ODA FOR CHINA: SEED MONEY AND A WINDOW FOR CONTACTS

The Chinese economy has been growing with an average of 10 per cent during the last 25 years. Walking in downtown Shanghai or Beijing, you can find some spots that are so luxurious that they are unrivalled in the world. China does not fit the picture of an average developing country. However, China is still a large recipient of foreign aid. Figures from OECD show that in 2003 the People’s Republic of China received USD 1.3 billion but ODA (Official Development Assistance), only amounts to 0.1 percent of Chinese GNP. The Chinese economic growth is certainly not dependent on foreign aid. At the government level in Beijing, ODA is seen as seed money, a window for contacts with foreign experts and technologies or as cheap financing. This paper will start by looking at China as a recipient. What are the processes of receiving aid, what do the Chinese want to get out of it and what are their priorities? This will be followed by a description of China’s main donor, Japan, where aid to China is a highly political and controversial question. After a short description of Nordic aid to China in general, we will look at Swedish aid and make case studies at the project level. In the conclusion, China as a recipient will be analysed, as well as Japan and Sweden as donors looking specifically at the concept of ownership, partnership and institutional change.Japanese foreign aid; Nordic foreign aid; ODA; ODA to China; partnership; ownership; institutional change

History of the tether concept and tether missions: a review

This paper introduces history of space tethers, including tether concepts and tether missions, and attempts to provide a source of references for historical understanding of space tethers. Several concepts of space tethers since the original concept has been conceived are listed in the literature, as well as a summary of interesting applications, and a research of space tethers is given. With the aim of implementing scientific experiments in aerospace, several space tether missions which have been delivered for aerospace application are introduced in the literature.</jats:p

Occurrence Rates and Heating Effects of Tangential and Rotational Discontinuities as Obtained from Three-dimensional Simulation of Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence

In solar wind, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) discontinuities are ubiquitous and often found to be at the origin of turbulence intermittency. They may also play a key role in the turbulence dissipation and heating of the solar wind. The tangential (TD) and rotational (RD) discontinuities are the two most important types of discontinuities. Recently, the connection between turbulence intermittency and proton thermodynamics has been being investigated observationally. Here we present numerical results from three-dimensional MHD simulation with pressure anisotropy and define new methods to identify and to distinguish TDs and RDs. Three statistical results obtained about the relative occurrence rates and heating effects are highlighted: (1) RDs tend to take up the majority of the discontinuities along with time; (2) the thermal states embedding TDs tend to be associated with extreme plasma parameters or instabilities, while RDs do not; (3) TDs have a higher average T as well as perpendicular temperature $T_\perp$. The simulation shows that TDs and RDs evolve and contribute to solar wind heating differently. These results will inspire our understanding of the mechanisms that generate discontinuities and cause plasma heating.Comment: 5 Figures, Submitted to Astrophys. J. Lett., in the process of refereein

Privacy protection for e-health systems by means of dynamic authentication and three-factor key agreement

During the past decade, the electronic healthcare (e-health) system has been evolved into a more patient-oriented service with smaller and smarter wireless devices. However, these convenient smart devices have limited computing capacity and memory size, which makes it harder to protect the user’s massive private data in the e-health system. Although some works have established a secure session key between the user and the medical server, the weaknesses still exist in preserving the anonymity with low energy consumption. Moreover, the misuse of biometric information in key agreement process may lead to privacy disclosure, which is irreparable. In this study, we design a dynamic privacy protection mechanism offering the biometric authentication at the server side whereas the exact value of the biometric template remains unknown to the server. And the user anonymity can be fully preserved during the authentication and key negotiation process because the messages transmitted with the proposed scheme are untraceable. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is proved to be semantic secure under the Real-or-Random Model. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme suits the e-health environment at the aspect of security and resource occupation

Bank lending and CEO turnover: Evidence from China

To maintain bank relationship, borrowers have motives to discipline themselves by forcing out underperforming CEOs. In this paper, we show that the state ownership in emerging markets renders this disciplinary mechanism ineffective. Using the contract information of bank loans for Chinese listed firms, we find that higher bank loan intensity overall does not affect the probability of forcing out an underperforming CEO. The absence of disciplinary effect is driven by the bank-firm pairs in which either the borrower or the lender is state-owned. However, the disciplinary effect is significant if a firm’s bank loans mostly consist of secured and short-term bank loans. Bank loans increase the likelihood of a forced CEO turnover, especially when joint-equity banks serve as the main lender. Overall, we propose that state ownership is an important factor driving the inefficiency of credit market in emerging countries

China's industrial performance (1980-1992): The interaction between resource mobilisation and productivity change.

Since 1978, China has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Notable features of its economic performance have been its industrial growth and the expansion of its manufactured exports. The focus of this research is China's industrial performance during the years 1980 and 1992. Its principal objective is to analyze Industrial growth from the twin perspectives of resource mobilisation and productivity change. It is argued that these two aspects, both of which reflect the impact of Dengist reforms, are interrelated.;Our analysis of resource mobilisation suggests that a number of factors have contributed to China's rapid industrial growth. Two of these have been of particular importance. First, increased emphasis on the role of the market, in terms of facilitating more rapid growth of household demand and strengthening intersectoral linkages, enabled the Industrial sector to improve its access to widening domestic and foreign markets. Second, the transformation of funding arrangements for industry had two beneficial results: it permitted non-state agents to play a greater role in financing industrial expansion; and it enabled the traditional state funding system to enhance its role as a means of improving intersectoral balance.;The analysis of productivity change in post-reform industry is deliberately set in the context of the changes in market structures which have faced China's industrial enterprises. Our findings indicate that enterprise reforms and structural adjustments have been a source of improvement in levels of industrial productivity in China. But they also suggest that such improvements have been neither consistent, nor balanced over time and between different branches of Industry.;In an attempt to identify the forces which have given rise to the distinctive patterns of resource mobilisation and productivity change in China's industrial sector under the Impact of reform, we have deliberately focused on the interactions between government, enterprises and the market. It is noteworthy that the increased role played by regional and local governments has facilitated the more intensive use of local productive resources. But it is also clear that the same factor has been the source of regional market fragmentation. Both of these elements have impacted on China's industrial performance since the early 1980s

Role of peptide–cell surface interactions in cosmetic peptide application

Cosmetic peptides have gained popularity in a wide range of skincare products due to their good biocompatibility, effective anti-oxidative properties, and anti-aging effects. However, low binding between peptides and the cell surface limits the efficacy of functional peptides. In this study, we designed two novel targeting peptide motifs to enhance the interaction between cosmetic peptides and the cell surface, thereby improving their performance for skin health. To achieve this, we optimized the well-known peptide tripeptide-1 (GHK) by separately grafting the integrin αvβ3-binding motif RGD and the chondroitin sulfate (CS)-binding motif sOtx2 onto it, forming two chimeric targeting peptides, RGD-GHK and sOtx2-GHK. Comparative analysis showed that both RGD-GHK and sOtx2-GHK exhibited superior anti-oxidative and anti-apoptotic effects compared to the non-targeting peptide, GHK. Furthermore, RGD-GHK demonstrated exceptional anti-aging activity, and its potential for promoting wound healing and repairing the skin barrier was evaluated in vitro using cells and skin models. In vitro permeation and in vivo adsorption testing confirmed that RGD-GHK achieved a high local concentration in the skin layer, initiating peptide effects and facilitating in vivo wound healing, while maintaining excellent biocompatibility. The enhancement of signaling cosmetic peptides can be attributed to the specific interaction between the binding motif and cell surface components. Consequently, this targeting peptide holds promising potential as a novel functional peptide for application in cosmetics

Formation of Rotational Discontinuities in Compressive three-dimensional MHD Turbulence

Measurements of solar wind turbulence reveal the ubiquity of discontinuities. In this study, we investigate how the discontinuities, especially rotational discontinuities (RDs), are formed in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. In a simulation of the decaying compressive three-dimensional (3-D) MHD turbulence with an imposed uniform background magnetic field, we detect RDs with sharp field rotations and little variations of magnetic field intensity as well as mass density. At the same time, in the de Hoffman-Teller (HT) frame, the plasma velocity is nearly in agreement with the Alfv\'{e}n speed, and is field-aligned on both sides of the discontinuity. We take one of the identified RDs to analyze in details its 3-D structure and temporal evolution. By checking the magnetic field and plasma parameters, we find that the identified RD evolves from the steepening of the Alfv\'{e}n wave with moderate amplitude, and that steepening is caused by the nonuniformity of the Alfv\'{e}n speed in the ambient turbulence.Comment: Five figures enclosed. Submitted to Astrophys. J., Under referrin