The New Labor Contract Law in 2008: China's Legal Absorption of Labor Unrest

Since labor protests in China are not directed at the post-socialist party-state but only directed at individual enterprise on a case-by-case basis, the Chinese party-state has articulated a response what can be called "legal absorption of labor conflict" by setting up new labor legislations more congruence with the interests of labor. The aim is to improve the wage and other compensation for individual workers without at the same time leading to the rise of working class at a collective level to form a class-wise organization or to engage in a collective social movement. However, previous labor laws set up before 2008 have failed to stop the abuses of business on the Chinese workers. In this respect, many researchers have labeled the 2008 Labor Contract Law as the most significant piece of Chinese labor legislation passed in recent years. The aim of this paper is to examine the distinctive features, the historical process of the making, and the impact of the Labor Contract Law at the turn of the 21st century. In the conclusion, this paper will discuss the implications of the Labor Contract Law for meeting the challenge of labor unrest in China

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

"One Country, Two Systems" and Hong Kong-China National Integration: A Crisis-Transformation Perspective

This paper examines the historical process of Hong Kong-China national unification through a crisis-transformation framework. This paper argues that the Chinese unification process between Hong Kong and mainland China is not a smooth process. Instead, it has gone through at least four crises during the 1980s and the 1990s. The institution framework for unification-the so-called oOne Country, Two Systemso policy-emerged out of the first crisis of negotiation in the early 1980s, and this policy has been hotly contested and transformed during the various crises over the past three decades. Previous studies on Hong Kong-China unification tends to focus solely on the political and legal aspects. However, this paper shows that unification needs to be symmetrical on all aspects (legal, political, economic and socio-cultural) in order to make it work