World Factory Research Articles

Between Representation and Reality: Zhao Chuan’s World Factory as Social Theatre

ABSTRACT Zhao Chuan’s play World Factory continuously introduces reality into the theatre by resorting to the creative techniques of documentary theatre, epic theatre, and theatre of the oppressed in left-wing theatre, thus constituting a blurred boundary between the reality and the representation, and also forming a mode of discussion of social issues in theatre. The tension between reality and representation allows Zhao Chuan’s theatrical production to be understood not only as aesthetic theatre but also as social theatre. With the help of sociological methods, Zhao Chuan’s social theatre creates a “theatrical public sphere,” and the reality of this sphere constitutes a Habermasian place of prudent and equal public opinion. At the same time, the representation of the theatrical public sphere creates the emotional space of physical presence. It imaginatively constructs another reality, and its representation quality can avoid the direct criticism of the reality, which makes the relatively free public sphere speech possible.

Overtime work and Chinese workers' physical and mental health: The mediating role of social support and work value awareness.

China was once called the world's factory. Chinese workers had long weekly working hours. However, the empirical results of the relationship between overtime work and workers' health are mixed and remain inconclusive. This study aimed to investigate how overtime work influenced workers' physical and mental health and the role of lifestyles, social support, and work value awareness. Data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey 2016 (N = 14,205) was used. The instrumental variable approach was employed to overcome the endogeneity problem between overtime work and workers' health. The bootstrapping method was conducted to elicit the role of lifestyles, social support, and work value awareness. The results indicated that overtime work significantly and negatively influenced Chinese workers' physical and mental health. The results of the bootstrapping suggested that workers' social support and work value awareness partially mediated the relationship between overtime work and their physical and mental health. However, the mediating role of lifestyles was insignificant. Through using big data with national representativeness, this study suggests that overtime work negatively influences Chinese workers' physical and mental health. Our findings provide policy implications for improving workers' health rights and well-being in emerging economies.

A critique of political economy: misgovernance equifinality to green economy transformability

An inquiry into misgovernance in globalization vs. anti-globalization aims to understand why the ‘world factory’ has a relative lower world pricing impact and animates in the history of ‘ecological transformation’ theory for world economy growth in green economy transitions from old-industrial to advanced-industrial regime during 1980–2019. This analysis reveals that oil price in a weaker US dollar value unexpectedly decreases world food prices but in the manner of depending upon an increase in real exchange rates on the US dollar values relative to the Euro and RMB as the base terms of trade, so that further forces the China producer price to undertake a higher production cost and lets EU members undertake a higher inflation rate. A critique on that is to clearly understand that the counter-acting effects of external uncertainty in world growth are against each initial domestic plan for green transformability and forces all world trade partners to cooperate against the expected loss of the weakened US dollar values. These necessary but reluctantly complementary cooperations are highly likely to make each sovereign money value towards a similar misgovernance equifinality undertake the cost burden of contractionary depreciation in the US dollar values. Hence a possible solution is to cooperate to lower the costs of world growth, particularly to assist the world factory to work against a further world loss caused by the weaker US dollar values in order to strengthen globalization in next period.

Analysis and Enlightenment of the Reasons for Why China Can Get Rid of the Poverty Trap

In 2020, China successfully won the Tough Battle Against Poverty, and eliminated all absolute poverty in the society. China becomes the first developing country that completes the poverty reduction goal of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and makes great contributions to the world poverty reduction. Most importantly, China escaped the Poverty Trap. According to the comparison between China and other countries that fall into the Poverty Trap, it is found that the environment for technological development, the potential economic growth, and the role of becoming the fourth "world factory" and the fourth international industrial transfer are all one of the factors that China can get out of the Poverty Trap. These factors ensure that Chinese economy can grow rapidly and also explain why China can avoid the Poverty Trap. Therefore, China should continue to vigorously develop its economy and technology to prevent poor households from returning to poverty and eliminate relatively poor populations.

Consuming China in Early Modern England and Beyond: A Survey and Reexamination

Abstract If we traveled back in time to the first half of the eighteenth century, we might notice that the cargo aboard an East Indiaman was rather diversified. But of these different products from different countries, a sizable number of them were manufactured in and originated from China. Why was China, alone among many other countries, able to secure its place as a world factory at the time? In this paper, I will suggest that we could not possibly understand how tea and porcelain became synonyms for China without tracing their histories back to the early modern world. We would not be able to deepen our understanding of Anglo-Chinese relations without taking into consideration the flow and circulations of goods between the two powers. My purpose here, therefore, is to outline these very connections throughout the early modern era, roughly from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, based on the fascinating studies conducted by pioneering historians in the field over the past few decades. If we follow the life histories of some of the Chinese commodities, can we determine the ways in which those imported items interacted with the European market in general and the British in particular? Other than treating these commodities as marketable goods, are there any other intellectual perspectives available to help us better comprehend their associations with the early modern world?

Centralized Regime Gaining Information Capacity: Can China Approach Innovation Frontiers?

ABSTRACT Why does the Chinese government have unsatisfactory policy performance in frontier innovation compared to its extraordinary achievements in the world factory model? Since the perspective of political system cannot provide an effective explanation, this article looks at this phenomenon from the viewpoint of information capacity. This article argues, the Chinese state has insufficient information capacity to promote frontier innovation—it has not developed an effective system to seize enough information through industrial practice to forge policies for frontier innovation. With the market-oriented reforms, the Chinese government has abandoned a top-down administrative coordinative system to organize science and technology (S&T) activities, and employed more market-oriented innovation policies. This article quantitatively assesses three main types of innovation policies, showing that the Chinese government has not achieved its expected goals of promoting frontier innovation. Interviews and long-term observations prove that the Chinese government lacks professional and penetrating capacities to seize and interpret information through industrial practice, and to effectively formulate and implement innovation policies—especially those aiming at frontier technologies with more complex information. This article sheds light on the relationship between the state and the market in the new era and state capacity building for technology and industrial policies.

Challenges, Opportunities and Future Paths: Environmental Governance of Big Data Initiatives in China

Environmental governance is a common task confronting human society in the 21st century. In recent years, China’s environmental crisis has been alleviated to some extent by the Chinese government’s vigorous regulation. However, as the world factory, China’s total greenhouse gas emissions have ranked first in the world for many years, and China still faces a very huge environmental protection pressure. The degree of informationization of China’s environmental governance must be improved, with particular emphasis on the collection and use of environmental big data to help transform, upgrade, and improve the efficiency of China’s environmental governance. The Chinese government obviously recognizes this and keeps promulgating policy documents related to environmental big data, and there are certain achievements in practice, but it is still in the primary stage of figuring out in general with many imperfections existing. The United States and other countries have more mature experience in the collection and application of environmental big data, which can be an important reference for China. Establishing organizational structures to support the development of environmental big data, striving to form a team of professionals with interdisciplinary knowledge, strengthening relevant legislation for environmental big data, and utilizing international environmental cooperation mechanisms to conduct international cooperation on environmental big data are the areas that China needs to focus on most in the process of improving the collection and use of environmental big data in the future.

Digital Free Trade Zone in Facilitating Small Medium Enterprises for Globalisation: A Perspective from Malaysia Small and Medium Enterprises

The establishment of Digital Free Trade Zone (DFTZ) in Malaysia is closely related to the Chinese e-commerce giant. It was an initiative to spearhead Malaysia’s national e-Commerce strategic roadmap and empowering Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to do cross-border commerce seamlessly. As such, this study aims to understand the perception of Malaysia SMEs towards DFTZ initiative and identify the hidden trepidation of Malaysia’s SMEs towards the e-commerce platforms via focus group interview as per Grounded Theory procedures. The findings reveal that about 40% of the interviewees are pessimistic about DFTZ and did not comprehend the potential benefit beyond it. Meanwhile, apart from incompatible cost structure and digital infrastructure development, lack of technical support knowledge and digital talent in innovative marketing strategies are among the main reasons the interviewees hesitate to move towards e-commerce platforms. Therefore, the authorities are urged to take several measures such as providing significant incentives for SMEs to upskilling their workforce, nurturing technology talent and ensuring the development of digital infrastructure to eliminate the trepidation that Malaysia SMEs currently faced. Be realistic and pragmatic when reviewing the capabilities of SMEs against the world factory is utmost important in helping SME to go global and remain competitive.

Robotization and labour demand in post-pandemic era: Microeconomic evidence from China

We study how robotization, namely the “machine substitution” policy, impacts firms' labour demand in the post pandemic era. Using a unique firm-level data set of online job postings in Dongguan, known as “The World Factory” in China, we find that “machine substitution” policy fosters the funded firms to expand their labour demand. The expansion is mainly driven by the growing demand for manufacturing workers, which offsets the reduced demand for service workers. Also, the expansion can be attributed to an increase in the number of employees listed in job postings rather than an increase in position types. Further analysis suggests that this positive impact is mainly attributable to the productivity effect rather than the restatement effect. Furthermore, there is no evidence of heterogeneity by sector or firm size but the effect of the policy varies by regional epidemic severity. Our results not only reveal the labour demand in the Covid-19 but also provide prominent implications for occupational security and steady economic growth.

Ensuring construction material provenance using Internet of Things and blockchain: Learning from the food industry

Ensuring material provenance is widely considered a promising solution to the persistent issues related to material fraudulence in the construction industry. However, current strategies of managing construction logistics and supply chain perplex provenance tracing and tracking by adding too many intermediaries and using low technologies. By learning from the food industry which shares similar complexity, prolonged supply chain, and numerous stakeholders, this research aims to develop a framework deployable for material provenance tracing and tracking in the construction industry. It does so by mixing the uses of (a) cross-sectoral learning; (b) design science research; and (c) internet of things (IoT) and blockchain technology. The developed framework has four interconnected layers, namely the business layer with different stakeholders and activities, the IoT layer to collect the provenance footprints, the blockchain layer with a mainchain to store open provenance data and sidechains to store organizational private data, and the application layer to facilitate the management of quality, safety, payment, logistic and supply chain, and sustainability. The underpinning philosophy of the framework is to capture the IoT-driven provenance footprints and put them in custody in blockchain. The framework is further illustrated and refined by using a pilot construction project in Hong Kong, which was endeavored to track steel provenance from its adjacent Pearl River Delta, the so-called “World's Factory”. The framework shows enormous prospects, e.g., adopting digital twins, lifecycle traceability, improved efficiency, and transparent operations, meanwhile facing challenges, e.g., under-developed regulations, scalability issues, and information leakage risks, which all call for future research.

From “world factory” to technological superpower: is China ready for global leadership in innovation?

In recent years, China has been often touted as a "technological superpower" rather than the "world factory". The new concept implies the country's leadership in the field of new technologies and their significant role in its economy. At first glance, China's achievements in science and technology and growing exports of high-tech goods confirm this status. China's innovation potential has grown significantly in recent years — the country gets regularly ranked top 20-30 in both Chinese and international innovation rankings. Moreover, the analysis of indicators related to China's independence in innovations shows an even more confident leadership of the country — up to the top 5 countries of the world. At the same time, a quantitative assessment of factor contributions to economic growth shows that the contribution of new technology to GDP growth from 2000 to 2019 was 8-10%, while for the most part, growth was driven by traditional industries. Nevertheless, China's growth can no longer be called extensive in recent years, and the state's efforts to switch to high-tech drivers through large-scale programs, such as the construction of "new infrastructure," only bring China closer to the status of a "technological superpower". Although China cannot yet be called technologically independent, trends in recent years suggest that China may well reach the status of a world technological leader even before its GDP, measured in current exchange rates, exceeds that of the United States. Acknowledgements: The author expresses his gratitude to V.A. Melyantsev, Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University, for his support in preparing this paper.

Construction of China’s automobile financial market network and its sustainability evaluation

“Made in China” has spread all over the world, and China has the status of “world factory”. However, the weak ability of independent innovation has affected the sustainable development of China’s manufacturing industry. The industrial revolution with digital and intelligent manufacturing as the core is coming. In the future, our development is not fast, and the key is how to be sustainable and healthy. The development of zero carbon vehicles such as intelligent transportation and electric vehicles is one of the highlands of technological competition in the transportation field, and it is also the core measure to achieve carbon peak and carbon neutralization. Identifying important firms in the automobile industry has always been a topical issue. This study used the transaction data of listed companies in China’s automobile manufacturing industry to build a complex network based on the quantitative data of enterprise development status using network modeling and the multi-attribute decision evaluation method. The relationship between the network structure of the financial market and the multi-index sustainability evaluation of enterprises were also studied. By extracting the financial information of environmental protection investment from the social responsibility reports of listed companies and analyzing the current status of target investment in the automobile manufacturing industry, the research shows that the current environmental protection investment in the automobile manufacturing industry is not strong and the government needs to increase supervision. The finding reveals three dynamic relationships for practical impact. The empirical result verifies that our method is effective and reliable. This approach can effectively overcome the effect of subjective factors on evaluation and provide sustainable evaluation strategy suggestions for investors in the automobile manufacturing industry.

A wider‐aperture lens for global strategic management: The multinational enterprise in a bifurcated global economy

Research SummaryThe growth of China and President Xi's policies have transformed the global economy in ways that global strategy and international business (IB) scholars have yet to reflect fully in their research. The global economy is increasingly bifurcated between a China‐centered authoritarian system and a market‐oriented democratic system, generating complications and perils largely unknown since the end of the Cold War. The global business environment now bears faint resemblance to existing models in IB. To properly analyze the new reality, global strategy and IB scholars need to adopt a wider‐aperture, systems‐theoretic view that will require the cross‐fertilization of ideas and collaboration with other disciplines such as international political economy. This engagement will allow the development of more broadly based frameworks, theories, and models that can assist decision makers in the private and public sectors.Managerial SummaryStrategic rivalry between China and the West requires managers to face a new reckoning. China remains the world's factory, but it has a tenuous relationship to even‐handed rules of law, both domestically and internationally. China leverages access to its market and has aligned with other autocratic countries to reshape the world order. Many firms have straddled the divide and tried to play by two sets of rules. This is not viable longer term. The strategic decisions of Western firms, particularly those involved with advanced and, especially, dual‐use technologies, are consequential to the future of democracy. A systemic view of the long‐term health of the enterprise may reveal the need to choose. Choosing democracy means, at minimum, guarding intellectual property, enhancing organizational capabilities, coordinating with peers, and protecting national security.

How can net petroleum importers achieve risk aversion in a globalized world: a multi-regional input-output perspective.

Net embodied petroleum importers face greater petroleum security risks in international trade due to their high foreign dependence. Therefore, paying better attention to the national flows and drivers of embodied petroleum consumption can effectively serve net embodied petroleum importers to avoid petroleum security risks and formulate environmental protection policy. This study utilized the multi-regional input-output model to determine the top five embodied petroleum net importers (i.e., the USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, and France) under the economic globalization, and traced the flows of embodied petroleum consumption through international trade. Combined with the logarithmic mean Divisia index method, this study also deeply investigated the drivers of changes embodied petroleum in net imports. The results show that from the perspective of international trade, the USA was not only the largest importer but also the largest exporter of embodied petroleum. Among the trade flows of embodied petroleum, the largest trade flow was from China to the USA, which indicated that China was the world factory and the USA was the consumer power. The embodied petroleum trade markets of Germany, the UK, and France was mainly distributed in Europe & Eurasia resulted from European economic integration. The largest contributor to the decrease of embodied petroleum imports in the top 4 net importers was the petroleum intensity effect. Meanwhile, the import dependence effect was the largest contributor to the increase of France's embodied petroleum net imports. In order to further avoid the risk of petroleum security, it is an effective path worth exploring to construct the diversified petroleum product import strategy and improve energy efficiency.

Improvement of the “big but not strong” situation of manufacturing industry in China from the perspective of China-US comparison based on gravity model and sustainable livelihood framework

Compared with the United States, the “large but not strong” situation of China’s manufacturing industry is still prominent. The reasons are, in addition to the “two-end squeeze” of “re-industrialization” of developed countries and emerging economies relying on low-cost advantages to build new “world factories”, China’s development shows weak core competitiveness, few leading companies and brands, fragmented production chains, low labor productivity in manufacturing, weak technological innovation capabilities, internal disadvantages such as insufficient support for high-end factors required for manufacturing industry development and the need to optimize the business environment, which should arouse greater attention. Therefore, based on Gravity Model, Sustainable Livelihood Framework and Core Competitive theory were used to find the reason and solution, and there is still a long way to go to build a strong manufacturing country.

Evolution and Trend Analysis of Research Hotspots in the Field of Pollution-Intensive Industry Transfer—Based on Literature Quantitative Empirical Study of China as World Factory

Background: The transfer of pollution-intensive industries in China accounts for an increasing proportion of industrial transfer, and related studies emerge endlessly. Fully exploring its research and development breadth and depth will help clarify the development trend in this field and point out the direction for future research.Method/Process: From the perspective of bibliometric analysis, with keywords as the core and cluster analysis of research hotspots as the basis, the keywords of pollution-intensive industry transfer in CNKI database are analyzed by CiteSpace software and divided into five categories. Established the text corpus model, and the network analysis transformed into a visual form. Due to the diverse research hotspots in pollution-intensive industry transfer, this article analyzes the evolution of research hotspots in this field to predict its future development trend.Conclusion/Significance: China, as the world’s factory, is affected by relevant policies, and industrial transfers have generally occurred. Industrial transfer, especially the transfer of pollution-intensive industries, has gradually attracted the attention of academic circles and has become a hot topic. When dealing with the transfer of pollution-intensive industries, industrial transfer only transfers pollution across regions. If we want to reduce pollution from the origin, innovation is an essential means. In retrospect, there were rare articles concerning the emerging polluting industries, however, recently since the emerging polluting industries have already constituted as the main source of pollution, more academic attentions are definitely needed. Although the mainstream measurement methods, the related share index method, and the input-output table have their weaknesses, respectively, the deviation share method can overcome the shortcomings of both. Therefore, it can be used as a reference for scholars to measure the transfer of pollution-intensive industries in the future.

From World Factory to Global City-Region: The Dynamics of Manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta and Its Spatial Pattern in the 21st Century

Since the 21st century, the PRD has gradually been transforming from a world factory to a global city-region. Based on the manufacturing and urban economic data, this paper uses the upgrade (UPG) index of industrial structure, comparative advantage and economies of scale to evaluate the development level of manufacturing in the PRD from 2000 to 2019. Through geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR), this paper measures the impact of four types of components (R & D, service economy, production capability and foreign investment) on the development of manufacturing in different periods. The results show the disharmony between the scale, structure and quality of the manufacturing in different cities. The impact on the manufacturing from R & D has spatiotemporal differences; the impact of foreign investment on the west coast cities of PRD is stronger than that of the east coast cities with varied impact mechanisms. The impact of the service economy is strong in sub-core cities. The impact of production capability has a transmission effect from core cities to the sub-core cities, indicating the manufacturing subdivision of function within the region. By 2019, The PRD has gradually transformed into a dual-core structure and the two cores have differentiated development paths.

The Adjustment of China’s Foreign Investment Policy and Law - Lessons for Vietnam

In recent years, China's economy has made impressive leaps. The success of China is based on many factors, of which foreign investment is an important factor. Famous as the world's factory, China is a country with great potential to attract investment. In 2020, China was one of the five largest FDI recipients in the world. With reported inflows reaching an all-time high, China continued to be the second-largest FDI recipient after the United States [1]. FDI growth in China continued in 2020, with an increase of 6% to $149 billion, reflecting the country’s success in containing the pandemic and its rapid GDP recovery. The growth was driven by technology-related industries, e-commerce and research and development [2]. These results are due to the process of adjusting laws to be compatible with each stage of the country's development, which are experiences that Vietnam should learn from. In this article, I will clarify the changes in foreign investment policy and law that China has made over the years and propose lessons learned for Vietnam.

Heavy metal pollution risk of cultivated land from industrial production in China: Spatial pattern and its enlightenment

Industrial production is the main source of heavy metals for cultivated land in China as it has been the world's factory. However, owing to there being insufficient data and appropriate methods, it is difficult to rank the risk level and identify spatial patterns of heavy metal pollution in cultivated land. This study developed an innovative methodology for relative regional risk assessment based on the risk theory of source-pathway-receptor, and the heavy metal pollution risks of cultivated land were appraised on a national scale. The results showed that: (i) the cultivated land with high, medium, and low risk of heavy metal pollution accounted for 4.23%, 10.01%, and 4.53% in China; (ii) the heavy metal pollution risk level of cultivated land increased gradually from the northwest to the southeast of China, and the risk in the north was more serious than that in the south; (iii) the aggregated distribution areas of high-risk regions in China were the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, the Tianjin coastal area, the Sichuan-Chongqing economic zone, central-southern Hunan, central Hebei, and the Yellow River coast of Henan; and (iv) China's prevention and control policies effectively curbed heavy metal pollution in cultivated land, the pollution risks have declined significantly. It is suggested that different protection and control strategies should be upgraded and implemented according to different risk modes.

The International Spillover Effect of Import Trade on Energy Efficiency in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Evidence From China

China is in a transition period—its government has been expanding imports and pushing itself to shift from a world factory to a world market. One of the aims is to promote energy reform and ensure energy security. Taking the resource-based regions of China as objects, based on 2003–2017 panel data, this paper investigates energy efficiency loss by the stochastic frontier approach and the effects of different technical inefficiency items. Surprisingly, quantitative results show that 99.9% energy efficiency loss in these regions is caused by technical inefficiency (which had never been found and discussed in previous studies). However, this does not mean that China’s efforts to expand imports as a way to improve energy efficiency and energy security are undesirable. Instead, interestingly, it is import (−0.083***) rather than industrial structure (0.524***) that can significantly reduce energy efficiency loss. Then, it employs the counter-fact test to quantify the positive accelerating effect of human capital (average as high as 4.1%) as a key factor of absorptive capacity in the technology spillover. Lastly, it puts forward the corresponding policy suggestions in energy fields, to solve the problem effectively, especially the “comprehensive technology spreading center” and “innovative three-dimensional talent supplementary and flow mechanism.”