This article analyzes China's pension arrangement and notes that China has recently established a universal non-contributory pension plan covering urban non-employed workers and all rural residents, combined with the pension plan covering urban employees already in place. Further, in the latest reform, China has discontinued the special pension plan for civil servants and integrated this privileged welfare class into the urban old-age pension insurance program. With these steps, China has achieved a degree of universalism and integration of its pension arrangement unprecedented in the non-Western world. Despite this radical pension transformation strategy, we argue that the current Chinese pension arrangement represents a case of "incomplete" universalism. First, its benefit level is low. Moreover, the benefit level varies from region to region. Finally, universalism in rural China has been undermined due to the existence of the "policy bundle." Additionally, we argue that the 2015 pension reform has created a situation in which the stratification of Chinese pension arrangements has been "flattened," even though it remains stratified to some extent. ARTICLE HISTORY

BackgroundDengue cases have been reported each year for the past 25 years in Guangdong Province, China with a recorded historical peak in 2014. This study aims to describe the epidemiological characteristics of this large outbreak in order to better understand its epidemic factors and to inform control strategies.MethodsData for clinically diagnosed and laboratory-confirmed dengue fever cases in 2014 were extracted from the China Notifiable Infectious Disease Reporting System. We analyzed the incidence and characteristics of imported and indigenous cases in terms of population, temporal and spatial distributions.ResultsA total of 45 224 dengue fever cases and 6 deaths were notified in Guangdong Province in 2014, with an incidence of 47.3 per 100 000 people. The elderly (65+ years) represented 11.7 % of total indigenous cases with the highest incidence (72.3 per 100 000). Household workers and the unemployed accounted for 23.1 % of indigenous cases. The majority of indigenous cases occurred in the 37th to 44th week of 2014 (September and October) and almost all (20 of 21) prefecture-level cities in Guangdong were affected. Compared to the non-Pearl River Delta Region, the Pearl River Delta Region accounted for the majority of dengue cases and reported cases earlier in 2014. Dengue virus serotypes 1 (DENV-1), 2 (DENV-2) and 3 (DENV-3) were detected and DENV-1 was predominant (88.4 %).ConclusionsDengue fever is a serious public health problem and is emerging as a continuous threat in Guangdong Province. There is an urgent need to enhance dengue surveillance and control, especially for the high-risk populations in high-risk areas.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40249-016-0131-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) has been demonstrated to play a central role in lipoprotein metabolism, with Ldlr-deficient (Ldlr(-/-)) mice developing severe dyslipidemia. In the present study we investigated whether Ldlr knockout could harm female reproduction and explored the mechanisms involved. The results indicate that although the number of litters born to Ldlr(-/-) mice did not differ significantly from that born to controls, the number of pups per litter was significantly lower in the former group. Interestingly, although Ldlr(-/-) mice were obese, the weight of their ovaries was lower than that in control mice. Serum cholesterol levels was significantly higher in Ldlr(-/-) mice than in their wild-type counterparts. In contrast, there were significant decreases in cholesterol, triglyceride and total lipid levels in ovaries of Ldlr(-/-) mice. Both ovarian lipid deposition, as detected by Oil red O staining, and lipid droplets, as evaluated by transmission electron microscopy, supported decreased lipid levels in ovaries from Ldlr(-/-) mice. In addition, Ldlr(-/-) mice had fewer ovarian follicles, more atretic follicles, lower oestrogen levels and spent significantly less time in oestrus than did the controls. Superovulation assays indicated immature Ldlr(-/-) mice ovulated fewer ova than controls. These results indicate that lack of Ldlr results in dyslipidaemia and poor fertility.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, by 2010 the number of people aged 60 or over had reached 178 million in China or 13% of its population. With the largest elderly population in the world in absolute numbers, China faces a challenge of providing care for the elderly both in the present and the future. Unlike old age pensions and health protection for the elderly, in Chinese society elderly care had never been considered to be a social problem but rather the individual family's responsibility. After the turn of the millennium, as the repercussions of increasingly ageing demographics, the results of the One-Child Policy and drastic changes in traditional family structures gradually became more apparent, this issue of elderly care has increasingly become one of the most pressing concerns for the ageing society. As there is little existing research on this particular topic, this article aims to shed light on elderly care in China, focusing on the care of elderly needing assistance with activities of daily living, since this group of elderly are most in need of care, their numbers having risen to 33 million in 2010. This article argues it is urgent for China to switch from informal family-based elderly care to the state's formal long-term care, illustrates that a model of social insurance (e.g. as in Germany) is advocated by many Chinese scholars and points out the ways in which it is different from both the commercialized models (e.g. as in the USA) and state organized "Beveridge" models (e.g. as in Sweden).

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In 1993, the Shanghai government introduced a minimum income security program, causing contagious imitative behaviors in scores of local pilot projects in China. Invigorated by such local policy experiments, the central government in 1999 set up a Minimum Living Standard Scheme covering all urban regions and, from 2007, rural areas. In the process of designing this scheme, the Chinese epistemic social policy community translated foreign ideas into the national context to facilitate the social assistance reform through policy experimentation and reinterpretation of external ideas. This article argues that Chinese actors in the field of social assistance have synthesized disparate ideas from two world regions – the United States and Western Europe – and from Chinese traditions to forge a Chinese model of social assistance. It thus complements the existing literature on diffusion, which tends to assume that countries import or adapt a ready-made policy model from another country or from an international organization.

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Background Dengue is becoming a major public health concern in Guangdong (GD) Province of China. The problem was highlighted in 2014 by an unprecedented explosive outbreak, where the number of cases was larger than the total cases in previous 30 years. The present study aimed to clarify the spatial and temporal patterns of this dengue outbreak. Methods Based on the district/county-level epidemiological, demographic and geographic data, we first used Moran’s I statistics and Spatial scan method to uncover spatial autocorrelation and clustering of dengue incidence, and then estimated the spatial distributions of mosquito ovitrap index (MOI) by using inverse distance weighting. We finally employed a multivariate time series model to quantitatively decompose dengue cases into endemic, autoregressive and spatiotemporal components. Results The results indicated that dengue incidence was highly spatial-autocorrelated with the inclination of clustering and nonuniformity. About 12 dengue clusters were discovered around Guangzhou and Foshan with significant differences by district/county, where the most likely cluster with the largest relative risk located in central Guangzhou in October. Three significant high-MOI areas were observed around Shaoguan, Qingyuan, Shanwei and Guangzhou. It was further found the districts in Guagnzhou and Foshan were prone to local autoregressive transmission, and most region in southern and central GD exhibited higher endemic components. Moreover, nearly all of districts/counties (especially the urban area) have cases that were infected in adjacent regions. Conclusions The study can help to clarify the heterogeneity and the associations of dengue transmission in space and time, and thus provide useful information for public health authorities to plan dengue control strategies.