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Massive funds that are necessary to finance China’s capital-intensive urbanisation are channelled through Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs), which are established by local governments to circumvent the prohibition on borrowing. This study examines LGFV development and how this land financing development strategy influences villagers. We argue that China’s discriminatory land property system and the feature of land being a captive asset allow local governments to transfer their debt pressure to land-losing villagers. Specifically, we find that more indebted local governments take a more extractive approach by paying land-losing villagers less compensation, suggesting the intrinsic connections of the local state, land-centred local public finance and society in China’s urban transformation. Our findings suggest that local governments can be developmental and predatory at the same time. Our arguments are developed using data that combine a self-compiled data set on LGFV debt with the China Household Finance Surveys. It systematically examines the connections between land financing via LGFVs and land-losing villagers. It contributes to a better understanding of the debt-fuelled urbanisation in China and, more broadly, of how the state intervenes in the economy and impacts distributive justice in developing and transition economies.

Student organization is considered an important approach for the sustainable development of ideological and political education, and it helps construct learning style and campus culture. This research studies college students’ motivations for their involvement and exit behaviors. Using a binary choice model, we analyze critical factors affecting the involvement and exit behaviors of college students based on social cognition theory, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and expectancy theory. On the one hand, our results show active cognition is most influential for the involvement behavior, followed by personal interest. Meanwhile, active cognition is positively affected by mother’s higher education level and senior students’ influence. Respondents who agree that joining organizations brings closer relations with teachers and other students as well as promoting heterosexual communication are more likely to join. On the other hand, the most influential factor for the exit behavior is unclear promotion mechanisms. Low-quality activities and wasting time with organizations cause students to quit. Moreover, lack of training opportunities and professional guidance dampens members’ enthusiasm. Complicated interpersonal relations, bureaucratic style, entering a higher grade and changing psychology cause some members to quit and further affect organizational learning. We provide additional insights on management strategies towards organization sustainability, such as improving leader selection and building harmonious interpersonal relations.

This paper places the problem of Chinese rural taxation in the context of government regulation and seeks to present an integrated theoretical framework of Chinese rural development in the past two decades. Our theoretical framework reconciles the seemingly contradictory facts that the average level of rural taxation relative to rural net income did not increase quickly from 1990, but rural taxation became a very serious problem in this period. Our findings suggest that this is in large part due to increases in rural income disparity from 1990 and uneven tax distribution among different income groups. We argue that differentiated enforcement of government regulations such as grain procurement and birth control play an important role in the rural taxation problem, and more generally, the problem of local government expansion and rising rural income disparity. The empirical findings support our hypotheses.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Scholarly Publishing in China yiming wang, zhiwu xu, and qi zhang This paper describes actions recently taken by the government, scholarly publishers, and researchers to face the COVID-19 challenge in China. By promulgating new policies and funding new programs, the Chinese government at all levels has provided huge support for research on COVID-19. Guided by the new policies, Chinese scholarly book publishers have published 124 new titles on the subject of the coronavirus. Journal publishers have put out numerous calls for papers and launched open access platforms for COVID-19 research. Chinese researchers have produced 2021 English-language papers and 2837 Chinese papers on COVID-19.These activities have the potential to affect scholarly publishing in China and around the world in multiple ways: 1) by establishing a more reasonable academic evaluation system in China; 2) by bringing about a more balanced relationship between Chinese scholarly publishers' profit motive and their commitment to social welfare; and 3) by altering the communication channels that Chinese researchers use and the publishing choices they make.