Role of Brick Tea Trade in the Formation of the Unitary Multi-Ethnic Country of China

In the Chinese history, no commodity has had a greater impact upon both China and the world other than tea. In the formation of the unitary multi-ethnic country of China, the brick tea trade ran through every stage of the country’s history since the Tang and Song Dynasties as a commercial activity through which the Central Plains dynasties exchanged tea from the Han regions for horses and other commodities from nomads in the northern grasslands and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Throughout the trick tea trade that continued for one thousand years, all ethnic groups were involved, consciously or passively, in the production, processing, transport and marketing of the tea, and collaborated in all trading chains and links, thus creating the largest trading activity in the history of China or even the world and exerting a significant influence on the formation of the unitary multi-ethnic country of China as a result

Politics, Trade and the Sale of Indian Tea to Tibet: Failure of Dumping of Indian Tea to Tibet During the Late Qing and Republican China Period

Since the late Qing dynasty, the sales volume of Sichuan brick tea in Tibet kept dropping, resulting in a sales crisis for it in Tibet a fear of the occupation of the Tibetan tea market by Indian tea due to its convenient traffic and low prices. During the dull sales of Sichuan brick tea in Tibet, Britain took various means, and even used military force to make Indian tea enter Tibet, whereas Indian tea was not sold in Tibet on a large scale, but only sporadically. The position of Chinese tea in Tibet was never shaken as was supposed by some at the time or later. The attempt for Indian tea on which Britain placed high hopes to be sold in Tibet was frustrated by the conflict between the central government and the Tibetan local government, the longstanding preference of the Tibetans for Sichuan brick tea, etc. The attempt of the British colonists to dump Indian tea into Tibet failed. In the meantime, with sea transport and price advantages, Yunnan tea made up for the reduction of Sichuan brick tea, and took up half of the Tibetan tea market

Ethnic Composition and Livelihoods of Lhasa Muslims in Tibet

The composition of the Chinese Hui people and the sources they own are very complex. Their identity is in a dynamic state. They are composed of people of different ethnic groups believing in Islam or being converted to Islam in the past. Currently, the Muslim community of Lhasa in Tibet is composed of various Muslim groups, namely Tibetanized Muslims or Tibetan-speaking Muslims and Chinese-speaking Muslims, commonly called Chinese Muslims (khui rigs), who are mainly from Gansu and Qinghai Provinces in northwestern China. They mostly have no household registration records in Lhasa and are regarded as a floating population. In the past 40 years of China’s reform and opening up, Lhasa has undergone dramatic changes in the residence, livelihoods and religious behavior of the residents. Therefore, it is necessary to review the situation of Lhasa Muslims to get a comprehensive understanding of their composition, livelihoods and current status

Group Sparse Precoding for Cloud-RAN with Multiple User Antennas

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has become a promising network architecture to support the massive data traffic in the next generation cellular networks. In a C-RAN, a massive number of low-cost remote antenna ports (RAPs) are connected to a single baseband unit (BBU) pool via high-speed low-latency fronthaul links, which enables efficient resource allocation and interference management. As the RAPs are geographically distributed, the group sparse beamforming schemes attracts extensive studies, where a subset of RAPs is assigned to be active and a high spectral efficiency can be achieved. However, most studies assumes that each user is equipped with a single antenna. How to design the group sparse precoder for the multiple antenna users remains little understood, as it requires the joint optimization of the mutual coupling transmit and receive beamformers. This paper formulates an optimal joint RAP selection and precoding design problem in a C-RAN with multiple antennas at each user. Specifically, we assume a fixed transmit power constraint for each RAP, and investigate the optimal tradeoff between the sum rate and the number of active RAPs. Motivated by the compressive sensing theory, this paper formulates the group sparse precoding problem by inducing the $\ell_0$-norm as a penalty and then uses the reweighted $\ell_1$ heuristic to find a solution. By adopting the idea of block diagonalization precoding, the problem can be formulated as a convex optimization, and an efficient algorithm is proposed based on its Lagrangian dual. Simulation results verify that our proposed algorithm can achieve almost the same sum rate as that obtained from exhaustive search

Passive detection of moving aerial target based on multiple collaborative GPS satellites

Passive localization is an important part of intelligent surveillance in security and emergency applications. Nowadays, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) have been widely deployed. As a result, the satellite signal receiver may receive multiple GPS signals simultaneously, incurring echo signal detection failure. Therefore, in this paper, a passive method leveraging signals from multiple GPS satellites is proposed for moving aerial target detection. In passive detection, the first challenge is the interference caused by multiple GPS signals transmitted upon the same spectrum resources. To address this issue, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is utilized to separate and reconstruct multiple GPS signals on the reference channel. Moreover, on the monitoring channel, direct wave and multi-path interference are eliminated by extensive cancellation algorithm (ECA). After interference from multiple GPS signals is suppressed, the cycle cross ambiguity function (CCAF) of the signal on the monitoring channel is calculated and coordinate transformation method is adopted to map multiple groups of different time delay-Doppler spectrum into the distance−velocity spectrum. The detection statistics are calculated by the superposition of multiple groups of distance-velocity spectrum. Finally, the echo signal is detected based on a properly defined adaptive detection threshold. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. They show that the detection probability of our proposed method can reach 99%, when the echo signal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is only −64 dB. Moreover, our proposed method can achieve 5 dB improvement over the detection method using a single GPS satellite

Buddhist entrepreneurs, charitable behaviors, and social entrepreneurship : Evidence from China

Acknowledgements We thank the Editor-in-Chief Zoltan J. Acs, David B. Audretsch, the anonymous reviewers, and Shaker A. Zahra and Yong Li for their helpful comments and suggestions.The usual disclaimers apply. Funding The authors acknowledge funding from the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant number: 20AGL008), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 72172056) and the General Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities of Jiangsu Province (grant number: 2020SJA0254).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Formal Modeling and Verification of Services Managements for Pervasive Computing Environment

International audienceVarious forms of pervasive computing environments are being deployed in an increasing number of areas including hospitals, homes and military settings. Entities in this environment provide rich functionalities (i.e. services). How to organize these heterogeneous and distributed entities to deliver user-defined services is challenging. Pantagruel is an approach to integrate a taxonomical description of a pervasive computing environment into a visual programming language. A taxonomy describes the relevant entities of a given pervasive computing area and serves as a parameter to a sensor-controller-actuator develop- ment paradigm. The orchestration of area-specific entities is supported by high-level constructs, customized with respect to taxonomical information. Pantagruel is also a language that describes and manages services. Further more, Pantagruel can be viewed as a high level service contract between the service designer and the program implementer. This paper presents a for- malization of Pantagruel, both its syntax and semantics. Four kinds of static properties are stated based on the formalization. Predicate abstraction based algorithms are designed to verify the properties

Entrepreneurship Knowledge : When East meets West

Acknowledgements The lead guest editor would like to express his sincerest thanks to Fabian Jintae Froese, for his excellent patience and guidance of this special issue and his thanks to Robert Wuebker, Qunwan Li, Julio de Castro, Chunhua Chen, Song Lin, and Zuhui Xu who provided very useful helps at different stages of the developments of this special issue and when this editorial paper was developed.Peer reviewedPostprin