The “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) has been launched by the Chinese government in 2013. The aim was to stimulate cross-border economic development in massive geographical areas covering Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa, and Latin America which accounts for 80% and 40% of the world population and gross domestic product (GDP), respectively. The BRI has devised an extension of the “going global” strategy to reconfigure China’s overseas sector in order to extend its spillovers, and create more development opportunities for participating countries. In practice, cross-border infrastructure was a comprehensive role to reduce transportation cost; however, the BRI was vast by nature that includes financial support, policy cooperation, investment, trade facilitation, and people-to-people exchanges for the humanitarian strategy. Against this backdrop, the overarching objective of this study was to analyze the impact of the BRI and Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the bilateral trade between China and Sub-Saharan Africa countries. The investigation was carried out using a trade gravity model, balanced panel dataset, and multivariate regression estimation strategy for robustness checks covering 16 years. The result showed that Chinese OFDI, home, and host country’s GDP and GDP per capita income variables have a positive and statistically significant impact on the bilateral trade. Moreover, the BRI has explained positively on the bilateral trade; however, it does not have enough evidence to stimulate significantly, and it usually takes a long time for the effects of the BRI investment on trade and OFDI. The study also found that geographical distance and official exchange rates have explained negatively and statistically significant impact on the bilateral trade.

This study expands on the impact of local government environmental regulation on enterprise environmental protection investment. Furthermore, it analyzes the influence promotion pressure of officials has on the scale of enterprise environmental investment. The results show that the environmental protection investment of companies in China is generally insufficient. The attitude of companies toward environmental protection is passive under the policy regulation. The environmental supervision of the government is also still at a low level. Both of these observations are far from the intentions of the government. There is a U-shaped relationship between the pressure of official promotion and the scale of enterprise environmental protection investment. Only when the pressure of official promotion exceeds a certain limit can it positively stimulate enterprises to invest in environmental protection. Environmental regulation also exerts a threshold effect on the environmental protection investment by enterprises. This research provides a new way to understand the decision-making behavior of local officials and the environmental protection responsibility of enterprises. This study provides recommendations for improving the environment appraisal and government supervision system in China.

Publicized as a global call for action in 2015, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has forwarded an agenda of resolutions to achieve the goals of sustainable development by 2030 (SDGs). Due to the specific challenges of funding gaps and the lack of advanced technology, the majority of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are still behind the standard of world development. Since foreign direct investment (FDI) has the potential to bring much-needed capital and efficient technology, FDI has often been considered as a vigorous source of development, even for sustainable development for under-developing economies experienced today. Conspicuously, Chinese outward FDI (OFDI) into SSA has seen a strong upward trend in the 21st Century, after China proclaimed its "go global" strategy. Ethiopia is one of the favored destinations of the trend of Chinese OFDI, which also substantially continues through the SSA region. The hosting economy of Ethiopia expected that Chinese inward FDI comes with capital, efficient technology, and knowledge to contribute innovations through directly improving productivity and competitiveness via technological diffusion to domestic industries and eventually for sustainable development. Against this backdrop, this study utilizes firm-level panel datasets from Ethiopia to address the following couple of research questions. The first question is: are there any productivity differences between the establishment of Chinese-affiliated and domestic firms in the manufacturing industry in Ethiopia? The second is, does the presence of Chinese-affiliated firms provide productivity spillovers for domestic firms in the same industry level for socio-economic development? The investigation was carried out using 2554 manufacturing firm census data, from which 15.04% were Chinese firms operating in Ethiopia. We used the ordinary least squares (OLS) and generalized-method-of-moments (GMM) two-step approaches for estimations. Our findings revealed that, generally, Chinese firms were more productive than local firms and their presence can bring positive potential productivity spillover effects for domestic firms. Specifically, we found that local firms have gained significant positive spillovers when they had a high absorptive capacity, whereas low-absorptive capacity firms suffered negative spillovers. We also found that non-exporting domestic firms experience significant positive spillovers from the presence of Chinese firms.

With the rapid growth of academic cooperation of medical science between China and the world, there has been an increasing demand of intercultural communication in English for medical purposes (EMP) in China. For a long time, people in China have attached importance to reading and writing in EMP while neglecting the listening and speaking ability of medical students. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the situation of intercultural communication between Chinese doctors and foreign patients and explain the significance of verbal communication in EMP. Based on data collected from discourse cases in Chinese medical settings, this paper demonstrates that EMP in China should pay more attention to the three critical elements: medical jargon, contextualized language, and cultural difference, and analyzes the significance of three elements through qualitative research. This paper also explores underlying reasons of intercultural communication failure between Chinese doctors and foreign patients, and helps to develop the idea that EMP teaching in China should not be silent.