Rapid urbanization in China has led to the increasing scarcity of land suitable and available for construction. Concurrently, rural depopulation has resulted in many vacant properties, including farmhouses and buildings. In order to address this issue, a national land transfer policy has been implemented since the early 2000s in which vacant rural properties are returned to agriculture in return for similar areas of periurban land being released for construction. While there have been many different approaches to policy implementation, most commentators agree that successful schemes are characterized by the involvement of local people. As yet, however, there has been little research into how such local collective action is organized, and whether it is really possible to address top-down policies through local, bottom-up, action. Based on a case study of the earliest pilot program in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, we seek to demonstrate that the top-down nature of China's land transfer policy does not mean that it is necessarily best implemented in a top-down manner. Indeed, we suggest that effective collective action is crucial to the realization of such policies. In particular, the case study indicates that with the empowerment of villagers to participate in the policy process it is possible to achieve a broad consensus on the best approach to addressing the problems, with community interests protected and properly monitoring. In offering a new way of understanding collective action, we conclude that even in cases where a top-down approach is imposed, communities can be empowered to act collectively in implementing the policy from the bottom-up.

The new urban agricultural geography of Shanghai Abstract：Agricultural geography has remained largely trapped in a neoclassical economic paradigm in which farm types have been understood to be predominantly products of location and global markets. This paper attempts to subvert this approach by reflecting on the emerging culture of small scale ecological farming in Shanghai. Such farms have been growing in number since 2000, driven largely by the availability of land and an increasing demand for safe and healthy food. While being a rational productivist response to a market opportunity, however, these farms reflect a break with conventional farming, in terms of their size, location and new farmer identities, as well as their socio-cultural relationships with customers and local communities. Using a survey of 45 such farms, the paper illustrates how and where new forms of farming, and the alternative food networks that they support, are colonizing the city. While being redolent of the growth in urban farming in many western cities, farming in Shanghai is driven by private individuals with personal and family, as well as broader community, motives. This suggests that while Shanghai may be experiencing the growth of alternative forms of what might be understood as civic agriculture, those involved are not primarily interested in the civilizing mission ascribed to many such movements. Rather, the new farms are hybrid service businesses in which the sales and marketing skills of the new farmers have allowed them to transform individual customers into members of food networks who form mutual codependent trust relationships that underpin the survival of the farms. Perhaps as a result of this, and despite strong demand for organic food, these new farms face a marginal existence in which business development is constrained as much by the strength and continuity of their food networks as it is by the quality and quantity of food that they can grow.

Diapause is a complex and dynamic process. Chilo suppressalis, an important rice pest in Asia enters facultative diapause as larvae. Our results demonstrated in Yangzhou, China, diapause was initiated between September 4 and 12, 2010. After diapause termination, C. suppressalis remained in quiescence in the field for as long as three months. The average time between collection of field larvae of C. suppressalis and their pupation decreased as the season progressed from fall to next spring. Unexpectedly, the pupated ratio of female to male in the initiation of diapause was 0.22. The abundance of hsp90, hsp70, hsp60 and CsAQP1 all peaked on January 8 or 15, 2011. Nitric oxide (NO) is a secondary messenger that is positively correlated with the diapause of C. suppressalis. Among several geographically separated populations of C. suppressalis, there are no significant differences in the mRNA levels of hsp70, hsp60 or CsAQP1.

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China's recent collective forestry property rights reform (CFPRR) is regarded as the third Land Reform and has been implemented to accelerate China's rural restructuring. In departing from previous top-down policy changes, the CFPRR has focused on local collective practices and actions. It indicates a shift in China's rural governance, away from direct intervention towards support for local collective actions. Based on a case study of Hongtian Village, the origin of the CFPRR, this article analyzes the process of insinuating collective action and the impact that this has had in creating a new cultural understanding and acceptance of collective forestry property rights. In contrast to the relative insecurity of tenure that can accompany many reforms of the governance of common pool resources, the paper suggests that the success of the 'Hongtian model' mainly lies in high levels of process engagement by local people and effective interaction between villagers and the government. While not addressing all the issues associated with the inefficiency of the previous collective approach to forestry, the paper suggests that there are many transferable lessons to be learnt from the CFPRR, both within and beyond China.