Transformation of China's State Commercial Sector Governance: A Case Study of China’s Largest Insurance Company, China Life

This thesis seeks to detail and advance path-based explanations for the changing character and conduct of Chinese state sector governance at both evolving national and current leading firm level. The ruling Chinese party-state has expressed concern about how governance failings lower operational efficiency in the state sector over three decades while continuing to devise and implement different reforms in the process. However, empirical research often suggests that its gradualist or incremental approach to reform can also result in a mosaic of different transplanted governance institutions which are not necessarily fully or immediately compatible with China’s own unique context. This thesis specifically examines the transformative dynamics of China’s state sector governance system through the prism of path based theory in order to provide a more holistic and in-depth understanding of how that context and leading Chinese actors’ own conduct both exert salient influences over governance practices. It uses a mixed-method strategy at both national and firm levels to derive a deeper and more holistic understanding than any one single method alone might do. Overall it finds governance reform to be characterized by a relatively unsynchronised and challengeable process of policy making and implementation which allows for some degree of flexibility and openness. Its more detailed findings also question path dependency type explanations' emphasis upon continued institutional stability and reproduction. These findings further suggest that the actual reform is not necessarily the collective and consensual quest for ever high levels of efficiency which certain financial economists typically assume. It can also depend upon the outcome of other competing pressures between increased marketization and competition on one hand, and different demands for maintaining extant governance structures and vested interests on the other. The former are no less legitimate and, in principle, urgent concerns for both policy makers and other leading stakeholders than the latter. Embedded characteristics cannot just be reduced to efficiency-technocratic considerations for inducing different competitive performance when these neglect how redistributive an economic governance system can be, and also the essentially mediated efficacy of certain transplanted mechanisms. Much of the convergence-divergence debate regarding national economic governance systems has nevertheless been conceived in efficiency and competition terms alone. However, this thesis suggests that the promulgation and transplantation of SSG reform policies needs to take the specific country context into greater consideration if it is to be both more meaningful and effective

Lysosome-dependent cell death and deregulated autophagy induced by amine-modified polystyrene nanoparticles

Nanoparticles (NPs) typically accumulate in lysosomes. However, their impact on lysosomal function, as well as autophagy, a lysosomal degradative pathway, is still not well known. We have previously reported in the 1321N1 cell line that amine-modified polystyrene (NH2-PS) NPs induce apoptosis through damage initiated in the lysosomes leading ultimately to release of lysosomal content in the cytosol, followed by apoptosis. Here, by using a combination of biochemical and cell biological approaches, we have characterized in a mouse embryonic fibroblast cell line that the lysosomal alterations induced by NH2-PS NPs is progressive, initiating from mild lysosomal membrane permeabilization (LMP), to expansion of lysosomal volume and intensive LMP before the summit of cell death. Though the cells initially seem to induce autophagy as a surviving mechanism, the damage of NH2-PS NPs to lysosomes probably results in lysosomal dysfunctions, leading to blockage of autophagic flux at the level of lysosomes and the eventual cell death

Mutual effects between Pinus armandii and broadleaf litter during mixed decomposition

Mixed-decomposition effects are commonly observed in natural and planted forests and affect nutrient cycling in a forest ecosystem. However, how one litter type affects the decomposition of another is still poorly understood. In this study, Pinus armandii litter was mixed with Betula albosinensis, Catalpa fargesii, Populus purdomii, Eucommia ulmoides, and Acer tsinglingense litter. The mixtures were placed in litterbags and buried in soil with consistent moisture for a 180-day indoor simulated decomposition experiment. The litterbags were periodically harvested during decomposition; the litter residues of different species were separated, and the biomass dynamics of each litter type were simulated. In addition, the soil sucrase, cellulase and polyphenol oxidase activities were also detected three times. The mutual effects of needle and broadleaf litter during mixed decomposition and the possible underlying mechanisms were investigated. The results indicated that (i) during the decomposition experiment, P. armandii needles significantly inhibited the decomposition of broadleaf litter in the first 3 months, while the broadleaf litter accelerated the decomposition of P. armandii needles in only approximately 40% of the cases. However, the inhibitory effects of needles on broadleaf litter decomposition subsequently exhibited significant weakening, while the accelerating effects of broadleaf litter were significantly enhanced. The effects of mixed decomposition on the activities of three enzymes can only partially explain the interactions between different litter types; (ii) the prediction by the decomposition model showed that most of the broadleaf litter types could continuously accelerate the decomposition of P. armandii needles throughout the mixed decomposition process, while the decomposition of broadleaf litter would be significantly inhibited at least in the short term. In general, four of the five broadleaf litter types (excluding E. ulmoides) could accelerate the early decomposition of P. armandii needles and consequently accelerate nutrient cycling in P. armandii pure forests. These species could be used for the transformation of pure P. armandii pure forests to mixed forests

Deep Neighbor Layer Aggregation for Lightweight Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

With the frequent use of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in robotics and autonomous driving, the model's efficiency is becoming increasingly important. Most current approaches apply much larger and more complex networks to improve the precision of depth estimation. Some researchers incorporated Transformer into self-supervised monocular depth estimation to achieve better performance. However, this method leads to high parameters and high computation. We present a fully convolutional depth estimation network using contextual feature fusion. Compared to UNet++ and HRNet, we use high-resolution and low-resolution features to reserve information on small targets and fast-moving objects instead of long-range fusion. We further promote depth estimation results employing lightweight channel attention based on convolution in the decoder stage. Our method reduces the parameters without sacrificing accuracy. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that our method can get better results than many large models, such as Monodepth2, with only 30 parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/boyagesmile/DNA-Depth

Solitons in systems of coupled scalar fields

We present a method to obtain soliton solutions to relativistic system of coupled scalar fields. This is done by examining the energy associated to static field configurations. In this case we derive a set of first-order differential equations that solve the equations of motion when the energy saturates its lower bound. To illustrate the general results, we investigate some systems described by polynomial interactions in the coupled fields.Comment: RevTex4, 5 page