Productivism and Post-Productivism: An Analysis of Functional Mixtures in Rural China

Existing studies have attempted to explain the transformation of rural China from a single productive or post-productive perspective. However, regarding the two development paradigms as binary opposites brings contradictions: Is China’s countryside evolving towards productivism or post-productivism? To answer this question, we transcend the binary opposition and instead propose an analytical framework based on rural value, driving actors, and rural land-use functions. Based on the location quotient analysis method, we measure the functional hybridity of rural areas using 7345 POIs (points of interest) representing the land-use types of productive and post-productive activities. We discuss the formation mechanism of functional hybridity considering two typical spaces: modern agriculture demonstration districts and “Tesecun”. We find that the government, the market, and villagers collectively promote the formation of functional hybridity in rural China. The government prefers to strengthen productivity in order to ensure state food security, while villagers prefer to make their villages more multi-functional in order to attract citizens. This study can be seen as a contribution supplementing research issues associated with rural China from the novel dualistic perspective of productivism and post-productivism

A Large-Scale Multipurpose Benchmark Dataset and Real-Time Interpretation Platform Based on Chinese Rural Buildings

As urbanization accelerates, the evolving dynamics of village growth and decline have garnered widespread attention. Rural housing, as the most significant asset in villages, serves as the primary indicator of socioeconomic development in rural areas. However, the extensive scale, diversity, and widespread distribution of villages make conducting a nationwide census of rural buildings a notably costly and time-intensive endeavor. Although deep-learning techniques have been successfully applied by numerous researchers to map building footprints, the majority of this work is concentrated in urban areas, leaving large-scale datasets for rural buildings notably lacking. In this article, an exhaustive database of rural architecture has been established, featuring diverse rural building annotations from the majority of provinces in the mainland China. Moreover, a real-time online platform for remote sensing image interpretation, integrating instance segmentation and boundary regularization, has been developed to streamline the extraction of building footprints from high-resolution imagery. The experimental results from predicting 43 992 rural building instances nationwide demonstrated that 33 210 were accurately identified, achieving a precision of 0.776, a recall of 0.755, and an F1-score of 0.765. Building upon this work, the maps of rural building areas and quantity are produced to clearly demonstrate the distribution of rural houses in parts of China. These data products can serve as vital supplements to public data products, such as nighttime light data, land cover maps, national statistical yearbooks, and road network data, particularly in the field of rural studies

The Path of Rural Social Capital Improvement in China from the Perspective of Planners: A Case Study of Hongtang Village in Yunnan Province

China’s rural areas have long been backward in development, and many villages have completed poverty alleviation with the help of the government. Facing the requirements of sustainable development, it is necessary to change the development path, continuously increase social capital, and effectively connect with government investment resources. The existing research and practice mostly construct the strategy of social capital from the inside of the village, lacking interaction with the superior government. This paper argues for the method of planners’ intervention. The advantage is that it links the power of government and villagers, creates a perceptible, experiential, valuable material environment, and promotes collective action. Through this process, the knowledge interaction and social relations in the village can be improved. The purpose of this paper is to study how participatory planning affects the content and mechanism of this process mentioned above. Taking Hongtang village as a case study, we analyze the in-depth changes that participatory planning has brought to the rural space and social level. In the participatory planning practice of Hongtang village, college rural planners took a small vegetable garden as the breakthrough point to stimulate villagers’ participation. In the process of the upgrade, planners evolved the interaction between the village committee and villagers in the path of IMEE, which is “Intervene, Motivate, Enable, Empower”. Moreover, planners always maintained contact with the higher-level government. Through the upgrade of small vegetable gardens, the villagers’ initiative was brought into practice, the social capital was fully explored, and an effective link with the government’s resource allocation was realized

System Building and Multistakeholder Involvement in Public Participatory Community Planning through Both Collaborative- and Micro-Regeneration

With the continuous development of social governance research and practice, the role of public participation in community planning has received increasing attention. In some developing countries, the public participation methods used in Western countries show a certain degree of inadaptability. The underlying reason for this is the lack of understanding of the related concepts and participation units of public participation and the lack of a scientific public participation system. This study first investigated the fundamental issues of public participation system construction and the definition of a public participation unit in community planning. Then, the micro-renovation of the Zengcuoan community in Xiamen, China, was used as an example to introduce the whole process of constructing a public participation system and an inverted pyramid model of public participation units. Collaborative workshops are a method of community planning that is government-guided and allows for multistakeholder participation and joint consultation. These workshops are mainly led by relevant government departments or social autonomous organizations. They adopt a flexible and diverse approach in response to problems and needs in the process of community construction and development that mobilizes and organizes residents and community organizations to participate in community construction and governance. Collaborative workshops provide new working ideas and practical solutions for participatory community planning in both top-down (government-led) and bottom-up (citizen-led) settings in developing countries

Evolution of urban forms observed from space

Abstract Multiple driving forces shape cities. These forces include the costs of transporting goods and people, the types of predominant local industries, and the policies that govern urban planning. Here, we examine how agglomeration and dispersion change with increasing population and population density. We study the patterns in the evolution of urban forms and analyze the differences between developed and developing countries. We analyze agglomeration across 233 European and 258 Chinese cities using nighttime luminosity data. We find a universal inverted U-shape curve for the agglomeration metric (Lasym index). Cities attain their maximum agglomeration level at an intermediate density, above which dispersion increases. Our findings may guide strategic urban planning for the timely adoption of appropriate development policies

CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes. Protein & Cell 6(5

ABSTRACT Genome editing tools such as the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-associated system (Cas) have been widely used to modify genes in model systems including animal zygotes and human cells, and hold tremendous promise for both basic research and clinical applications. To date, a serious knowledge gap remains in our understanding of DNA repair mechanisms in human early embryos, and in the efficiency and potential off-target effects of using technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 in human pre-implantation embryos. In this report, we used tripronuclear (3PN) zygotes to further investigate CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human cells. We found that CRISPR/Cas9 could effectively cleave the endogenous β-globin gene (HBB). However, the efficiency of homologous recombination directed repair (HDR) of HBB was low and the edited embryos were mosaic. Off-target cleavage was also apparent in these 3PN zygotes as revealed by the T7E1 assay and whole-exome sequencing. Furthermore, the endogenous delta-globin gene (HBD), which is homologous to HBB, competed with exogenous donor oligos to act as the repair template, leading to untoward mutations. Our data also indicated that repair of the HBB locus in these embryos occurred preferentially through the non-crossover HDR pathway. Taken together, our work highlights the pressing need to further improve the fidelity and specificity of the CRISPR/Cas9 platform, a prerequisite for any clinical applications of CRSIPR/Cas9-mediated editing

Additional file 1 of Network meta-analysis on the effects of finerenone versus SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists on cardiovascular and renal outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease

Additional file 1. RoB-2 evaluation

Additional file 2 of Network meta-analysis on the effects of finerenone versus SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists on cardiovascular and renal outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease

Additional file 2. Publication bias