No abstract

As an important branch of medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been applied for the treatment of diseases for thousands of years in China and other countries in East Asia. The Chinese Pharmacopoeia (ChP) is a drug code formulated by the Chinese government, and it includes a special volume for the monographs of TCM, which plays an important role in ensuring the quality of drugs. The use of quality control technology has always been a complex and important factor in TCM. Owing to the chemical diversity of TCM, chromatography technology has been proven to be a comprehensive strategy for the assessment of the overall quality of TCM and has become the main analytical method in the ChP. This article provides an overview of the classical and modern chromatographic technologies applied in the ChP, and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each technique in the TCM monographs. In 2020, the new edition of the ChP (the 2020 edition) has been implemented at the end of 2020. This paper also contains a brief introduction about the application of chromatographic technologies in the new edition of the ChP.

No abstract

A rapid and specific LC-MS/MS method has been developed for the simultaneous analysis of polygala acid, senegenin and 3,6'-disinapoylsucrose (DSS) in rat plasma. The method was applied to the pharmacokinetics studies of polygala acid, senegenin and DSS. The analysis was carried out on an Agilent Eclipse plus C18 reversed-phase column (100 × 4.6 mm, 3.5 µm) by gradient elution with methanol and ammonia (0.01%, v/v). The flow rate was 0.4 mL/min. All analytes including internal standard (IS) were monitored by selected reaction monitoring with an electrospray ionization source. Linear responses were obtained for polygala acid and DSS ranging from 2.5 to 2000 ng/mL, and senegenin ranging from 5 to 2000 ng/mL. The intra- and inter-day precisions (relative standard deviation) were <11.34 and 8.99%. The extraction recovery ranged from 70.89 ± 4.60 to 88.49 ± 3.26%, and that for the IS was 77.23 ± 3.68%. Stability studies showed that polygala acid, senegenin and DSS are stable during the preparation and analytical process. The validated method was successfully used to determine the concentration-time profiles of polygala acid, senegenin and DSS.

Over the last decade, a large part of the Chinese countryside has experienced a ‘hollowing out’ process in economy and state administration, as rapid urbanisation and development have concentrated in urban areas. To deal with this challenge, the Chinese government has launched rural programmes, resulting in significant transformation in the countryside. Applying the state rescaling theory as an analytical lens, this paper argues that these state-led rural programmes have strengthened the state role in governing the countryside significantly based on the case study of Jiangning. These programmes are not fixed yet developed and expanded through the interaction of multi-level governments. While local governments follow the discourse of the higher-level governments in this process, they also restructure the state apparatus for programme implementation. Local governments have some autonomy by echoing and responding to the initiative of the higher-level governments actively. Thus the programme evolution is not simply a top-down process as it encompasses interesting dynamics of state rescaling. Generally speaking, the state plays an important role in moving toward ‘good governance’ in rural China at the initial stage. The state-led rural programmes enable the state to regain its leading role in the countryside and restore the rural public administation to some extent. There is still a long way to go for the civil society to achieve self-governance in the countryside.