China's resistance to Japanese aggression escalated into a full-scale war in 1937. The continuously deteriorating situation stimulated the rise of Chinese nationalism in the diaspora communities worldwide. The Japanese invasion of China, accompanied by the emergence of the National Salvation Movement (NSM) in Southeast Asia, provided the overseas Chinese with a rare opportunity to re-examine their ‘Chineseness’, as well as their relationships with the colonial states and the increasingly self-aware indigenous populations. This research problematises traditional approaches that tend to regard the NSM as primarily driven by Chinese patriotism. Juxtaposing Malaya and Java at the same historical moment, the article argues that the emergence of the NSM was more than just a natural result of the rising Chinese nationalism. Local politics and the shifting political orientations of overseas Chinese communities also profoundly shaped how the NSM played out in different colonial states.
Background Mangrove ecosystems are vulnerable due to the exotic Spartina alterniflora (S. alterniflora) invasion in China. However, little is known about mangrove sediment microbial community assembly processes and interactions under S. alterniflora invasion. Here, we investigated the assembly processes and co-occurrence networks of the archaeal and bacterial communities under S. alterniflora invasion along the coastlines of Fujian province, southeast China. Results Assembly of overall archaeal and bacterial communities was driven predominantly by stochastic processes, and the relative role of stochasticity was stronger for bacteria than archaea. Co-occurrence network analyses showed that the network structure of bacteria was more complex than that of the archaea. The keystone taxa often had low relative abundances (conditionally rare taxa), suggesting low abundance taxa may significantly contribute to network stability. Moreover, S. alterniflora invasion increased bacterial and archaeal drift process (part of stochastic processes), and improved archaeal network complexity and stability, but decreased the network complexity and stability of bacteria. This could be attributed to S. alterniflora invasion influenced microbial communities diversity and dispersal ability, as well as soil environmental conditions. Conclusions This study fills a gap in the community assembly and co-occurrence patterns of both archaea and bacteria in mangrove ecosystem under S. alterniflora invasion. Thereby provides new insights of the plant invasion on mangrove microbial biogeographic distribution and co-occurrence network patterns.
To investigate the capability of pi-pi stacking motifs to enable spin-spin coupling, we designed and synthesized three pairs of regio-isomers featuring two radical moieties joined by a [2.2]paracyclophane (CP) unit. By fusing indeno units to CP, two partially stacked fluorene radicals are covalently linked, exhibiting evident antiferromagnetic (AFM) coupling regardless of the orientation of two spins. Remarkably, while possessing high diradical indices of 0.8 and 0.9, the two molecules demonstrate good air stability by virtue of their singlet ground state. Single crystals help unravel the structural basis of their AFM coupling behaviors. When two radical centers are arranged at the pseudometa-positions around CP, the face-to-face stacked phenylene rings intrinsically confer orbital interactions that promote AFM coupling. On the other hand, if two radicals are directed in the pseudopara-orientation, significant orbital overlapping is observed between the radical centers (i.e., C9 of fluorene) and the aromatic carbons laid on the side, rendering AFM coupling between the two spins. In contrast, when two fluorene radicals are tethered to CP via C9 through a single C-C bond, ferromagnetic (FM) coupling is manifested by both diradical isomers featuring pseudometa- and pseudopara-connectivity. With minimal spin distributed on CP and thus limited contribution from pi-pi stacking, their spin-spin coupling properties are more similar to a pair of nitroxide diradical analogues, in which the two spins are dominantly coupled via through-space interactions. From these results, important conclusions are elucidated such as that although through-space interactions may confer FM coupling, with weakened strength shown by PAH radicals due to their lower polarity, face-to-face stacked p-frameworks tend to induce AFM coupling, because favorable orbital interactions are readily achieved by PAH systems hosting delocalized spins that are capable of adopting varied stacking motifs.
Information about students’ learning is necessary for educational decision making. Therefore, classroom assessment, comprehended as the procedure in which students’ reactions to spontaneous activities are used to draw inferences about their knowledge and skills assumes a significant role in education. In higher education, students’ learning is more impacted by their originations of the instructive condition than by the real instructive practices. In China, which has a long history of examination-oriented education, an assessment reform in basic and higher education was kicked off by the Ministry of Education as part of the New Curriculum Reform in 2001. This paper reviews literature on students’ upheld conceptions of assessment and then reports a study into Chinese students’ conception of assessment. Literature reviewed revealed that students conceive of assessment in at least four major ways (i.e., assessment makes students accountable; assessment is irrelevant because it is bad or unfair; assessment improves the quality of learning; and assessment is enjoyable). The findings of the study also indicated that students conceive assessment as being for improvement of learning and assigning grades.
Governments worldwide have taken unprecedented social distancing and community lockdown measures to halt the COVID-19 epidemic, leaving millions of people restrained in locked-down communities and their mental well-being at risk. This study examines Chinese rural residents' mental health risk under emergency lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. It investigates how the environmental, socioeconomic, and behavioral dimensions of community support affect mental health in this emergency context. We also explore whether community support's effectiveness depends on the strictness of lockdown measures implemented and the level of individual perceived COVID-19 infection risk. We collect self-reported mental health risk, community support, and demographics information through a cross-sectional survey of 3892 Chinese rural residents living in small towns and villages. Ordinary least square regressions are employed to estimate the psychological effects of community support. The results suggest that the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown policies negatively affect psychological well-being, especially for rural females. The capacity for community production has the largest impact on reducing mental health risks, followed by the stability of basic medical services, community cohesion, housing condition, the stability of communications and transportation supply, and the eco-environment. The effectiveness of different community support dimensions depends on the level of lockdown policy implemented and the levels of one's perceived risk of COVID-19 infection. Our study stresses the psychological significance of a healthy living environment, resilient infrastructure and public service system, and community production capacity during the lockdown in rural towns and villages.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been an effective paradigm to support real-time computation-intensive vehicular applications. However, due to highly dynamic vehicular topology, these existing centralized-based or distributed-based scheduling algorithms requiring high communication overhead, are not suitable for task offloading in vehicular networks. Therefore, we investigate a novel service scenario of MEC-based vehicular crowdsourcing, where each MEC server is an independent agent and responsible for making scheduling of processing traffic data sensed by crowdsourcing vehicles. On this basis, we formulate a data-driven task offloading problem by jointly optimizing offloading decision and bandwidth/computation resource allocation, and renting cost of heterogeneous servers, such as powerful vehicles, MEC servers and cloud, which is a mixed-integer programming problem and NP-hard. To reduce high time-complexity, we propose the solution in two stages. First, we design an asynchronous deep Q-learning to determine offloading decision, which achieves fast convergence by training the local DQN model at each agent in parallel and uploading for global model update asynchronously. Second, we decompose the remaining resource allocation problem into several independent subproblems and derive optimal analytic formula based on convex theory. Lastly, we build a simulation model and conduct comprehensive simulation, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed algorithm.