Much like the nation as a whole, the development of football in China has accelerated at unprecedented rates in recent years. The investment toward, participation in, and consumption of the sport has surged in the years following the Chinese Communist Party’s implementation of major 2015 reforms intended to (1) develop the domestic professional football league, (2) grow the sport’s popularity among the country’s 1.4 billion population, (3) increase youth participation, (4) develop the national team to be the best team in Asia, and (5) aggressively bid for a men’s FIFA World Cup. Despite these significant levels of State and private investment theretoward, there are still significant concerns within the Chinese and international media publics about the footballing nation—specifically as related to the performance of the Chinese men’s national team. In this article, we present a comparative analysis of Chinese- and English-language news media representations that frame how east and west media publics might “read” various aspects of Chinese football (commercial, cultural, ideological, etc.). In so doing, we identify and analyze major themes which, as popularized in different popular media contexts, articulate the men’s national team’s performance to broader (inter)national anxieties about the state of football and the geopolitical trajectories of the People’s Republic.
Abstract. We estimate the importance of precautionary saving by using the large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify changes in income uncertainty. Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed similar job security as government employees. The reform caused massive layoffs in the SOEs, but government employees kept their "iron rice bowl." The changes in the relative unemployment risks for SOE workers after the reform provide a clean identification of income uncertainty. Furthermore, we focus on individuals with government assigned jobs to mitigate potential self-selection biases. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE household wealth accumulation between 1995 and 2002. We also find evidence that demographic groups more vulnerable to unemployment risks accumulated more precautionary wealth in response to the reform.
The perception of greenways has been intensively investigated to understand the attitudes of stakeholders and to study the preferences of greenway users. In the Pearl River Delta, there has been a long-term debate on the form and function of greenways in campaign-style development, but few studies have focused on the public perception of greenways. Through both onsite and online investigations, this study obtained first-hand data about the user perceptions of greenways in selected case studies and developed an overall understanding of the public perception of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) greenways. Moreover, to examine the academic debate, we further distributed questionnaires to groups that had professional educational backgrounds related to greenway planning. The results showed that, in contrast with the academic debate, the user, public and professional perceptions were positive toward PRD greenways. Although it has been commonly recognized that bikeways compose the primary form of PRD greenways, the results suggested that the public has multiple needs for greenways, in which the primary demands are recreation and transportation. The investigation also identified many issues in greenway practices regarding the accessibility of greenway spaces, the coherence of nonmotorized routes, and the landscape characteristics of the greenways. Finally, this study suggests that more effort should be placed on the everyday demands of greenways, including accessible recreational resources and safe, comfortable, and coherent nonmotorized routes.
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