The Chinese accounting profession in the People's Republic: A preliminary understanding from an oral history perspective

While oral history still has a marginal role in accounting literature in general, it has not been applied at all in relation to the history of Chinese accounting. Within broader research on accounting change in China, this paper uses oral history to investigate patterns of the career of accountants in China. We interviewed 21 retired accountants, aging from 60 to 90 at the time of the interview, asking them to share their professional experience in open and unstructured talk. We reconstruct individual experiences, which provides insights into the working lives of our interviewees. Unlike previous studies that only focus on influential informants, we investigate Chinese accounting changes as they emerge from the collective memory of everyday accountants. Taking a pluralist perspective, we collect non-archival data to illustrate the education and common elements in accounting career development. Our approach takes a ‘view from below’, underlining the limitations of top-down perspectives in most of the literature on accounting change in China. The findings contribute to our understanding of accounting changes in China and their social and economic impacts on the profession while providing interesting implications for oral history in accounting in general

The Shanxi Grand Theater: The “Renaissance” of Chinese Drama Land

ThispaperfocusesonTaiyuancity,asecond-tierChinesecitywithabrillianthistorythat had been gradually reduced to mediocrity. When an ambitious governor took office, he planned to carry out an urban revitalization process in which cultural facilities would become symbols of power and represent the city’s identity or define its character. The importation of western-style architecture and urban design for the performing arts offer a way out. The ‘perfect copies’ of European lifestyle, through the way of architectural, urbanism transplant, seemed to serve as a potent symbol of China authority’s ability to control and rearrange the worldwide intelligence for their citizen. The authors investigated Taiyuan and its performance spaces, examine the Shanxi Grand Theatre in terms of designs, layouts and uses, expectations, and disappointments in spatial terms both within and in relation to urban spaces, which epitomized China’s strategy on balancing the elite cultural monuments and social welfare

Decoherence processes during active manipulation of excitonic qubits in semiconductor quantum dots

Using photoluminescence spectroscopy, we have investigated the nature of Rabi oscillation damping during active manipulation of excitonic qubits in self-assembled quantum dots. Rabi oscillations were recorded by varying the pulse amplitude for fixed pulse durations between 4 ps and 10 ps. Up to 5 periods are visible, making it possible to quantify the excitation dependent damping. We find that this damping is more pronounced for shorter pulse widths and show that its origin is the non-resonant excitation of carriers in the wetting layer, most likely involving bound-to-continuum and continuum-to-bound transitions.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Shennan Road and the Modernization of Shenzhen Architecture

Shenzhensetsanexampleforrapiddevelopmentofurbanplanningandconstruction.It was the starting point of the most massive city-construction movement in contemporary China. In less than 40 years, many representative urban space and buildings on the mainmast-west highway—-ShennanRoad,have witnessed the for mation of the banded multi-center structural layout and the miraculous expansion of the city. Many of those iconic buildings are designed by Hong Kong or foreign architects. With the continuous development of the length and width of Shennan road, its broad and prosperous image is not only a symbol of the fruits of reform and opening up in Shenzhen or even China, but also contains the growth history of Shenzhen’s architectural modernization. This paper reviews and summarizes the changes of the urban fabric and the design trend of representative buildings along with the Shennan Road in different periods by the historical research methods. Combined with the transfer path of the city center, this study analyzes what kind of unique role the street and buildings act as in the developmentofurbanstructureinShenzhen,and expound what other urban functions and symbolic meaning they have. In the context of globalization, this article discusses how do the buildings designed by foreign architects change our city,thedrivenfactors behind the phenomenon of the design trend change. This research can make a supplement to the history and theory of the modernization of contemporary Chinese architecture