that GMM provides more reliable results than OLS in terms of accuracy of the estimator, size and power. In short, people should be cautious of the existing OLS-based identification results of fiscal policy behavior and the empirical researchers should not consider OLS regression as a reliable tool when trying to identify fiscal policy behavior in the future.