Between Power Politics and International Economic Law: Asian Regionalism, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and U.S.-China Trade Relations

This Article examines the interactions of power politics and international economic law in the development of regionalism in Asia, particularly in the context of United States-China trade relations. It argues that the process of regional economic integration in Asia has been slow-moving because of the politicization of regionalism by power rivalries. China’s initial regional integration initiatives apparently ignored the United States, a superpower which has always been a major player in Asia and an indispensable part of the region’s economic process. The United States-led Trans-Pacific Partnership was allegedly designed to exclude China, Asia’s largest economy. On the other hand, the Trans-Pacific Partnership also spurred the effects of competitive liberalization, pushing China to deepen its economic reform domestically and engage its trading partners on friendlier terms at regional and international levels. The demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not amount to the death of its cutting-edge rules. Those rules have laid a solid foundation for developing high-standard template agreements for Free Trade Agreements of the next generation, and many of them are likely to be incorporated into an upgraded multilateral trading system. United States’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership offers a golden opportunity for Asian countries to establish a real Pan-Asia free trade area through the negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, but in the long run, regional integration in Asia should look beyond Asia and include the economies of the American side of the Pacific for both economic and strategic reasons. The Article concludes with a few suggestions

Dancing with Wolves: Regulation and De-regulation of Foreign Investment in China\u27s Stock Market

China’s stock market is the world’s youngest one and the fastest-growing one as well. During the past decade, it has been developed with a variety of unique features, most of which are inconsistent with the concept of a viable market economy. China’s dualist regulatory regime has different sets of rules for domestic participants and foreign investors. For a long period, foreign investment in the stock market was subject to severe restrictions and effectively excluded from all market activities except in the B shares market. Fundamental changes, however, have occurred following China’s accession to the WTO, especially in the last two years. Now qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) are allowed participate in the market, as are foreign firms that wish to acquire Chinese enterprises including listed SOEs. This article, after introducing China’s existing legal rules on foreign participation in the stock market, analyzes the major legal and corporate governance obstacles facing foreign investors. It concludes that, in order to achieve the ambition to make its stock market one of the most successful in the world and to meet its WTO obligations, China needs to substantially improve its regulatory and legal framework and adjust to different regulatory philosophies, including rethinking the role of foreign investors, redefining the role and functions of government with a view to providing institutions supporting the market, and creating real good corporate governance for listed companies. To achieve this, the key is to accelerate privatization, which has picked up speed in 2003

2D Be3B2C3\rm\bf {Be_{3}B_{2}C_{3}}:a stable direct-bandgap semiconductor with record-breaking carrier mobility, 8.1×105cm2V−1s−1\rm\bf 8.1 \times 10^{5} cm^{2}V^{-1}s^{-1}

The Moore's law in the semiconducting industry has faltered as the three-dimensional (3D) Si-based transistors has approached their physical limit with the downscaling. The carrier mobility $\rm \mu$, critical to the device's performance, will be degraded when the thickness of Si is scaled into several nanometers. In contrast to the bulk counterpart, two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors can be scaled into atomic-layer thickness without dangling bonds, maintaining its intrinsic carrier mobility and going beyond the limits of Si-based electronics. Hence, the development of novel 2D semiconducting materials with high carrier mobility is the market demand as well as the scientific challenge. Here, we successfully designed 2D $\rm {Be_{3}B_{2}C_{3}}$ with planar hypercoordinate motif. It possesses the perfect planar skeleton with both pentacoordinate carbon and hexacoordinate boron moieties, which is the first reported material with such multi-hypercoordinate centers. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations prove that the $\rm {Be_{3}B_{2}C_{3}}$ monolayer has excellent structural and thermal stabilities as well as mechanical properties. Further investigations reveal that the $\rm {Be_{3}B_{2}C_{3}}$ monolayer has a strong ultrahigh Fermi velocity ($\rm 2.7 \times 10^{5} m/s$), suitable direct bandgap (1.97 eV), and high optical absorption coefficient ($\rm 10^{5}$). As a result, an unprecedented ultrahigh room-temperature carrier mobility ($\rm 8.1 \times 10^{5} cm^{2}V^{-1}s^{-1}$) with strong anisotropy is discovered, making $\rm {Be_{3}B_{2}C_{3}}$ monolayer a revolutionary candidate for future electronic and photovoltaic applications.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

New hanger design approach of tied-arch bridge to enhance its robustness

As the crucial components among the tied-arch bridge, the local failure of hangers may trigger a progressive collapse through the entire tied-arch bridge. However, the current design guidance as regards hangers still lacks consideration of structure robustness under an extreme hazard. To improve the structural robustness of tied-arch bridge under extreme conditions, a new hanger design method is proposed, which is termed as asymmetric parallel double-hanger system. Based on Miner’s linear cumulative damage law, an analysis on the fatigue life of the double-hanger system was conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposal, and then a dynamic time-history analysis was employed to simulate the transitory fracture impact due to one or more hangers fracturing. According to the simulation results, the structural robustness is greatly enhanced with asymmetric parallel-double hanger system design, when compared with single hanger system design. When one or more hangers reveal local damage, it will not trigger a progress failure to the whole structure in particular. Several practical suggestions of bridge system’s load-carrying capacity are also put forward for the future arch bridge design at the end of this paper. © 2018 Korean Society of Civil Engineer

Fault diagnosis of refrigerant charge based on PCA and decision tree for variable refrigerant flow systems

Variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems are easily subjected to performance degradation due to refrigerant leakage, mechanical failure or improper maintenance after years of operation. Ideal VRF systems should equip with fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) program to sustain its normal operation. This paper presents the fault diagnosis method for refrigerant charge faults of variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems. It is developed based on the principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction method and the decision tree (DT) classification algorithm. Nine refrigerant charge schemes are implemented on the VRF system in the laboratory, which contain the normal and faulty refrigerant charge conditions. In addition, data of the online operating VRF systems are collected in this work. Firstly, data from both experimental VRF system and online operating systems are pre-processed by outlier cleaning, feature extraction and data normalization, because the original data of the VRF system usually has poor quality and complex structure. Secondly, the fault diagnosis model based on the PCA-DT method is built using the data of the experimental VRF system. In this step, the PCA method is used to obtain a new data sample which includes four comprehensive features, then the new data sample are randomly split into training and testing sets as the input of DT classifier for fault diagnosis. Thirdly, the advantages of the PCA-DT method is validated using the experimental data of different fault severity levels. Results show that the combined use of PCA and DT methods can achieve better fault diagnosis efficiency than the single decision tree method. Further, the robustness of the PCA-DT method in online fault diagnosis is verified using the data from online VRF systems. The online VRF systems have the same or different number of indoor units as the trained (experimental) VRF system. The PCA-DT method also shows desirable goodness on the online fault diagnosis process. In this sense, this work provides a promising fault diagnosis strategy for refrigerant charge faults of VRF system application

An Advanced Multicarrier Residential Energy Hub System Based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming

This work proposes a multicarrier energy hub system with the objective of minimizing the economy cost and the CO2 emissions of a residential building without sacrificing the household comfort and increasing the exploitation of renewable energy in daily life. The energy hub combines the electrical grid and natural gas network, a gas boiler, a heat pump, a photovoltaic plant, and a photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) system. In addition, to increase the overall performance of the system, a battery-based energy storage system is integrated. To evaluate the optimal capacity of each energy hub component, an optimization scheduling process and the optimization problem have been solved with the YALMIP platform in the MATLAB environment. The result showed that this advanced system not only can decrease the economic cost and CO2 emissions but also reduce the impact to electrical grid

Atomic-Scale Tracking Phase Transition Dynamics of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Polar Vortex-Antivortex

Particle-like topologies, such as vortex-antivortex (V-AV) pairs, have garnered significant attention in the field of condensed matter. However, the detailed phase transition dynamics of V-AV pairs, as exemplified by self-annihilation, motion, and dissociation, have yet to be verified in real space due to the lack of suitable experimental techniques. Here, we employ polar V-AV pairs as a model system and track their transition pathways at atomic resolution with the aid of in situ (scanning) transmission electron microscopy and phase field simulations. We demonstrate the absence of a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition between the room-temperature quasi-long-range ordered ground phase and the high-temperature disordered phase. Instead, we observe polarization suppression in bound V-AV pairs as the temperature increases. Furthermore, electric fields can promote the vortex and antivortex to approach each other and annihilate near the interface. The elucidated intermediate dynamic behaviors of polar V-AV pairs under thermal- and electrical-fields lay the foundation for their potential applications in electronic devices. Moreover, the dynamic behaviors revealed at atomic scale provide us new insights into understanding topological phase of matter and their topological phase transitions.Comment: 19 pages and 4 figure