New Wenzhou: Migration, Metropolitan Spatial Development and Modernity in a Third-tier Chinese Model City

Migration has asserted great influence on urban spatial structure, especially during China’s recent waves of rural-to-urban migration. This dissertation focuses on Wenzhou, a third-tier Chinese city that served as a national model for the re-introduction of small-scale private enterprise in the 1990s. Wenzhou’s economic success generated migration that has served as a catalyst for new forms of urbanization in which migrants play a central role. I aim to examine and understand the distribution patterns of migrant settlements, their changes over time and the ways that the formation of these settlements has impacted emerging urban form. There are two primary components in this study: a broad-scale comparative study of the formation and location of migrant settlements based on census data and existing studies of Beijing and Guangzhou, and a fine-scale, survey- and interview-based analysis of a case-study migrant settlement. Using data drawn from the 2000 and 2010 population censuses, the city-scale analysis finds that Wenzhou’s migrant settlements, which are dominated by manufacturing workers, are spatially linked to patterns of industrial development. Thus the city’s industrial development strategies have had a direct influence on the location, formation, and characteristics of migrant settlements. This is a direct contrast to the spatial formation of migrant settlements in Beijing and Guangzhou, where factors such as the location of village-held land and place-of-origin linked migrant settlements have been more important. Further analysis uses the classic “concentric zone model” as a baseline for understanding the differing dynamics of migrant settlements in contemporary Chinese cities. Drawing from a survey of 435 migrants and 20 in-depth interviews in Shuangyu, Wenzhou, this dissertation further reveals the residential and activity space in migrant settlements, the daily life of migrants and how they connect with the other parts of the city. The findings address the social and spatial isolation of migrant settlements from the other parts of the city, contributing to the formation of “city within a city”. This new kind of urban space constitutes a significant new “assemblage” in Wenzhou’s evolving urban form, and challenges the generalizations often made on the basis of the experience of migration in Beijing and Guangzhou

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mostly detrimental effects of normative aging on eye movements during reading. This article provides a review of research on aging effects on eye movements during reading for different writing systems (i.e., alphabetic systems like English compared to non-alphabetic systems like Chinese), focused on appraising the importance of visual and cognitive factors, considering key methodological issues, and identifying vital questions that need to be addressed and topics for further investigation

Community environmental satisfaction: its forms and impact on migrants' happiness in urban China

BACKGROUND: The great number of internal migrants has become an important part of China's urban population. Improving migrants' well-being is emerging as a key to the state policy emphasized in China's New-type Urbanization Plan. Previous studies on subjective well-being (SWB) have primarily focused on the impacts of objective measures of community environment and consider migrants as a homogeneous group. This study extends the literature by exploring the impacts of perceived community environment on migrants' SWB and incorporating cohort differences in the analysis. METHODS: We use the 2015 national scale data-China Household Financial Survey (CHFS) data-to analyse the different forms of community environmental satisfaction and their impacts on migrants' subjective well-being. A total of 12,607 migrants were sampled from 29 of mainland China's 31 provinces. Latent class analysis is applied to explore the potential forms of community environmental satisfaction; multinomial and ordinal logistic regression models are constructed to examine the sociodemographic characteristics of different forms of community environmental satisfaction and the association between community environmental satisfaction and subjective well-being among migrant cohorts in urban China. RESULTS: Latent class analysis defines four distinctive latent classes, which mirror four different domains of migrants' perception of their local environments. They are called 'unsatisfying local environment', 'satisfying social environment', 'satisfying physical environment', and 'satisfying social life'. Results from the multinomial logistic regression model reveals that the four forms of community environmental satisfaction are underpinned by distinct sociodemographic characteristics. Results from a series of ordinal logistic regression models show that different forms of community environmental satisfaction, in particular satisfaction with the physical environment and with social life, are positively associated with migrants' happiness. The model results also suggest that cohort differences do exist among migrants. The positive effect of a satisfying physical environment on happiness tends to be greater in younger cohorts, while the positive effect of a satisfying social life on SWB is more observable in older cohorts. CONCLUSION: Satisfaction with community environment has a salient impact on urban Chinese migrants' happiness. For their SWB, improving migrants' physical living environments and social lives is relatively more important than social environment, which in a way mirrors migrants' current status with its deficiencies in terms of a comfortable living environment and social life. Moreover, there exist cohort differences that should be considered when making policies to enhance migrants' subjective well-being

Specification test for panel data models with interactive fixed effects

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Migrants' perceived social integration in different housing tenures in urban China

Housing is often identified by the government and scholars as a key dimension of strategy for promoting migrant social integration. Yet, existing studies often pay attention to homeownership without distinguishing various housing tenures. This paper examines the effects of tenures on migrant social integration. Drawing on 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey data collected by the National Health Commission of China, this study examines migrants’ perceived social integration in 11 housing tenures, which vary from informal to formal, private to public, and rental to ownership. It is found that migrants’ social integration increases from those living in informal housing, to the private rental, to the public rental, to informal owned, to privately owned, and to public owned housing. Homeownership plays an important role in affecting migrants’ perceived social integration. It is worth pointing out that migrants who live in public housing, whether rented or owned, tend to have a higher level of social integration within each group (renters and owners). Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the positive effects of owned housing and public housing on migrant social integration are significantly strengthened in first-tier cities and cities with advanced industrial structures and higher housing-price-to-income ratios

Mediating Role of Time Pressure on the Relationship between Organizational Psychology Safety and Motivation of Learning from Failure in Large-Scale Construction Project

Large-scale construction projects are characterized by the temporary cooperation of different parties with objectives, making it challenging to learn from failure under great time pressures. Learning from failure in such multiparties projects must overcome the fear of speaking out the “failure,” reflected by organizational psychology safety. This study aims to explore the impact of organizational psychology safety on the motivation of learning from failure under the mediating role of time pressure by a cross-sectional study. Data was collected by a questionnaire survey of 189 construction practitioners and analyzed by applying regression analysis. Results show that organizational psychology safety was negatively associated with time pressure and positively with the motivation of learning from failure. Time pressure was detrimental to the motivation of learning from failure, and it partially mediated the relationship between organizational psychology safety and motivation of learning from failure. Insights from the analysis could help the managers of organizations or projects to attach importance to the influence and role of learning from failure and could provide them with guides to implement lessons-learned systems

Buyang Huanwu Decoction Ameliorates Poststroke Depression via Promoting Neurotrophic Pathway Mediated Neuroprotection and Neurogenesis

Objective. The aim of the present research is to investigate the therapeutic effect of Buyang Huanwu Decoction (BHD) in poststroke depression (PSD) animal model and illustrate its underlying mechanism via promoting neurotrophic pathway mediated neuroprotection and neurogenesis. Methods. To induce PSD rat model, isolation housed rats that received middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) surgery successively suffered from chronic mild stress (CMS) treatment for consecutive twenty-one days. Meanwhile, rats were correspondingly given vehicle, BHD, and fluoxetine. Then, neurologic function was scored and depressive-like behaviors were assessed by sucrose preference test, locomotor activity, novelty-suppressed feeding test, and forced swim test. Thereafter, the neuroprotection and neurogenesis related molecular markers and signaling were detected. Results. We firstly observed a significant neurological function recovery and antidepressants effect of BHD after MCAO together with CMS treatment. Our study also found that treatment with BHD and fluoxetine can significantly rescue neurons from apoptosis and promote neurogenesis in the CA3 and DG regions in the hippocampus. Notably, BHD and fluoxetine treatment can activate BDNF/ERK/CREB signaling. Conclusion. The results suggest that BHD is a promising candidate for treating PSD. Its curative effects can be attributed to neurotrophic pathway mediated neuroprotection and neurogenesis

Microinvasive pars plana vitrectomy versus panretinal photocoagulation in the treatment of severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (the VIP study): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

Introduction Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the main cause of adult visual impairment worldwide. Severe non-proliferative DR (sNPDR) is an important clinical intervention stage. Currently, panretinal photocoagulation (PRP) is the standard treatment for sNPDR. However, PRP alone cannot completely prevent NPDR progression. One explanation might be that PRP does not remove the detrimental vitreous that plays an important role in DR progression. Microinvasive pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) was shown to be a safe and effective method to treat late-stage proliferative DR (PDR) by completely removing the pathological vitreous. However, whether PPV is effective in controlling sNPDR remains unknown. In this trial, we aim to compare the effectiveness of microinvasive PPV with that of PRP for sNPDR progression control.Methods and analysis This single centre, parallel group, randomised controlled trial aims to evaluate the clinical efficacy of microinvasive PPV in preventing the progression of sNPDR compared with PRP. A total of 272 adults diagnosed with sNPDR will be randomised 1:1 to the microinvasive PPV and PRP groups. The primary outcome is the disease progression rate, calculated as the rate of sNPDR progressed to PDR from baseline to 12 months after treatment. The secondary outcomes include the change in best-corrected visual acuity, re-treatment rate, diabetic macular oedema occurrence, change in central retinal thickness, change in the visual field, cataract occurrence and change in the quality of life.Ethics and dissemination The Ethics Committee of Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center approved this study (2019KYPJ108). The results will be presented at scientific meetings and submitted for publication to peer-reviewed journals.Trial registration number NCT04103671

A Further Look at Ageing and Word Predictability Effects in Chinese Reading: Evidence from One-Character Words

Older adults are thought to compensate for slower lexical processing by making greater use of contextual knowledge, relative to young adults, to predict words in sentences. Accordingly, compared to young adults, older adults should produce larger contextual predictability effects in reading times and skipping rates for words. Empirical support for this account is nevertheless scarce. Perhaps the clearest evidence to date comes from a recent Chinese study showing larger word predictability effects for older adults in reading times but not skipping rates for two-character words (Zhao et al., 2019). However, one possibility is that the absence of a word-skipping effect in this experiment was due to the older readers skipping words infrequently because of difficulty processing two-character words parafoveally. We therefore took a further look at this issue, using one-character target words to boost word-skipping. Young (18-30 years) and older (65+ years) adults read sentences containing a target word that was either highly predictable or less predictable from the prior sentence context. Our results replicate the finding that older adults produce larger word predictability effects in reading times but not word-skipping, despite high skipping rates. We discuss these findings in relation to ageing effects on reading indifferent writing systems