Air transportation is of great importance in ''the Belt and Road'' (the B&R) region. The achievement of the B&R initiative relies on the availability, reliability, and safety of air transport infrastructure. A fundamental step is to find the critical elements in network performance. Considering the uneven distributions of population and economy, the current literature focusing on centrality measures in unweighted networks is not sufficient in the B&R region. By differentiating power and centrality in the B&R region, our analysis leads to two conclusions: (1) Deactivating powerful nodes causes a larger decrease in efficiency than deactivating central nodes. This indicates that powerful nodes in the B&R region are more critical than central nodes for network robustness. (2) Strategically adding edges between high powerful and low powerful nodes can enhance the network's ability to exchange resources efficiently. These findings can be used to adjust government policies for air transport configuration to achieve the best network performance and the most cost effective.INDEX TERMS Power, robustness, network performance, air transport, ''the Belt and Road''.

Seng Zhao and his collection of treatises, the Zhao lun, have enjoyed a particularly high reputation in the history of Chinese Buddhism. One of these treatises, The Immutability of Things, employs the Madhyamaka argumentative method of negating dualistic concepts to demonstrate that, while “immutability” and “mutability” coexist as the states of phenomenal things, neither possesses independent self-nature. More than a thousand years after this text was written, Zhencheng’s intense criticism of it provoked fierce reactions among a host of renowned scholar–monks. This paper explores Zhencheng’s main points as well as the perspectives and motives of his principal adversaries in order to shed light on the nature of philosophical discourse during the late Ming dynasty.

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The increasing attention on Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) pronunciation instruction gives us an opportunity to look into the current directions of teaching CFL and the specific instructional pronunciation strategies employed by CFL teachers. This paper offers a review of empirical evidence on the use and impact of instructional pronunciation strategies in the CFL field from 1980 to 2019. Our findings reveal that: (1) controlled segmental‐based strategies—such as comparative strategies, listening, and repeating strategies—are used widely and effectively to improve pronunciation of Chinese initials and finals; (2) suprasegmental‐based strategies, especially computer‐assisted strategies, largely improve CFL students' tone accuracy; and (3) the validity of assessments in quantitative studies needs to be further developed by including comparative groups, making tests before and after instructions, and involving discourse assessment contents.

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