COVID-19 and the Chinese Christian Community in Britain: Changing Patterns of Belonging and Division

This article draws on interview data with Chinese Christian leaders to explore how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Chinese Christian church in Britain. Based upon twelve semi-structured interviews conducted with Christian leaders in nine cities, the research identifies the ways in which the COVID-19 outbreak is shaping the dynamics of intragroup and intergroup connectedness within and beyond the Chinese church in Britain. It finds that COVID-19 is playing a significant role in social connectedness. This manifests in three ways: the reconfiguration of a sense of belonging at church, the perception of outreach and evangelism, and the relationship between Chinese Christians from different regional backgrounds. These findings outline that the COVID-19 pandemic is triggering both cohesion and division. On the one hand, the outbreak is functioning as an incubator for a stronger sense of belonging to the church and appears to encourage the church to reach out to seekers and the wider community. On the other hand, the pandemic is also dividing the Chinese church through conflicts in political views and social attitudes. Such conflicts, which are primarily about democratic values and views of China's communist regime, are particularly observable between Mandarin-speaking Christians from mainland Chinese backgrounds and Cantonese-speaking Christians from Hong Kong backgrounds. The article argues that the coronavirus pandemic has initiated deeper reconstruction and reform in the Chinese Christian community in Britain in terms of organisation and mission

Social life and political trust in China: Searching for machers and schmoozers

Previous literature has provided little evidence regarding the ways in which China’s burgeoning social life and rapid urbanization shape Chinese people’s level of trust in their government leaders. This article builds on Robert Putnam’s conceptualization of maching and schmoozing as formal and informal forms of social involvement, respectively. Using the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey, we identify four types of participants in social involvement, namely the inactives, machers, schmoozers and all-rounders, to untangle various aspects of social life in China. Our empirical analysis shows that the sociodemographic positions of the four types of social involvement are largely distinct. Our findings also contribute to the study of political trust by offering insight into the complicated associations between social involvement, hukou status and political trust in contemporary Chinese society

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

Investigation of PtSGT1 and PtSGT4 Function in Cellulose Biosynthesis in Populus tomentosa Using CRISPR/Cas9 Technology

Cellulose synthesis is a complex process in plant cells that is important for wood processing, pulping, and papermaking. Cellulose synthesis begins with the glycosylation of sitosterol by sitosterol glycosyltransferase (SGT) to produce sitosterol-glucoside (SG), which acts as the guiding primer for cellulose production. However, the biological functions of SGTs in Populus tomentosa(P. tomentosa) remain largely unknown. Two full-length PtSGT genes (PtSGT1 and PtSGT4) were previously isolated from P. tomentosa and characterized. In the present study, CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology was used to construct PtSGT1-sgRNA and PtSGT4-sgRNA expression vectors, which were genetically transformed into P. tomentosa using the Agrobacterium-mediated method to obtain transgenic lines. Nucleic acid and amino acid sequencing analysis revealed both base insertions and deletions, in addition to reading frame shifts and early termination of translation in the transgenic lines. Sugar metabolism analysis indicated that sucrose and fructose were significantly downregulated in stems and leaves of mutant PtSGT1-1 and PtSGT4-1. Glucose levels did not change significantly in roots and stems of PtSGT1-1 mutants; however, glucose was significantly upregulated in stems and downregulated in leaves of the PtSGT4-1 mutants. Dissection of the plants revealed disordered and loosely arranged xylem cells in the PtSGT4-1 mutant, which were larger and thinner than those of the wild-type. This work will enhance our understanding of cellulose synthesis in the cell walls of woody plants