Scaling-up Strategy as an Appropriate Approach for Sustainable New Town Development? Lessons from Wujin, Changzhou, China

China has achieved rapid urbanization and unprecedented economic booming over the past three decades. Numerous cities and towns dreamed of cloning the miracles of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai, in terms of their international development. However, inappropriate development strategies have meant that the majority of fast expanding urban suburbs or newly developed towns suffer a high ratio of vacant dwellings in real estate markets and a massive loss of farmland. The frequent exposure of these empty cities to mass media or the public has urged urban governments to impose fiscal austerity. These unexpected and negative consequences of urban development have explicit conflicts with sustainability. This paper aims to provide a political economy view of these unsustainable outcomes of new development. To achieve this, the processes and agendas of new city or town planning in Wujin District, Changzhou City, are analyzed and evaluated from the perspective of scale theory. Extensive interviews conducted with local politicians at different levels, planners, real estate agents and local residents facilitate the interpretation of these processes and agendas. It is argued that the legends of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai originate from a modified neoliberal capitalism intervention at the right time and place, with which other peer cities are not comparable. It is concluded that the scaling-up strategy is not appropriate for the local new town development of Wujin, which has led to unsustainable outcomes—empty cities and towns—and created important lessons for the sustainable development of Chinese cities

Genotyping and biofilm formation of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae and their association with virulence

Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae, the causative agent of swine respiratory disease, demonstrates differences in virulence. However, factors associated with this variation remain unknown. We herein evaluated the association between differences in virulence and genotypes as well as phenotype (i.e., biofilm formation ability). Strains 168 L, RM48, XLW-2, and J show low virulence and strains 232, 7448, 7422, 168, NJ, and LH show high virulence, as determined through animal challenge experiments, complemented with in vitro tracheal mucosa infection tests. These 10 strains with known virulence were then subjected to classification via multilocus sequence typing (MLST) with three housekeeping genes, P146-based genotyping, and multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA) of 13 loci. MLST and P146-based genotyping identified 168, 168 L, NJ, and RM48 as the same type and clustered them in a single branch. MLVA assigned a different sequence type to each strain. Simpson’s index of diversity indicates a higher discriminatory ability for MLVA. However, no statistically significant correlation was found between genotypes and virulence. Furthermore, we investigated the correlation between virulence and biofilm formation ability. The strains showing high virulence demonstrate strong biofilm formation ability, while attenuated strains show low biofilm formation ability. Pearson correlation analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between biofilm formation ability and virulence. To conclude, there was no association between virulence and our genotyping data, but virulence was found to be significantly associated with the biofilm formation ability of M. hyopneumoniae

Socio-spatial differentiation and residential segregation in the Chinese city based on the 2000 community-level census data: A case study of the inner city of Nanjing

Socio-spatial differentiation and residential segregation have been studied extensively in numerous cities and have contributed significantly to the understanding of urban spatial and social structures. Analyses of diverse data sets at varied spatial scales have supported the development of theoretical frameworks. However, the majority of Chinese case studies published in recent decades were dominantly based on either non-spatial data or population census data at sub-district (or jiedao in Chinese) level. These analyses have been limited through using low-resolution aggregate data resulting in incomplete or biased findings. This paper aims to examine the fine-scale socio-spatial structure of the inner city of Nanjing using the fifth population census data of 2000 at the lowest spatial scale – community (or juweihui in Chinese) level. Our findings reveal that the policies of the socialist era and the initial outcomes of the introduction of a free market, particularly with regard to the creation of new elite spaces within the inner city, have shaped a complex pattern of socio-spatial differentiation and residential segregation

Analyzing regional economic development patterns in a fast developing province of China through geographically weighted principal component analysis

Understanding the spatial structure of regional economic development is of importance for regional planning and provincial development strategy making. Taking Jiangsu Province in the economically richest Yangtze Delta as a case study, this paper aims to explore regional economic development level on a provincial scale. Using the data sets from provincial statistical yearbook of 2010, eleven variables are selected for statistical and spatial analyses at a county level. Both the traditional principal component analysis (PCA) and its local version—geographically weighted PCA (GWPCA)—are employed to these analyses for the purpose of comparison. The results have confirmed that GWPCA is an effective means of analyzing regional economic development level through mapping its local principal components. It is also concluded that the regional economic development in Jiangsu Province demonstrates spatial inequality between the North and South

Challenges in QCD matter physics - The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR

Substantial experimental and theoretical efforts worldwide are devoted to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. At LHC and top RHIC energies, QCD matter is studied at very high temperatures and nearly vanishing net-baryon densities. There is evidence that a Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP) was created at experiments at RHIC and LHC. The transition from the QGP back to the hadron gas is found to be a smooth cross over. For larger net-baryon densities and lower temperatures, it is expected that the QCD phase diagram exhibits a rich structure, such as a first-order phase transition between hadronic and partonic matter which terminates in a critical point, or exotic phases like quarkyonic matter. The discovery of these landmarks would be a breakthrough in our understanding of the strong interaction and is therefore in the focus of various high-energy heavy-ion research programs. The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR will play a unique role in the exploration of the QCD phase diagram in the region of high net-baryon densities, because it is designed to run at unprecedented interaction rates. High-rate operation is the key prerequisite for high-precision measurements of multi-differential observables and of rare diagnostic probes which are sensitive to the dense phase of the nuclear fireball. The goal of the CBM experiment at SIS100 (sqrt(s_NN) = 2.7 - 4.9 GeV) is to discover fundamental properties of QCD matter: the phase structure at large baryon-chemical potentials (mu_B > 500 MeV), effects of chiral symmetry, and the equation-of-state at high density as it is expected to occur in the core of neutron stars. In this article, we review the motivation for and the physics programme of CBM, including activities before the start of data taking in 2022, in the context of the worldwide efforts to explore high-density QCD matter.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Published in European Physical Journal

A temporally cyclic growth model of urban spatial morphology in China: evidence from Kunming Metropolis

Rapid urbanization and complexity of political-economic transition in China has brought about continuous and remarkable changes of urban morphology over the past decades, which were driven by a mixture of spatial, social-economic and institutional forces. Understanding such urban morphological evolution requires new mixed evidences and holistic perspectives. In this paper, it is argued that two dominant types of urban growth in China: low-density expansion and high-density infill might be driven by different forces at different stages. To interpret the processes of urban development, two easy-to-understand morphological indicators: expansion-induced investment density index” (EID) and “infill-induced investment density index” (IID) are defined to measure the investment density per unit of developed land and used to compare the morphological changes between different phases in a long period by integrating spatial and socio-economic data. The temporal variation of these indicators suggests a cyclic growth model (CGM), which means the periodic switch between low density expansion and high-density infill. Using Kunming metropolis as a case study, this paper has confirmed that its urban morphological evolution from 1950-2014 was periodically and reciprocally driven by a set of vis-à-vis dualistic dynamics, in which low-density expansion is led by pro-growth infrastructure oriented public investment, while the high-density infill is activated by collective and rational actions of individual enterprises and their economic behaviors. It is concluded that the confirmed CGM model, together with two morphological indicators, offers a new holistic perspective and method to easily and integrally interpret urban morphological evolution and accordingly has potential theoretical implications for reasonably understanding the urbanisation in China

การสร้างแบบฝึกทักษะการอ่านอักษรย่อจากหนังสือพิมพ์ไทยรัฐสำหรับนักศึกษาจีนวิชาเอกภาษาไทยชั้นปีที่ 3 มหาวิทยาลัยชนชาติกวางสี

บทคัดย่อ บทความวิจัยนี้มีความมุ่งหมายเพื่อสร้างแบบฝึกทักษะการอ่านอักษรย่อจากหนังสือพิมพ์ไทยรัฐสำหรับ นักศึกษาจีนวิชาเอกภาษาไทย ชั้นปีที่ 3 มหาวิทยาลัยชนชาติกวางสี มีจุดประสงค์เพื่อหาประสิทธิภาพของแบบฝึกตามเกณฑ์ที่กำหนดไว้คือ E1/E2 = 80/80กลุ่มทดลองในการวิจัยครั้งนี้คือ นักศึกษาจีนที่เรียนวิชาเอกภาษาไทยชั้นปีที่ 3  ของคณะวรรณคดีและภาษาต่างประเทศ มหาวิทยาลัยชนชาติกวางสีจำนวน 25 คนผลการศึกษาวิจัยพบว่าแบบฝึกทักษะการอ่านอักษรย่อจากหนังสือพิมพ์ไทยรัฐสำหรับนักศึกษาจีนวิชาเอกภาษาไทย ชั้นปีที่ 3 มหาวิทยาลัยชนชาติกวางสี  มีประสิทธิภาพ E1/E2 = 82.34/83.64 ซึ่งมากกว่าเกณฑ์ที่กำหนดไว้ ดังนั้น แบบฝึกนี้จึงมีประสิทธิภาพและมีผลสัมฤทธิ์สามารถนำไปใช้ประกอบการเรียนการสอนได้จริง คำสำคัญ แบบฝึกทักษะ, อักษรย่อ, นักศึกษาจีน   Abstract The objective of this research was to design and implement an abbreviation reading workbook based on Thairath newspaper  with the value of  effectiveness at E1/E2 = 80/80.  The workbook was aimed to help 3rd-year Chinese students majoring in Thai understand Thai abbreviations. The subjects consist of twenty-five students who were 3rd-year Chinese students majoring in Thai from Guangxi University, the Republic of China.  The result of the research revealed that the standard effectiveness was E1/E2 = 82.34/ 83.64, which can be concluded that it was an  effective enough to be used in the real classroom. Keywords Skills Workbook, Abbreviations, Chinese college student